Trip to India - Day I at Doha

After a long flight of 14 hours from Atlanta I reached Doha, Qatar. It was late afternoon, local time as the flight descended piercing through a hazy sky, the gulf next to the Airport looking like faded sky blue ink on a dusty sandpaper. 

Being peak school season, the flight was filled with good number of vacant seats along with mostly old couples and families with infants & toddlers - some of them cranky and cacophonous. I boarded the fligh the evening of October 2 in Atlanta and arrived in Doha close to evening of next day. In between the night went fast, so also the day. On the 3rd of October this year I saw the shortest duration of daylight - thanks to the diurnal rotation of mother earth from West to East. Flying West to East you lose time, you gain time flying other way round, as earth is round.

Four more hours before connecting to Delhi, I took time to walk around. Folks in Arabians in white cotton helmets with their female folks tagged along in black attire from top to bottom peeping through tiny slits cut below their foreheads - looking like Ku Klux Klan members in black.

A Virgin Airline flight was about to board and names of passengers not boarded were called. An Air hostess swung by, shouting at top of her voice - "ANY VIRGIN HERE", obviously looking for some missing Virgin Airline passengers. Couple of girls raised their hands. Everyone close by started looking at them, some with chuckles and half baked smiles. The shy girls retreated to their privacy by dropping their heads over their smartphones to hide their embarrassment, still peeing through their corner of their eyes. Non of them got up to board the flight. We humans are slaves of inadvertent reflex actions.

Through out the journey I watched folks drooling over their smartphones. All heads down like Ostrich, they were busy fingering over the glaring screens of their devices. I have seen this in America, not unusual and unexpected in a nation where individualism rules the roost. But I observed the same in Europe, Middle East, Singapore and India. Asian culture is more social and group oriented, where people enjoy a tete-a-tete, even with strangers. I saw many, including Airline crew busy dragging bag in one hand and texting on the other, clinging to their phones, baby sitting their devices.

Growing back days in India, we use to chat about anything and everything under sun, alluded to topics ranging from NANA BAHA GHARA RU, NANI BAHA GHAR PARYANTA (From Dad's marriage to Sister's marriage). Perhaps we have gone electronic doing eKhatti (chit chat) on social media.

In 1979, when I was hardly 10 year old, I accompanied my Uncle to a play in his Alma Mater Vani Bihar under Utkal University. It was a symbolic play which I could barely understand but still remember those lines 

OTA PARI JABA BHAI NAHI NAHI HOIRE,

JIBARE MANISHA OTA HEI JIBARE

PITHI RE KUJA, KI MANOHARA....

Roughly transliterated,

You will become a camel, uttering no no,

Humans will become camel as days go,

How wonderful to have humps on back !

Replace OTA (Camel) by OTA PAKHI (Ostrich) and KUJA (Hump) with Smartphones. The drama is now enacted in another era. The nondescript person who wrote this Odia Drama (play) in 1970s was so prophetic and way ahead of his time. More later...