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I was happily surprised by Sunday’s Oscars ceremony: I did not expect Slumdog Millionaire to gather so many awards. I liked the movie a lot, but I did not think it was going to turn out such a winner. I guess had I not seen Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! before and had it not broken my heart, Slumdog would have done it instead. Given that I saw the Mira Nair production, and was instantly taken by it, I watched Slumdog with a sense of seeing a remake of an unforgettable original. Yet, Slumdog featured my favorite Indian actor, Irfan Khan (The Namesake), and those street urchins of Mumbai, and I was hooked.

In addition, I went to watch the movie with a former student of mine who took my Multicultural American Literature course at Hunter. T. comes from Kenya, via London, but her family is originally from India, and she speaks with a lovely accent. She knows way more about South Asian literature than I do,  I am about four years older than she is, and we connected instantly. Meeting her in a different context, outside the classroom, however, made communication a bit awkward at first. We were no longer following the teacher-student scenario, yet the overtones of this relationship lingered enough to give a perceptible tint to our conversation. At least, at the beginning. At the end, I went home with a feeling of gratitude and a reminder of the deeply humbling quality of teaching: you don’t even realize it, but you touch people’s lives in the process, and they touch yours. If there is cross-cultural communication and there are cross-cultural encounters, then they should mark turning points in your life where you set out to measure the weight of your full-blown humanity.