Please step aside, Ma'am

Good for Shah Rukh K-K-Khan - he clarifies that he was embarrassed and inconvenienced, but not angry at being detained and questioned at Newark airport.
I’m impressed with the NRI community in that country for not rioting and burning buses and trains because their Shah Rukh had not been recognised as god. However, perhaps I should be impressed with the much-maligned US authorities, who would not have brooked any such property and people-damaging show of displeasure by anyone. Unlike in our own backyard here, where going on a rampage and destroying property is quite the shortcut to everything. Railways property worth Rs 3 crore was destroyed because someone got upset with something someone else did recently in Bihar. Why single out Bihar – in Maharashtra and elsewhere too, we Indians, particularly the ‘boys’ of Mumbai, routinely attack public property.
But to come back to being questioned at US airports. I am not Shah Rukh Khan, but I have a detainment story to tell too. And like him, I too was not angry, just puzzled and then amused, and I understood that the American girl who questioned me closely was just doing her job, particularly post 9/11.

My little brush with the immigration people at San Francisco airport began with my being asked to step aside, please. This was my third visit and I had a multiple entry visa, so I was a bit surprised. Then I was led down several sterile corridors that reminded me horribly of hospitals and I wondered if I was going to be given an MRI - out of some The Matrix type mix-up, was I in some other dimension?
No, nothing so interesting. I was called into a room, and politely but very coldly asked about the purpose of my visit. When I said to meet friends and family, they asked me to name 3 cities of the US of A. Huh? But this was fun; I wondered if I was suddenly on the sets of a Millionaire show. I toyed with asking the lady if I could use a lifeline and phone-a-friend. But my inner guide told me that this was not a good time to joke.
Next she asked me to open my bags, which had magically arrived in the room through a hatch. I opened them, and she pounced on my sitar notation book, and a folder with some of my papers. The sitar notation book she looked at closely, and asked me what code this was. I said no code, just music notes (from our faiu-thousand year tradition, I should have added). She asked me why the folder said Yoga Institute, Santa Cruz, Mumbai. First I had to explain to her that there was a Santa Cruz in Mumbai too. She looked totally unbelieving. This was when she decided to take the phone-a-friend option and called in another woman. This woman too looked like one of those check-out girl at a big US food store counter – same level of intelligence, but a little scarier in the black uniform.
Picking my folder (which just happened to be a nice sturdy folder that I used to keep my travel insurance policy and papers to show that I had property in India, for just this kind of encounter) and my poor sitar book, she said: “Are you going to use these to teach seetar and yoguh and earn dollars in the US?” I had to control my grin – I just said, “Lady, if you heard me play and saw my stiff attempts at touching my toes, you wouldn’t have asked me this.”
Then one of them pounced on something in my bag. I had taken for an American friend, a steel masala dabba – the one with the 7 little compartments. She opened it, peered into it, took out the sections, and asked me what this was for. I was so sorely tempted to say – oh we pack this with gunpowder and dynamite and then hurl it at buildings. But of course I said no such thing. When I told them what it was, one of them gave me a small smile, and said ‘Neat’!
Aapla masalyacha dabba had suddenly disarmed these girls so much, that I thought we were going to all three get cosy and start playing house-house right there.
Anyway, they decided that I was harmless. I was waved through to my waiting friends.