Flying red eyed out of Bombay

I must be a masochist. I am sort of convinced. Among the other things I do to sock myself, booking late night flights stands out. 

Surge pricing by taxis? How much? A few hundreds? Try booking Planes! A thousand rupees in a minute! A 7 pm flight that was Rs. 5000 just went up by another Rs. 4000 even as the booking was being made! Just in front of my eyes!

All said and done, middle class saving induced brains will never accept daylight robbery. So the next available option was the 'cheaper' flight. With other flights making the 7 pm flight seem like an angel when it came to lightening your pocket, the 10 pm flight at 4500 seemed reasonable. Booked. With a beaming face -  'I saved!' 'Beat you!'

Flights that depart late night and arrive early next morning are knows as red eye flights as they then to give you a red eye due to induced sleeplessness. Red eye flights are cheaper but the trade off is what they do to your body, the eyes in particular. The term 'red 'eye' is derived from symptoms of fatigue that can be seen in the eyes turning red, which can be caused or aggravated by late-night travel. You lose sleep waiting at the airport and saunter to the destination in the other city where you land in the wee hours of the morning - yes, the traffic less roads another boon, by the way. The issue is that after trying to get sleep throughout the flight, you end up getting sleep but it is time for the plane to land.

Bombay international airport is tastefully done. Very aesthetic, with beautiful artwork and a pleasing theme throughout. My favorite international airport in India. One can spend a lot of time just walking around and taking in the sights and sounds. With a multitude of shops throughout, uniform air conditioning and Mild instrumental music being piped, waiting is a pleasant experience. Isn't the government partial to cities like Bombay and Delhi alone when it comes to loosening the purse strings for development? Well, that's for another day!

And yes, the silent airport (major announcements like delays and gate changes only) is both a boon for people like me who cannot tolerate cacophony but a bane for those accidental sleepers and people who like to be hand held into the plane. Many a time, it is our wont to wait for the next announcement of our flight and we have to adjust for this initiative at some airports.

Since I have this habit of checking in well in advance for any trip(something I picked from my father), I had ample time to check out many shops in the airport. Window shopping is that easy!

One chain by name Vaango! (meaning 'please come!' In tamil) was selling South Indian food. 'OK,', I thought let me go since they were 'calling' . The menu card made me realize that the welcome was restricted to the, well, welcome board only. 300 rupees for a plate of upma! Two spoons! And they call it a 'value meal'! By what stretch of imagination? I guess it is value for them, which is why it is called so. Missal pav at 200, Masala dosai at 300... These are examples of daylight robbery. Lest I forget to mention, there was a queue for this! Ah, middle class, middle class!

As for the shops, I wonder who shops at these shops. There seems to be no one even mildly interested in checking them. A shop selling pens, for example. 'Gifting options from Rs.10,000/- onwards'.  What the... Ahem!' Many of them seem to be pricing their wares only for a category of people who can be termed rich or super rich. Perhaps it is for the international traveller. But a lot of domestic airports also have similar shops only. 

Air Deccan changed the way India flies but the commerce at the airports seems to be caught in a time warp. I can understand that it is not your everyday roadside shop, but, even considering the overheads and stuff, selling something is better than not selling at all. How many Rs. 20,000/- pens does one sell in a day? A week? It is for a category, I understand, but how do these people manage with such sparse sales? Food for thought?

Coming to the flight, well at 9:30 pm, when I was just loosening myself to step into the flight, came an announcement that it was delayed by an hour. Then, forty minutes later, - 'Jet Airways regrets to inform you that due to (whatever damned reason it was) there is a delay of one hour to departure. The revised departure time stands at 00:00 hrs!' Seriously! Where does that appear on the clock - all the four zeroes, I mean? Heartless. Your flight is already scheduled to depart when most of the world is sleeping, but they sock it in by delaying it by one more hour!

The Bombay airport is  notorious for taxiing issues. Planes need to Queue in for close to 30 minutes for taking off. So Much investment on aesthetics but not much thought on infrastructure and logistics. A shame. I mean, 30 minutes more to take off after boarding. 12:15 am would be the taxiing and close to 1 am would be departure making it a 2:45 am 3 am landing. Come on, even ghosts would have gone to bed!

Red eye flights are 1 am plus flights. But most of the flights departing... Sorry scheduled to depart by 11 PM or so seem to crown themselves with their invariable power to give you a red, blue or whatever eye anyway.

And the announcement again. 'guests on the Jet Airways flight to Chennai...'  Hey... hey... hold that! Am I a 'guest'? The land of 'Athithi devo bhava?' Do you treat your guests like this?  OK, I paid a few thousands less for a late night flight, but seriously not for this treatment, man! This is like... Third class! Thankfully, it was a flight where they served meals and I was not required to pay 200 rupees for a cup of noodles!

No web check in and I got the 'prestigious' middle seat! Next to two fat smelly chaps, who took both my armrests! And one of them was drunk! 

Did I say I was a masochist?

A cute little treatise on happiness

 

(Image source: www.iwatchstuff.com)

“Life is not all about cupcakes and rainbows but I would rather go through life thinking that it mostly is.....”

- From the Hollywood movie “The Trolls” (2016)

Animated movies hold our interest because they make us believe that anything is possible. When we set out to watch an animated movie, we suspend disbelief and logic. Of course, ‘anything can happen’ is too good to be true, isn’t it? However, many animated movies contain the most subtlest of messages. They are made for kids but by adults. Hence there is some adult who tries to get the message across to an adult too. In fact, I can vouch that most messages are for adults than kids as it is they who need to be reminded of a lot of positive things in life.

What if a cute little movie tries to get across the simplest of messages across with its little adorable (actually, not so ‘adorable’ in the sense of the word, as trolls are meant to be ‘ugly’ dolls!) characters? The animated Hollywood movie ‘The Trolls’ is what I am talking about. There is a group of people (‘the Bergens’) who are brainwashed to thinking that happiness can be obtained only if they eat the other group of people (‘the Trolls’, that is). How one of the Trolls manages to get the message across to the Bergens that happiness cannot be sought outside but must be brought from inside forms crux of the movie. No blood or gore, no violence and no profanities. A simple delightful thread of events unfolds. Plus, the comedy in the movie (which is subtle and intermittent), is not slapstick but poignant and clever at times.

Now, let us try to get answers to attaining happiness .

Where can we find happiness?

How can one try to find happiness inspite of one’s circumstances? Not a single soul on this earth is trouble free; nor it is rosy all over. But it is something to be able to follow one’s dreams and push things. Things happen only if you push and with all your heart. A staid squatter is not going to achieve things in life. But in trying to achieve things, one needs to believe it will lead him / her to happiness.

“Life is not all about cupcakes and rainbows but I would rather go through life thinking that it mostly is....”

This dialogue from the movie largely sums up our lives and the search for the non-existent outside rather than the existent inside.

When we try to search for happiness, there is a lot of soul searching involved. A bulk of this is sub conscious eventually leads you to oneself. For example, the lead character in the movie (‘Poppy’, a girl and that’s refreshing!) is full on positive and never believes that any loss can be a loss unless one tries to put all effort in achieving something to alleviate it.

“How do you always look on the bright side?” says a character to Poppy, who is seemingly an icon for all of us humans to emulate few things to get a life.

Like the movie, life is a story about happiness and how far some will go to get it and how far we can go and get it back.

Where does happiness lie?

A lot of people say that happiness is a choice and it is inside us. But how we can convert seemingly unhappy situations in life to happy ones, lies within us. We try to find happiness in acquiring new things, perhaps even possessing things, getting more money etc. It is not to say that these things do not give us joy. A new mobile phone, all said and done, indeed gives  pleasure. But you cannot buy a mobile phone every time you need happiness. You cannot expect an increased salary every other month which will seemingly give you happiness. A car, for example......how many can you buy? This is the limit of material things giving us happiness, though it is undeniable that they are and, to an extent, necessary in life as a ladder to happiness. Thus they are a means to happiness; but they are not all that is happiness.

When can one attain happiness?

One can attain happiness at any point of time. There is no starting point. One need not wait for a particular hour to begin to be happy; it is immediate as it is a state of mind, which means that you have to bring it from inside you.

How can one attain happiness?

Hence happiness depends on when you decide to be happy. Just bring it into existence with your thoughts. This is a really simple sentence but pregnant with wisdom. Start appreciating the smallest of the nice things around you. This helps in enduring the difficult circumstances and tolerating the bad things.

Are others happier than us?

A lot of us feel that the other one is happy – in fact every person other than us seems to be happy – but it is not true. As many people say, if we are allowed to exchange our troubles we will try to do it but will gladly take them back the next day. The grass is always green on the other side.

Happiness, like the mythical djinn, is inside you. Just summon it and you will see the difference!

Nomophobia

Recently, I had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on how you look at it) of misplacing my phone which led me to be without it for almost a couple of days. I did not realise at that point of time, the consequences of what were in store. Can you live without you phone for two days?

The primary advantage I had was that both the days were holidays and hence the pressure of official calls was non-existent. If it was, then it would have been a different ball game. Firstly, the feeling of getting lost started pervading. It was almost like I was one hand down. My trouser pocket did not have a protruding bulge.....in fact, it felt awkwardly comfortable. Sometimes, like every half an hour, I felt like I had lost my phone. I would invariably touch my pocket and, after a moment, realise that I had misplaced my phone. I started making eye contact with things on the road. But the wonder was I was the only person who was walking with his head held high. Almost every other person was head down, staring at and furiously typing into their four - five inch LCD screens. It was like I was the only single in a ‘couples only’ world.

I felt like a bozo. After a couple of hours, without facebook, twitter, google, hike, inshorts, and whatsapp, I was feeling different in a very weird kind of way. Stressed, maybe?

With no TV at home, I did not know what was happening in faraway Syria. Forget Syria, I did not know what was happening in Satara. Or Salem. Not that I was a superhero trying to save the world, but not knowing the news was kind of, strange. I talk very less on my phone; texting, reading and typing occupy more than 95% of my phone usage.

And I have this mandatory wee hour wake up calls...I lose sleep. These are the minutes and hours when the net becomes very active in my phone. With no wi-fi at home and no phone, i was prancing up and down like a hungry tiger.

Bizarrely nervy and strangely weird. No notification sounds, though I have most of them on mute anyway. I don’t know what sort of a phenomenon I can call it, but we are all afflicted by this bug. It is kind of escapist, I would say. These little gadgets have put up into a comfort zone and made us live a life which we can try to minimise living. Not to say that they are something bad. In fact they are good companions – they listen to whatever we say! They have made our lives easy – from contacting people to keeping in touch with long lost companions to searching for things, gaining knowledge to even ordering food and other stuff online... they are indispensible. Imagine emergencies and being without them - one is not even able to think about such situations. But it is kind of like our lives seem to revolve around them. Only around them. We are constantly into them, sometimes forgetting the other things we can do. Technology has had such an impact on our lives that instead of owning gadgets, we have allowed them to own us.

These couple of days of phone detox were perhaps what the doctor ordered, to jolt me out of the incongruent phone lifestyle I had gotten myself into. I could see the food I was eating, taste it properly, smell the trees, plants and flowers around me, even think more about things which I used to give thoughts about cursorily.

I went back in time....

I was a big time TV guy. My TV used to be on almost all the time I was awake. Even while cleaning or dusting or cooking, the TV would be on. The only saving grace was that I watch TV on mute all the time, except if it is music ....it is another weird habit that I have got. Hence others at home are not disturbed with any sound. Then one day, I decided to live without the TV. It was a decision in which I never had any faith in myself – I was expecting to install a dish any time immediately after that decision – but days became weeks became months and now, it is one and a half years that I have been without the TV. It was difficult at first, having been used to news and sport and movies all the time. It was a good companion. I have always maintained that TV is, was and will be the greatest invention of man. But it was taking over my life. I felt escapist while watching TV. Then I tried and gave it up. But now I realise that the TV has been replaced by another gadget – the smart phone. I don't know if I can give up the phone like I did the TV.

This is not to say anything negative about being addicted to a gadget. In fact, in this lonely world, I feel gadgets are our best friends. They are available at our beck and call, do everything for us make us feel as if they are there for us during every situation in life - whether we are happy, sad, lost, depressed...whatever.

When I got back my phone, it was like meeting a long lost, brother, parent, girlfriend whatever you call it  – lips quivering, hands shivering and, perhaps, even a churn of the liver.

Even as I am posting this, there are buzzes on the phone, signalling notifications. I don’t know if I have learnt, but I think I will perhaps try my best to peep into that little LCD screen a little lesser from here on.