I was excited and a bit nervous upon arriving at Airport. Felt little odd to be inside an Airport and an Airplane after a gap of 3 years. I thought both would be sparsely populated considering it is off season for kids are in School and of course the pandemic factor. But I was wrong. It was a fully packed flight to Amsterdam. My negative test results for Covid was duly verified during the check in and before boarding.
It's interesting to watch flights taking off and landing in quick succession at Hatfield International, Atlanta, known as the busiest Airport in the world. This being the peak hours, every couple of minutes a flight lands or takes off. Flights line up one after another, their lights forming a string of pearls extending into the dusky horizon, as they wait for their turns to land. The Air Traffic control must be doing an amazing job, as error is not an option.
Remembered travelling in our D M School bus in Bhubaneswar when it stopped at Railway level crossings (those days the roads of Bhubaneswar were not clogged, no bypass for flyover was necessary over the Railway tracks). As a Goods train passed by I spent time counting the number of bogies. Now I don't have patience to watch flights landing and taking off every other minute.
The flight to Amsterdam filled with good old couples and families with infants & toddlers - some of them cranky and cacophonous. Due to the ongoing pandemic the corridors and toilets were regularly cleaned and sprayed. The toilet doorknobs were cleaned and a bottle of hand sanitizer was kept right outside it.
Thanks to the diurnal rotation of mother earth, flying West to East you lose time, see reduced amount of daylight. Again you gain time flying the other way round, as earth is round. As the plane descended on Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam, I was reminded of a joke on our ex-President Giani Zail Singh, once travelling on a plane above equator. His secretary flattered him - "Sir, can you see the equator below" ? Zail Singh responded "Yes. I can see it and a car is slowly going on it". What he actually saw, was a lice walking on his long string of hair, which just happened to be right in front of his eyes. This flight flying so low, Giani Jail Singh would have seen numerous lice, in form of cars crawling on the interspersed Interstate highways.
After 8 long hours flying from Hartsfield Atlanta Airport I reached Amsterdam. It was morning local time. As the flight descended piercing through a hazy sky, the lushly meadows started looking greener amidst dykes crisscrossing the labyrinth of water bodies.
Another 8 more hours of flight awaits me before I land at Delhi. I took some time to scan my poking eye around. Apart from Europeans, I could see a good number of Africans wearing long gowns. Saw a few 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 attire. Covid virus won't dare penetrate their impregnable visors.
Having travelled multiple times through Amsterdam, I am now reminded of an interesting episode during my layover at the Schiphol International Airport. A Virgin Airline flight was about to take off and names of passengers not boarded yet 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.
Throughout 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 have 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 using 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, barely a 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. We have become Ostriches burying our heads into our phones, the same way an Ostrich buries its head inside sand. 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...
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