Even after decades of traveling in flight, I am still
surprised at this engineering marvel.
Now it looks like a simple routine of check-in, boarding,
repeated safety procedures, takeoff and mostly good landing, baggage
collection, and a taxi to hotel or home.
Travel time has reduced drastically, and you can travel from
one continent to another in the span of a dinner, sleep and breakfast.
What I find intriguing is the change you notice when you
travel from one continent to another. Within 10-12 hours a flight takes you
from one place to another completely different place. 10 hrs back you were
accustomed to a different world and now you are in a different world. There is
a mixed feeling of change due to weather, language spoken, culture of the
people, security, laws, prices, food, environment, etc etc…
If you make the same travel by a car or train, it takes much
longer and the human mind accepts the gradual change with longer time available.
In a long haul flight you are exposed to bigger change in faster time, which
makes it incomprehensible and interesting. A mixed intriguing feeling…
I am writing this as I am just returning from a 3 weeks
vacation in India (Bangalore, Mumbai and Kolkata) to Paris. I travelled to
India after almost an year in Paris.
The difference is incredible… It’s not good or bad, it’s a
mixture of both, some good some not good and some simply unbelievable… rather
comic… (in both places by the way)
Let me put them in the order they come to my mind…
While in Paris, its peace, clean air, polite people who hold
doors open for you, best quality food at expensive prices, clean walkways (if
you ignore the dog poos J ), amazing
health care, parks for kids, medicines always available in pharmacy, slow life,
poor growth rate, pathetic competitiveness, zero entrepreneurship, strong
safety and police administration, social security, people mostly on vacation, very
efficient but dirty metros, mostly French spoken…
While in India its fun, lots of relatives, crowded, loud
noise in malls (music and din and bustle, and loud chatter), dust and pollution
everywhere, very good food, unsafe water, unbelievably bad infrastructure,
superb quality clothes at very good prices, no social security, zero safety and
police administration, driving in the city a real pain in ass, mosquitoes
everywhere, taxis unreliable but very cheap, markets everywhere and shopping is
fun, people speaking in all the Indian languages you can imagine plus some
American accent English in Mumbai, and some Bengali accent English in Kolkata…
I can keep on writing… J
And when you are transported from one such world to another
in 10 hours, its difficult for the modest conditioned human brain to understand
this without being surprised. And then you realize that taking a flight is like
a magic, which transports you from one world to another so fast, almost like
the way people got transported in the ski-fi fiction Star Trek… J
Mahtab SYED
Paris, Nov 11 2012
