India trip March 2023 - At Atlanta Airport

 As I arrived at Atlanta Airport my excitement was accompanied by a bit of perturbation, not quite unusual at the beginning of a long journey spanning several continents. I expected both the Airport and the flight would be sparsely populated as this ain't the peak travel season considering the schools are already open. But I was wrong. We were on a packed flight to Paris, packed like sardines.

It's interesting to watch flights taking off and landing in quick succession at Hatfield International, Atlanta, the busiest Airport in the world. This being the peak hour, every couple of minutes an airliner lands or takes off. It has been raining here since yesterday. Flights lined up one after another in the gray cloudy sky, forming a string of hazy pearls extending into the horizon, as they waited 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, so no bypass m flyover was necessary over the Railway tracks). As 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.

I am now reminded of an interesting episode during one of my earlier trips. A Virgin Airline flight was about to take off and names of passengers not boarded yet were called. An Air hostess swung by, shouting on 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 peeping through their corner of their eyes. Non of them got up to board the flight. We humans are slaves of inadvertent reflex actions.

The flight to Paris were filled with a good number families with infants & toddlers - some of them cranky and cacophonous. Though Covid pandemic is almost a passe, the corridors and toilets were regularly cleaned up and sprayed. The toilet doorknobs were cleaned often and a bottle of hand sanitizer was kept right outside it. Due to the diurnal rotation of mother earth, flying West to East you lose time. You 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 3 hour of wait at Paris and still 8 more hours of flight awaits me before I land in Delhi. And 8 more hours before I reach Bhubaneswar. Gosh, when can there be a direct flight to connect to Bhubaneswar from Eurasia ? I took some time to scan around using my poking eyes. 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. More later...