"What are you?" This is one of the first questions I get asked at a party or gathering of people I don't know. Look at the question. It is not, "Who are you?", which would give me an opportunity to launch into an existential discourse on my inner-self, but "What are you?", a question that demands specific answers. If I act smart or do not answer, the interrogator will then launch into a "20-Questions" routine, shooting potentially embarrassing questions at me, such as "Are you this?, "Are you that?", until I land up regretting my decision of not having been up-front and honest the first time around.

Here are what my answers would be, in different permutations and combinations, depending on the occasion.

I am a Gujarati.
I am a Kathiawari.
I am a Jain.
I am a Derawasi Jain.
I am a Halari Visa Oswal.
I am a Mumbaiite.
I am an Indian.

In an earlier draft of this piece, I tried to explain all these terms in detail all at once and reached the end of our mutually imposed word-limit, much before I had finished. To me it was a boring read and so I have decided to spread the explanations over the next few weeks.

In brief, though. Gujarati is my mother tongue. Being Gujarati, implies the presence in my life of certain traditions and customs, that come from being a native of the state of Gujarat, which is a state just north of Maharashtra. Mumbai, where I live now, is the capital city of Maharashtra. This also makes me a Mumbaiite. Ironically, though Gujarati is my mother tongue, I am much more proficient in English.

Kathiawar is a small province that used to be in a state called Saurashtra, until Saurashtra was made part of Gujarat after independence. The way I speak Gujarati is very typical of the region of Kathiawar and knowledgeable people would be able to identify my roots immediately after hearing my way of speaking Gujarati.

Jainism is a religion, an off-shoot of Hinduism. Derawasis form one sub-division and believe in temple and idol worship as opposed to Sthanakwasis who believe only in meditation.

Halari Visa Oswal is the community I belong to, around 125,000 strong, internationally. Halari comes from Halar, a small region in Kathiawar. Oswal implies origin from a village called Osu, in the state of Rajasthan, which is north of Gujarat. Visa is because of the type of credit cards we all carry (ha, ha!).

And lastly, I am an Indian. The funny thing is, that when two Indians meet, the "What are you?" question comes up almost immediately and is aimed at establishing the opposite person's origins and roots quickly. Though we all realize the dangers of stereotyping people and communities, human minds still love classifying everything and are much more comfortable when people and situations fall within the radius of specific reference points. So knowing that the opposite person is a Sindhi from New Delhi implies a certain pattern of behavior and method of thinking that helps establish an immediate background to work with. This happens funnily even when two Indians, settled outside India, meet each other. "Where are you from?" would not be answered by, "I am from Connecticut", but by "I am from Calcutta, and you?"

All this comes from having an ancient history, which is supposed to be more than 3000 years old. Not that it seems to help much in this day and age, when the equations seem to be, 'the older the history, the more corrupt and inefficient the country'. A couple of days ago, in an episode of "Jag", an all-American show about a military lawyer team, an Iraqi woman asks Meg, one of the lawyers in the team, how old America is. Meg says, around 200 years. The Iraqi woman accuses Meg of being presumptuous in thinking that a country which is a child in the history of civilization could try teaching other countries with vastly older cultures and traditions how to live life. Meg retorts that sometimes there is more to be learnt from children than adults.

The older the civilization, the more deep-rooted traditional customs and culture become and the baggage that an individual has to carry, is that much heavier.

It is considered very patriotic to talk about our long and supposedly distinguished history. About the fact that the number zero was first used in India when the rest of the world probably couldn't even count. That the first plastic surgeries were done here a thousand years ago, when the rest of the world was probably still fumbling with barber knives. But all this has no meaning. All it does is to give people a plank to put their feet up on and to look deprecatingly at the rest of the world, saying we've been there, done that and all the best to you. Yeah, right! Sometimes it makes sense to live in a country without a lot of baggage.

Ancient history also comes with deep roots and big families. My great-grandfather spawned a large family whose members number more than 300 now, after excluding the families created by the daughters - this is an Indian way of handling a family tree - once the daughter is married, except for her and her husband, the rest of her family (children, grand-children) does not get included in the family tree (this applies only to the family tree, not the family itself). The story of my great-grandfather's children reads like an epic saga, complete with large-scale migrations, rags-to-riches stories, fights and reconciliation. The family is now scattered all over the world, but India being the focal country, my cousins keep dropping in from time to time. It is fun meeting and talking to them, exchanging news and views and my entries will probably keep referring to them on and off. And virtually all the elders are in touch with each other- there is an amazing network that has been kept alive and kicking through the years, fed by gossip, snail mail, direct telephone calls and frequent visits - I wonder how much closer we might get to each other in the next few years, when we start an email discussion list and a private website.

For example, a couple of nights ago, a young cousin of mine, settled in London, but born and brought up in Mombasa, Kenya, came over for dinner with her father. Somehow the topic veered to the issue of men getting facials, manicures and pedicures done on themselves. She went ballistic, when her father expressed a desire to get one of these beauty treatments done. According to her, men who get manicures, etc. done are gays, wimpy, "not men" and "wooshy" (whatever that means). She could not understand how any man, who was a man, would want to behave like a woman. I thought maybe this was her personal viewpoint, but she was vehement that all her friends in London would think alike - she is in her early 20s and has lived there for over eight years now. At our end, none of us could understand what the problem was with the idea of men getting beauty treatments done - men in Mumbai and India have been getting facials, manicures and pedicures done for years now. It started some years ago I guess, with weddings, when the groom wanted to look really good, but now has reached a stage where no excuse or occasion is necessary to get these things done. I wonder how it is in other parts of the world.

And while everyone is talking about Thanksgiving, I just realized that Thanksgiving, though not celebrated in India has a special meaning for me. I am a vegetarian by religion and the first time I tasted meat and fish was when I was 18 years old. My first "meat" dish was shark fillet, which I liked so much that in the next three days I sampled chicken, mutton, beef, prawns and three different kinds of salt-water fish. I kept eating meat and fish for another 10 years or so. My parents disapproved, but didn't say much. My wife disapproved and voiced it whenever she could. In 1994, on a trip to the US, we were invited by my American aunt to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with her parents. We stuffed ourselves with turkey and gravy and a whole lot of other things that I don't remember while my wife had to make do with green peas (she still hasn't forgotten the contrast). But something happened that day. Probably a combination of my innate upbringing, my wife, the overeating on that day and a revulsion that developed over the next few days about the fact that an entire population of turkeys is reared, just to be decimated on this one day, did something to me. I stopped eating meat and fish from that day on.

Two things happened together on Thursday. Victoria wrote about the "space" problems in Germany, which make people rent houses rather than buy them and the morning newspaper carried an item about the high divorce rates in Italy. This is apparently so, because 30% of Italian men above the age of 25 live with their parents since they can't afford to move out. This leads to mother-in-law, daughter-in-law fights and eventually to a high rate of divorce.

The rents in Mumbai for decent accommodation are between 400-1000$ a month for a 500-800 square feet apartment. The average middle-class earnings in Mumbai would be around 200$ a month. Obviously, most people cannot afford to rent apartments and have to live with their parents. If they do want to live separately, they have to move into the far-flung suburbs, which are more than 30 miles outside Mumbai and then they have to use the local train system for transport, usually entailing a travel time of at least 11/2 hours each way. It makes for a tough existence. More than 50% of the population earns even less than 200$ and these people usually land up living in the slums - more than 60% of Mumbai's population lives in slums.

Mother-in-law, daughter-in-law discords are extremely common, but divorce rates are low simply because women still don't have the courage, finances and support to leave. Where would they go? The parents' house would be cramped because the son may have started his own family and it would be virtually impossible for her to rent or buy a house in Mumbai. These problems lead to tremendous stress and family physicians have noticed an increasing trend among women to present with resultant headache, lassitude and depression.

Things are a little better outside Mumbai, especially in the smaller towns. Housing is more easily available, and rentals are reasonable. But Mumbai and the larger cities like Madras (now called Chennai), Calcutta (now called Kolikatta) and New Delhi (thankfully unchanged name) still provide the best employment opportunities and act as magnets, drawing in people who have dreams and hopes of making it big. Most don't succeed and live a crazy life, but they still think their lives are better than what they would have been in the small towns and villages that they have left behind.

Until next week...

There you go.

I can be a bimbo or an airhead if I keep very quiet. Otherwise, a word of five syllables or more will inevitably escape my lips and fall leaden into the light souffle of conversation and like Lucy Ricardo, I will have some 'splaining to do. I'm merely blondish. And I'm not really from California, not at all.

Not by a long shot. I was born on our opposite coast in what is now one of the all-time ugliest cities in this country: Chester, Pennsylvania. A former booming oil-refinery port for the Sun Oil company, a place of great greasy factories and heavy black clouds and concrete-edged urban poverty. But when I was a child there, I traveled in that Wordsworthian golden glow that infused everything with glory, so I'm rather favorably prejudiced about that old city.

Chester is where the long meaty sandwich known as a hoagie was invented. A few times a year my mother sends me four of them via FedEx, specially wrapped in foil and several layers of plastic protection to safeguard the secret scent, and still the delivery man or woman will linger at my door long after I've signed the receipt. I always have to unwrap and carefully assemble one of the sandwiches right then and there -- slice off a small succulent piece and hand it over, dripping with olive oil and oregano and sweet peppers and the most heavenly layers of black-pepper-edged cappacola and provolone.

And yes, I am Italian. Only half Italian, but just as brown eyes will trump blue ones in the DNA game, my Italian half is rather dominant. As is my mother. My father's entire family came quietly to this country from Riga, Latvia, and when I was born I was not dark enough to please the noisy Italian relatives, of which there were many. Not a single grandparent spoke English to me when I was growing up.

This is one of the really lovely aspects of being an American, I think; at least it is for those of us who are first- and second-generation newly minted Americans. We take our country of birth completely for granted and we look across oceans for our souls. I have an unnatural pride in most things Italian and in what little I know about the culture and customs of Latvia and I dream of visiting these places and finding people who might look like me. I really don't know whether I'd feel "foreign" in a country that was beloved by my own parent's parents.

I do know I feel foreign in my own skin sometimes and in whatever city I happen to be living in at the time.

My city of the moment -- Venice -- is 3,000 miles away from my entire family. People who live in the entertainment meccas of Los Angeles and New York refer to all the rest of this country, all the mountains and rivers and lakes -- all five and a half hours and $2,000.00 (US) of it -- as the Flyover. As in: a day lost to travel or a redeye sleepless night flight. The two cities sprawling on opposite coasts are inextricably entwined in a grand business venture and you are totally dependent on both if you work in any aspect of show business, as we do.

We are primarily book publishers by profession, and now we also work in film and television. Thus, we fly back and forth occasionally for business, with precious few stops in between. But I don't get back home as often as I'd like because this is a very competitive, very mercurial business ... and so I spend a lot of time missing homey things out here in the distant sunshine. I especially miss the seasons. I grew up believing that there were four of them, each one distinct. How quaint that old memory seems. I've known winters so cold the water in the pipes in the walls of the house froze and cracked and and had to be blowtorched to melt. Summers so hot you had to sleep sheetless on the roof. Harlequin-colored leaves falling, tender buds cheeky and clean and pink in the spring.

Well, there's none of that here in Venice.

Sometimes it's dusty and sometimes it's windy. It's always the tourist season. It might rain, and it might even drizzle for several days in a row. If you've picked the wrong place to live, your house might wash away in a rainstorm or disappear in a neignborhood-wide firestorm. The good news is that you'll be on the 6 o'clock news, clutching your precious photo albums, panicky and disheveled and preternaturally poised, stalled on the one road out beside your partially packed and traffic-jammed SUV.

The first time I visited here I was on an 18-city book tour promoting a cookbook I had written. It was late November, just like now. But instead of the gloom and doom and dour demeanor I'd naturally come to associate with these shorter days and dreary afternoons, the people in California were behaving as if they hadn't gotten the memo.

As if school were not back in session. As if they were on recess, or a permanent holiday. I felt so cheated when I got on the plane for home. People out here were actually wearing play clothes -- bright pastel jogging things, pale yellow fun togs, light sweaters just in case -- while back home, back on the old, cold sober East Coast, people dressed in dark pinstripes and grownup gray woolens. Muffled.

That contrast made a mighty impression on me. Whenever I saw the natural disaster of the moment being replayed on TV, I zeroed in on the background sunny scene in the picture. An earthquake might have rent their entire sidewalk, but hey! Those people are wearing surfer shorts and rubber flip-flops in the middle of the winter! And maybe I've changed in the ten years since I moved here. I know that my real work is forever and primarily back East, and that of course my friends and family are still there, too. I know I'm really a moody Russian and a fiery Italian at heart ... but maybe I sort of have become a puffy bimbo on the surface now.

A California blonde, struck dumb by the sheer incongruity of it all.