A long haul flight really connects two different planets

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