When you completely bomb your dinner with a Nobel Laureate

The boiling tension behind the forced smiles, and what I learned after meeting an actual literary god

I’m the one on the far right. The Nobel Laureate is that tall non-asian man.

For most people, they’d expect meeting a Nobel Laureate in-person to be a humbling opportunity of a lifetime. And while that should be the case, my own personal experience was that of great tension, misfires, and forcing fake smiles in front of the camera.

Let me explain.

When I was a graduate student at Columbia University, I had a chance to have a guest lecture with the great Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 for his great literary works such as My Name is Red. He’s the apparently the number one writer in his country of Turkey.

Truth be told, I didn’t know who he was, didn’t read any of his books, and in fact missed that guest lecture (I didn’t know he was coming; I was somewhere else doing something I can’t remember). I found out about it through my colleagues in my cohort who frantically shouted at me about the event upon my return to the university after everything ended.

Fast-forward few days from the lecture, I was grabbing dinner with two of my colleagues/friends at the famed Max Soha restaurant (famed because it’s one of the…