India trip January 2024 - On flight to Paris

 I was all excited and bit apprehensive upon my arrival at the Atlanta's Hartsfield - Jackson International Airport, hoping there is no flight delay as it has been pouring in North - Central Georgia since last night. Thankfully the clouds bended their spine like gentlemen, opening the door for sun to peek through them as they cleared. My flight to Paris was on time.

I thought both the Airport and the flight would be sparsely populated considering the schools are already open post the winter holidays. But I was wrong. We were on a packed flight to Paris. With the ever growing Indian population in the United States, this observation didn't come as surprising to me.

It is interesting to watch flights taking off and landing in quick succession at the Atlanta Airport, the busiest 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 semi 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 when we wait at the level crossings, 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. We had a rough start as for the first couple of hours there was a lot of turbulence due to inclement weather on the flight path. On top of that, the entertainment system was down for few hours. Thankfully, it was lot calmer when the plane entered the Atlantic over the Newfoundland. Due to the diurnal rotation of mother earth, while flying West to East you lose time, see reduced amount of daylight as night passes by too fast, too soon. Again you gain time flying the other way round, as earth is round, vindicating the fact that what goes around comes around. A few hours of dozing off was all I got to sleep.

Boosted by a glass of Merlot French wine, the best Cattle Class could offer and watching one of my favorite actors Denzel Washington taking on and taking out Sicilian mafia in movie "EQUALIZER 3", I passes 8 hours of flight to Paris to be welcomed by a fleece of pretty bluish white clouds which would have made another Mary of Little Lamb fame proud. The top view of the spotless white cloud from an unadulterated virgin sky looked like millions of white furred lambs on move looking for greener pastures. It seemed I was looking at a gigantic milk shake with cream churned on top.

It was morning in Paris as the airplane descended on the Charles DeGaulle Airport piercing through a hazy sky, the water bodies next to the Airport looking like faded blue ink on a dusty sandpaper as the grass on the ground looked gray and listless. As the descending aircraft continued flying in a low altitude but above the clouds, slowly the crimson sky in East turned brighter glowing with the sun. Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins might have wrote a different kind of "Is Paris Burning" by having a view of the city burning under a bright morning sun. But the sunshine was short-lived as the flight descended piercing through the silvery cumulus clouds, the lushly but grayish meadows looked bigger amidst multiple highways crisscrossing each other. The flyovers looked like a bunch of threads crumbled using bare hands and thrown on the ground in a haphazard way. 

Got few hours to stretch my legs before I catch my connecting flight to Delhi. Apart from Europeans and Asians, 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 Knights from Medieval era in black attire. Covid virus won't dare penetrate their impregnable visors. 

I decided to take a stroll around the glittering Duty Free Shops doing window shopping until I was propelled on a Time Machine to a decade 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 who used to coach of the US team), Beckenbauer.


She now laughed at my attempt to humor her and asked me - "From America ?". "Ja, Fraulin", I responded instantly, 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 the tall lady 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. So goes the Kishore Kumar song from a Rajesh Khanna movie :

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.

More later...