It was a very cold and snowy day. There was this tall Indian guy walking beside me. A colleague of mine that he was, I kept talking to him more of course, than to the other really short stranger who was also walking beside me. The snow was really very bad on that particular early February noon in 2010, in Columbus, Ohio, with nothing but an all-enveloping, thick white blanket engulfing our boot-covered feet as we tried to put our steps forward slowly. I was very hungry, and hence I was not so enthused to drag my feet indefinitely along with my Indian colleague in an effort to help find a single bedroom apartment for this rather reserved and short Italian stranger who had arrived in Columbus, to become another colleague in our research group. With heavy boots and thick jackets around our bodies, it was really a pain to walk even a mile which seemed like a light year. The dense whitish snowy ambience mocked cruelly at the sun trying desperately to throw a beam of extremely faint ray no...