Meeting Oprah will definitely remain one of the high points of my year and perhaps my life. Although my meeting was brief, Oprah had enough magic filled with warmth and grace to bowl me over.

The lady who brings in-depth emotion to the screen — from the uber rich and glamorous to the downright downtrodden — made a brief visit to India, and planned her Mumbai visit with the help of Shantaram author Gregory David Roberts to meet people as a priority rather than visit places. Over a cup of tea with “Shantaram”, I got a little insight to a sweet story during her trip.

“Life is about people, not places,” said Gregory, easily one of the most intelligent and sensitive people I have met. “Oprah had read my book and wanted to meet me.” Her team had come to Mumbai for two weeks and worked with Gregory to make a list of things to do in Mumbai.

“Mumbai is about its people,” he said. “It is about the traffic cop who breathes the toxic fumes of the vehicles while regulating the enormous amount of traffic. He will still make eye contact and smile at you. This only happens here.”

He added that people are the heart of Mumbai. “I hoped that Oprah would meet a wide range of people from this city, which is home to the nicest people in the world.”

“Did you find her as intense as she appears on screen?” I asked him. “She was intense in all the right ways,” he was quick to answer. “She makes eye contact with everyone, and is not scared to make physical contact with people. She shakes hands and doesn’t even recoil from putting her arm around people.”

We laughed while commenting on the many celebrities who like to stand with their hands behind them and only nod a greeting when meeting people. “Oprah takes her time and breaks the wall of isolation,” Gregory told me.

“So, did you take her to a slum in Mumbai?” I asked him. “No, to a chawl,” he corrected me. “To a family of five that lived in a 8x8 feet single room.”

The family of five comprised Aanchal, who studies in Class X, two twin seven-year-old girls Anisha and Tanisha, their mother and their father who earns `10,000 a month as a security guard. `6,000 goes into his children’s education. Oprah’s team picked out this family from several others.

Standing inside their home, Oprah was clearly overwhelmed. She explained to Gregory that in America, people feel cramped living in far larger homes than this small pitiful living space. The fan didn’t work and it was slowly getting warm inside.

Gregory introduced Oprah to the family and then went outside while she spoke to them. Aanchal was the only one who could speak some English and translated for her family.

“Is there anything that deeply pains you?” Oprah asked the father. He burst into tears. “My children’s education is both my greatest joy and my biggest worry,” he told Oprah between his sobs.

“Shantaram” told me later how he was very surprised when Oprah addressed a question to the mother by her name Parvati. “I knew Parvati was not a name that Americans could remember that easily and say it.”

We both agreed that one of the traits of a great person is focus and full attention to people they meet, even though briefly.

I knew that Oprah had loved meeting people here. “What was her impression about the contrast between the rich and the poor?” I asked Greg.

“Things people own and have seem to distinguish them from each other,” Oprah had told him. “The fact is that people feel happy and sad to the same degree, regardless of how rich or poor they may be.”

“If you lose somebody you love, whether they die quietly on a hospital bed or on the battlefield, the grief of loss is the same. It’s not experiences that unite the human family but the emotional response, the love or the sorrow, that unites the human race,” “Shantaram” told me quietly. How true.