India trip March 2023 - On flight to Paris

 A glass of Red Wine, followed by a shot of Finlandia Vodka and watching Christopher Waltz as a Bounty hunter firing multiple shots in the new Western movie "Dead for a Dollar" preceded my arrival at the Charles De Gaulle International Airport in Paris, France. Got few hours to stretch my legs before I catch my connecting flight to Delhi, I decided to take a stroll around the glittering Duty Free Shops which enticed me to do some window shopping.

It suddenly propelled me on a Time Machine to a decade or so or back when I was at the Frankfurt Airport in Germany, similarly browsing the Duty Free Shops with my prying eyes. While busy inspecting the liquor racks a tall, pretty brunette inadvertently dropped a pouch on the floor right next to me. I picked it up and handed over to her. She nodded back at me with a sweet smile on her lips uttering "Danke Schoen" meaning "Thank You"; expressing her gratitude in German. I replied instantly - "Gutten Morgen Fraulein", mustering whatever little German I accumulated in my entire life with the apprehension that little knowledge can also be a dangerous thing. As a contingency plan at back of my head I stacked up German words like blitzkrieg, gotterdamerung, doppelganger, hansen, putten, Autobahn, BMW, Andrea Merkel, Berlin Wall, Brandenburg gate, Klinsmann (the German soccer player and coach of the US team).

She now laughed at my attempt to humor her and asked me - "From America ?". "Ja, Fraulin", I responded, now almost exhausted of my repertoire of words from my German dictionary. She apparently didn't mind my KHANDI (broken) German spoken by an Odia who quite apt at speaking "PAKHALA KHIA English - thick accented English spoken by Odias after eating a stomach full of water soaked rice" and matched every word of mine with her German accented English. After a few minutes of chit chat our tryst with destiny ended as she melted away in the labyrinth of perfume and liquor bottles.

Such chance encounters in life reminds me of a passage from our Hindu epic "BHAGVAT GITA" - two logs floating in the middle of a vast Ocean collide with each other only once to get separated forever never to meet ever again, lost in the vastness of the sea, as the Kishore Kumar song :

AATE JAATE KHOOBSURAT
AWARA SADKON PE
KABHI KABHI ITTEFAQ SE ;
ITNE ANJAAN LOG MIL JAATE HAIN
IN MEIN SE KUCHH LOG BHUL JAATE HAIN,
KUCHH YAAD REH JAATEIN HAI...

Roughly transliterated....

On these vagabond roads
Once in a while by chance
Many unknown faces we meet;
Some we forget
And some in our memory forever fit.

At Paris Airport I interacted with a few passengers who were returning to India after spending their Evenings in Paris. Not a bad time to savor the cool, salubrious climes of Europe as a getaway from the stifling heat and humidity of India. I was doing exactly the opposite, travelling on a vacation straight into India's heat & dust and excited to core. 

Now back to Paris Duty Free Shop, once when I was flying through it, I asked a Sales girl the price of a perfume I was buying for my wife. She responded to me in French where except the word "Monsieur" the rest sounded Greek and Latin to me. I replied back - "English please". She replied in feeble English. Same thing I encountered at the security gate and lavatory where folks were explaining something in French where people from all over the world connecting to their destinations across the globe assembled and I am sure not everyone understands French. However full credit goes to the French for taking pride in their language. We Odias perhaps are the only ones on earth who do not take pride in its mother tongue should learn a thing or two from the French.

Inside my Paris to Delhi flight I was sitted next to a Punjabi lady and her son. During our tete-a-tete she mentioned that she was from Boston and glad that her long journey ends at Delhi. I said - "I am not so fortunate. It will be at least a 7 hour arduous wait in the middle of night at the Delhi Airport before I catch the morning flight to Bhubaneswar". Now I could see surprise in her eyes - "Bhubaneswar ? Where is it ?" I replied - "It's the capital of the state of Odisha". "I am sorry, I have no idea where it is", she said. "Well, do you know Jagannath Puri ? ", I mentioned thinking the better known Lord Jagannath temple of Puri will at least ring a bell. 

The Punjabi lady's eyes sparkled a bit as she suddenly came with an answer - "I have a relative Jagannath Puri who lives in Greater Kailash, Delhi". I got my answer. Now it's late night in America while outside the flight the midday Sun was glittering over snow white clouds somewhere over the Black Sea. It was now time to doze off a bit before I land in Delhi. More later...