I wrote a dozen letters to potential pen-pals in Norway, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland, Russia and Turkey. Thank God, it was the post Cold War era, and we had more countries to write to! Somehow, we always harboured doubts regarding some of the addresses that seemed to be strange permutations and combinations of English letters. However, my anxious attempts at finding a pen-pal in faraway lands bore little fruit. A few months later, I found a pen-friend, a little over 100 miles away from my hometown, and, of all the exotic places, in the capital — Delhi!