Suman Chhibber and Pushpa Narula were both married to army generals when they took their flight out of the country to visit the United States for the first of several times.

While Chhibber had been to neighboring Afghanistan, as the wife of a military attache, Narula had not done even that, so an international trip was quite an event for both of them.

What enamored them most here was the freedom of doing as they pleased.

They did crazy things like putting henna in their hair, and for want of authentic shower caps, wrapping grocery bags around their heads and merrily going for a walk in their new heady contraptions.

"Do you think people will mind?" asked Chhibber of Narula.

"Who knows we are the wives of generals?" retorted the latter.

To while the hours in between the application and the shampooing of henna, they proceeded to shop for a watch at an Iranian store. After they had been haggling in typical Indian style over the price for more than a few very long minutes, the Iranian guy turned and muttered to his wife in Persian, "These women are Indian and just like us they will haggle and argue and not buy a darned thing" Chhibber, whose stint in Afghanistan had honed her fluency in Persian, retorted in equally fluent Persian,"If you give us this $40 dollar watch for $13, which is really the right price, we will buy it."

The two then proceeded to take the ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty, but having paid the princely sum of 25 cents for the ride, the frugal women decided to stretch the quarter and would at the end of each trip follow the herd to leave the boat, but right at the exit, would stealthily turn around and mingle with the incoming crowd. They beamed with pride at their innovative skills for riding the crest seven times in a row and the quarter was a quarter well spent.

Umesh Rathie, an engineer from India, came to the United States over two decades ago as a consultant. "All of us came here because we could not find the opportunities, and projects intellectually challenging enough in India," Rathie recalls. "The rising tides raise every boat, and we too rose to the top quickly.

Indian technocrats were greatly in demand in the 1980s and 90s and it was exciting times for us professionally and financially."

Rathie soon realized, however, that intellectual skills don't automatically equip you to understand the ways of the American world!

On his first day at work, Rathie meticulously arranged his table, got the stationary, the pencil, the pen, and then went to the secretary and asked, "I don't have any rubber. Where can I get a rubber?"

The secretary looked aghast: "You need a rubber?... in office, during office hours?"

He responded, "Well obviously, I need to use it during office hours sometimes."

The secretary looked at him sternly, "Let me tell you something and don't you forget it, never ask a lady for a rubber and in future buy your own."

"I discovered later, what we..er.. call rubber in India is called eraser here!"

Rathie also recalls another hilarious incident when he accompanied his Gujarati manager in South Carolina to McDonald's. His colleague asked a waitress in his heavy Gujrati-Indian accent, "I want large fries and a large Coke" Because of his accent, the coke sounded like something that rhymes with sock . The woman eyeballed him for one long, piercing moment and said with a straight face, "Man I don't know about you, but aah am lookin for one ma self."

Rathie and his colleagues also discovered the joys of driving a car on the highway and parking in the multi deck parking garages. In Detroit some of his friends from Tata-Unisys, came to work on a project and parked their car on the third floor. When they left after work, instead of putting the gear in reverse they pushed the accelerator and sailed forth. The headlines in the next day's newspapers heralded the arrival of the "Flying Tatas."

Christopher Meehan, a graduate student at New York's Columbia University, says Nothing prepares you for either the humidity or the poverty. It is a country of such contradictions."

He was ecstatic when he reached Benaras. "There was so much free music there - the music festivals showcased the talents of the leading artists. Of course knowing Hindi really helped."

Meehan recalls instances where people talked about him in Hindi only to be embarrassed when he would pointedly address someone in Hindi in retaliation! Meehan says one of his last memories of India are walking in Benaras and suddenly seeing a cow amble over to a small Hanuman temple, go down on is forelegs and kneel with its head on the entrance as if paying homage to the lord, of being thrown from an auto rickshaw and landing in a gutter, of feeling the cycles of life and death and the changing seasons so much more intensely, and being awestruck at the rustic beauty of the remote villages he visited for his study of Ayurveda.

Meehan's Hindi teacher had given him the name Kailash, when he was learning Hindi at the University of Wisconsin, to get into the skin of things. The teacher continued to call him Kailash while they were in India in his class room on Asi Ghat. The people in that neighborhood picked up on it. He continued to introduce myself as Christopher, but gradually became Kailash and really identified with the name. "Several years after returning home, if I heard someone call the name Kailash I would instinctually turn my head in response." A Punjabi family he has befriended has rechristened him Satyananda. Meehan who went back to India recently says "Having been given these names, in a way, has contributed to broadening my sense of identity and has helped maintain a special connection with the experiences I had when living in India."

If Meehan feels embraced by India, famed American flautist Steve Gorn went through his version of the Quit India movement in 1995 after his passport was stolen on a train from Bodhgaya to Calcutta. Gorn went to the police station to report the loss. He was greeted joyously by a policeman with a calm yogic disposition who told him to relax and offered him an orange and then started taking down the report not on an official document, but a scrap of paper with a carbon copy. Gorn was asked to report to the foreign registration office in Calcutta and get documentation to leave the country, because his new passport had no visa.

"When I saw the address, I had this weird feeling I had been there before and then suddenly I remembered that in 1971 I had to go to that office twice a week because I had been under house arrest."

It had so happened that in 1971 when Gorn was in Benaras he was seen in the company of a westerner who had aroused the Indian government's suspicions. When Gorn went to Calcutta soon after to get a permit to go to Darjeeling he was turned down and asked to quit India because of the company he didn't know he should not have been keeping. Gorn refused to go as he was learning the flute, from master musician Guru Goswami, and as is legendary of Indian bureaucracy, the paper to deport him with its carbon copy kept going back to the office and returning every three months and was still doing the rounds many moons later when he begged his famous guru to intervene.

"As soon as they saw him the case was dropped and that was the end of it. Now two decades later I am back in this office and I get led up to the chief director and I show him the letter from the U.S. consulate to give me the visa as I need to leave in two days. The chief director says it cannot be done in two days. I said I have played Indian music for 25 years and I will come back tomorrow and play the flute for you if you give me the visa."

Gorn' took his flutes and finding the director said to him, "I am going to play for you." The director benevolently said, "Aah we have seen your record." Gorn's chest swelled with pride at the recognition.

He cooed. "Oh the one I cut with my guru?" The director said "Noooo..the Quit India record of 1971."

"He refused to listen to music, sent me downstairs to the clerk. I look over the glass and there it is, still there, this yellowing moth eaten Indian paper, and they say India is backward? ....and I am crazy too, that I still go back!"

"And yet, I don't think I could play the kind of music I do otherwise."

Nancy Simms, chair of educational leadership at Western Carolina University, went to India on a rotary scholarship, and gave a shopkeeper in Mumbai plenty of food for thought when asked for crackers to settle her stomach. "The clerk's eyes grew huge. I didn't realize that 'crackers' in India were fire crackers."

Simms also got acquainted with India's all embracing religious practices of come one come all ... and that anything goes or comes in. It was Christmas Eve 1999 and Simms was in Punchgani. She and another visitor from Canada were taken to a midnight Mass at the local Catholic church.

"There were no doors or windows in the tiny church and during the ceremonies in wandered a dog," recalls Simms. "It looked around and silently went to the back to lie down. A short time after that a goat walked up the center isle, looked around and walked out. Finally a rooster flew to the top and decided to crow around midnight. That night it seemed as if the entire world was at peace when suddenly, as the priest walked out the door there were firecrackers everywhere. I thought we were being attacked and dropped to the floor and covered my head. Imagine my embarrassment when I discovered that was usual practice."

They say there is no place like home but celebrating the wonders, the peculiarities, and unique sensibilities of distant places is what enriches the tapestry of human life. Someone rightly said, the point of going somewhere is not to see the most spectacular, but to get a feel for the fringes and hollows in which life is lived. Each one of us needs to venture, not just to revel or achieve in something glimpsed in a seemingly distant universe, or seek and conquer new horizons that beckon, but also as Thoreau rightly said, sometimes just "to witness our limits transgressed."