I was excited and a bit nervous upon my arrival at the Atlanta Airport. I thought both the Airport and the flight would be sparsely populated considering it is still early days of schools closing for the summer vacation. But I was wrong. We were on a packed flight to Paris. Our Covid Vaccination Cards were duly verified during the check in and before our boarding.
It's interesting to watch flights taking off and landing in quick succession at Hatfield International, Atlanta, arguably the busiest Airport in the world. This being the peak hour, every couple of minutes an airliner lands or takes off. Flights line up one after another in the gray sky, forming a string of hazy pearls extending into the horizon, as they wait for their turns to land. The Air Traffic controllers must be doing an amazing job. They are in a professional where error is not an option.
Remembered travelling in our DM School bus in Bhubaneswar when it stopped at Railway level crossings (those days the roads, the arteries of Bhubaneswar were not clogged yet, 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, forget about counting them.
The flight to Paris were filled with a good number families with infants & toddlers - some of them cranky and cacophonous. Due to the Covid pandemic the corridors and toilets were regularly cleaned and sprayed. The toilet doorknobs were cleaned often 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, vindicating the fact that what goes around comes around.
It was morning in Paris as the airplane descended on Charles DeGaulle Airport after 8 hour of flight under a crimson sky with sun looking like a poached egg with its sunny side up. Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins might have wrote a different kind of "Is Paris Burning" by having a top view of the city burning under bright morning sun 🌞.
I was reminded of a joke on our ex-President Giani Zail Singh who was once travelling on a plane above the Equator. His secretary tried to flatter him - "Sir, can you see the equator below" ? Zail Singh responded "Yes. I can see the equator 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 hanging right in front of his eyes. This flight flying so low, Giani Jail Singh would have seen numerous lices, in form of cars crawling on the interspersed highways.
As the flight descended piercing the silvery cumulus clouds, the lushly meadows started looking greener amidst highways crisscrossing each other. From top view the flyovers looked like a bunch of threads crumbled using bare hands and thrown on the ground in a haphazard way.
Another 8 more hours of flight awaits me before I land in 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.
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