Is the world on which we, the small people, tread on, tentatively, for a little while. While out in the first blast of northern cold last evening, to eat dinner at the Pakistani dive around the corner, I scanned a face that looked as if I had met it before, in a much younger version. So I tentatively approached the person, and realized that he too was doing the same.

The first words out of our mouths was a quizzical statement, KGP?! Yes?! Which class? 1995? Same here! It turns out that we had sat in a couple of same classes with titles such as "Structural Engineering -I", "Steel Structures" etc as he was then studying Architecture, and I, Civil Engineering. Having abandoned all vestiges of that life, with him not having designed any buildings following the holy grail of Le Corbusier, and I not having built any suspension bridges in the mode of the Golden Gate, we meet again here, across the Hudson, close to the shadows of the City of Mammon's Temple*, two semi-capitalistic strangers on the make, to eat, and talk, and share the winter solitude by burning old collegiate memories.

*See "mammon" in Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary"