I am one of those people who wonder “What if” … a lot.

I am told that in Denmark there are libraries where you can borrow a person instead of a book, take them out to the park, or find a quiet room at the library, then listen to their life story for 30 minutes. Each person has a title – “unemployed”, “refugee”, “bipolar”, “prostitute”, and such. The intent is that you end up learning a little about another human’s life and, hopefully, get over your propensity to “judge a book by its cover”.  Sort of like what books help us do.  “What if,” I mused the other day as I nursed my single-malt, “something like this was available where I live? Wouldn’t it be lovely?”

This single-malted thought took me down memory lane to an Ivy League dorm room in the early 70s, where some fellow grad students (Indian, of course) and I would spend our lonely weekend evenings downing Budweiser six-packs in front of a black and white TV and solving partial differential equations, like a lot of us fresh-off-the-boat nerds used to do at the time. “What if,” one of us once speculated, “we could invite so-and-so to this room right now to hang out, just shoot the breeze with us, and pick their brain on any topic that our beer would lead us to – Pythagoras, Marilyn Monroe, anyone.” We sat up thru the night arguing about who we should invite. The concept, as it turned out, was already simmering in the fertile mind of American television personality, radio personality, musician, composer, actor, comedian, and writer, Steve Allen (who incidentally was also the co-creator of “The Tonight Show” which first aired in 1954 and is still a favorite of night-owls). Steve Allen brought this to life a few years later in his brilliant PBS series “Meeting of Minds with Steve Allen”, a show in which guests like Cleopatra, Teddy Roosevelt, Genghis Khan, and others sat around a table and discussed various topics. Brilliant. Four decades after they first aired, these shows are now finally on YouTube. Watch just one episode; you’ll be hooked. “What if,” I have often wondered, “we did this show with characters from Indian history? Wouldn’t it be lovely?”

And then during Christmas of 1974 I read this short story in The New Yorker Magazine. It was written by the man who has said such outrageously clever things as: Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television…Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go it is pretty damn good….Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic….I took a speed-reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia….Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: Frequently there must be a beverage!…. and there are a zillion more like these in the head of the diminutive comic genius whose parents gave him the name Allan Stewart Konigsberg, and who we all know as Woody Allen. Here is that famous New Yorker story.

CLICK HERE TO READ THAT MOST INTERESTING SHORT STORY

“What if,” I have often wondered during the lazy hazy crazy days of the lockdown, “a service like this was available where I live? Wouldn’t it be lovely?”

What if I just started one myself? Could I? Should I? Would I? What if…

Until we meet again, this is Storyteller Vish saying,  October-November-December are festival months all over the globe – Navarathri, Diwali, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Christmas, and so many more. Have fun.  

Thanks for reading.