Flight from Newark

Newark airport

It’s 6:25 PM, I have a connecting flight to Mumbai in 10.  With laptop in one hand, cabin luggage in the other and the Bluetooth headset clutched in my teeth (!) I am sprinting my way to Gate 6, which is 15 minutes away per the signboards. I am still hopeful to make it. The thought of waiting for another flight to Mumbai, which might be 10 hours later, is making me run faster. “ Honk honk” I step out of the way, there she is, my savior on the battery driven cart! “ssup…how much time?” “10”, I say. “Hop on”…

All the domestic flights in the US were running behind the schedule that day. Hurricane Ike was on its peak. My flight from Chicago to Newark also got delayed by more than 2 hours. That 2 and ½ hours flight was unforgettable because of the worst ever turbulence I had experienced!! Wow…The restlessness was evident throughout the cabin. Those 15 minutes saw 3 puke bags being utilized in my aisle.

 

That’s how I was late for my connecting flight to Mumbai. Somehow with the help of my “savior” I reached at the gate 5 minutes before the departure. The flight was held up due to the delays in domestic connecting flights all over….Phew…..I got onto the plane…finally.

I was looking for 36F. Reached there, kept my bag in the overhead compartment and settled in my seat. “So you are the one!” I turned. She was my co-passenger. “They were holding the take off for you”. “Oh really? Lucky me!” I said. The conversation started after the first round of introduction. This Canadian girl, Jessica, became my “single serving friend” for that flight.

Chicago

2 days before the flight. Starbucks near the office. I am having a career discussion over a coffee with my boss/mentor. He is congratulating me on the award for the best performer for the quarter.

The situation on my end is different. I am looking for a change in my role in a big way. The intellectual trip has gone away from the current work for a while now. How do I change my current role in the org is the impending Q. There is nothing wrong in the current organization I am with, considering the growth and opportunities I got and I see in future here. The only problem is “Mundaneness”. After some discussion and introspection, I see 2 ways out of this boredom. One is to take a 3 months (to indefinite) break and go to Ladakh, away from the regular predictability, indulge in some landscape photography, some trekking, camping, unwind for a while. May be this will bring the energy back. The other way is to think seriously about getting a management degree from a good school!

I kept thinking…throughout those 2 days and even when I entered the Newark terminal from my flight from Chicago.

“Hi, I am Jessica”, She offered me a hand. "Aditya", I said, "How u doing?". She tried saying my name but bounced back immediately, “ That’s too difficult, will Adi work?”. “Fine” I was so used to this by now. 

Jessica was reading a book on statistics and data warehousing. “Woho, is that your interest or a ‘forced interest’ due to work?” I asked Jessica. She giggled and told me that she was a fresh grad from a management school in Ontario and has a paper presentation on the same topic in some management school in Mumbai. 

“Wow, that’s cool” 

“What do you do Adi?”

“I am a Financial Analyst”

The next 20 minutes in the discussion were devoted to me answering her various queries about my role and my company! She was definitely keen on knowing more and more about the role and the profile. On the other hand I was interested in knowing more about her management school, the class composition, the admission procedure, the recos and the references and all the other granular stuff.

This is strange, after 3 years into this role of Financial Analyst in a consulting company I was looking for major change in path and one of the options I was contemplating was going for an MBA. There was this girl, pass-out from a good school who was keen on getting into a role like mine. Later in the discussion, she asked if my company is recruiting fresh MBA grads!! :))

This is more confusing than ever. The subjectivity is so complex. 

Life is open ended!

The royal roads to the unconscious...

Before meeting Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, I had never thought there could be people stirred to a much greater extent by the phenomenon of dreams than I was! Ignorance was bliss!

Amongst the numerous things that have fascinated me in my life are my dreams. I sometimes repent not having maintained a diary of the dreams I had had.

I have had many random thinking bouts totally devoted to Dreams. Why are they so elusive? Why can’t I remember them once I wake up? Why can’t I have the same feeling, the same adrenaline race once I wake up? Why is the wonderland so coveted? The questions were endless…

At the time of my examinations, I used to have a dream which goes like this,

“I am passing through one of the crowded market bylanes. The smallest features of the faces of the people, the various colors in the scene and the noises etc are accentuated, sharp and life like. After taking a turn to the left, I see two really hefty men engaged in a battle. Out of concern I reach out to them trying to conciliate. The moment this happens, they would forget about their ongoing fight and start beating the hell out of me!”

This particular dream was quite consistent too. Every time, at the end of the dream I would get up from sleep with a sand dry throat, inevitably! This seemingly non-offensive…rather funny dream was bothering me to an extent I couldn’t just ignore and walk away! I had to do something!

Around that time I was introduced to the psychologist, Sigmund Freud. The maverick kind! The kind of heuristic impact this fellow’s work had on the evolution of the subject of psychology can itself be too large a topic for even a Ph.D. dissertation. His importance can be gauged by this statement, “The history of psychology can be broadly divided into two periods, before Freud and after Freud!”

While going through the Psychoanalytical Theory by Freud, I came to know that one can have (at least a little) control over his dreams. This is called as ‘Lucid Dreaming’. Had I been told the same thing by someone else, I would certainly have refuted the idea outright! Freud says that we can actually participate in our dreams and can actively change the course of the dream if we DECIDE! It was intriguing.

That day I went to bed with a vengeance!

I remember, 5 minutes before going to sleep I was continuously thinking about my reaction if the men start hitting me again.

Sometime that night I started having the same dream! This time I was surprisingly more anxious while passing through the same market as if I knew what was in store for me! I took that turn, saw the men fighting, I went ahead trying to conciliate. Till this time everything was rather mundane, boring…But as soon as one of them raised his fist to impart a blow on my face, the tempo of the dream suddenly changed to the one, shot with a high-speed camera! Very articulate, each motion emphasized! I reached to his arm, arrested its motion towards me and gave a crunching blow to him on his stomach! Phew…the poor thing was thrown in the air, backwards in an embryonic position!! He went straight through the two walls behind him in succession and finally rested on the debris! I gazed at the other man; he was watching aghast, visibly stoned by what he just saw. The feeling was mutual, though I was happy at what I did but I still couldn't believe I did.

I felt like GOD!

I woke up with a strange satiated feeling. I switched on the lights and immediately jotted down everything in great detail.

That dream could never bother me again. Felt as if the two men were successfully trapped in a gothic dungeon never to be seen again!!!

Itinerary

The time in question was my itinerant days, the journey in question was my bullfight directed to Civil Services. The place was Delhi.

At this time in my life some important transitions took place. In addition to discovering that medieval history, plate tectonics, polity and constitution, civic sciences have seized to be lifeless anymore, I got bugged by good books, I was wondered, amazed and fascinated by people who could pull out lines such as,
"Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. Unspeakable. Numb. " (Excerpted from "The God of Small Things" )

The June, July time was the best time when I could really find some time to read good books except my study books! I used to literally lock myself in my room for the whole day and feast the books.
This exactly was the time when I heard from my friend Belu about a travelogue on the city of Delhi by William Dalrymple, I decided to grab a copy...the interest was because of two reasons,
firstly I had heard a li'l too much about the travelogues by him so I needed to have a look at his writing style. Secondly, the book was about Delhi. (At that time, my stay in Delhi was 2 years young and I had explored quite some areas there and loved every bit of it.)
On my next trip to Connaught Place, I picked the book. The book was amazingly genuine as Dalrymple has maintained neutrality in his observations.

In this book he unveils the charm of the city of Delhi or DEHLI as he puts it and takes the reader to places , even a core Dilliwala wdn't hv imagined to be existent, if at all , worth visiting !
The immense amount of hard work and devotion of Dalrymple comes to the fore as you wonder para by para about the flow, wit and honesty of the author...

There are some jaw dropping, eye popping revelations about the promiscuousness of the then Mughal Emperors. Their insanely lavish lifestyles make you sick , yet the beauty and tenderness of Mughal Architecture of Delhi freshens you. The sketches, one on the cover page and of the various sites in Delhi which adorn this book are drawn by his wife and get full 10/10.
Dalrymple makes you amaze at his insatiable curiosity, which always charms you!

Read this book for pure joy and entertainment... I'll also recommend this book to people who think visiting Delhi is tantamount to visiting Janpath and India Gate....

P.S: I have written about the same book in my another old (now defunct) homepage. The last 3 paragraphs are from my old site.

Nithari Nightmare

I will have to say this with great despair that the recent Noida killings have brought before the whole world the rotten underbelly of the administrative and bureaucratic setup in India. I am afraid that we , the people in India are so ‘used to’ disasters , may it be natural or social, we comfortably forget the whole issue in a matter of few years and live our lives as if nothing unpleasant, utterly disturbing had ever occurred.

A notorious serial killer in the US in 70’s went on a killing spree and managed to kill 7 teenage girls in a matter of few weeks. The killer indulged in cannibalism and necrophilia. The incident gave the FBI sleepless nights and scathing media criticism till they found the culprit. The case is still counted in the FBI files as one of the most gross murder cases.

What do we do with the Moninder Pandhers in our society? I just couldn’t help but to ponder how in the name of God were 50 odd children from the same area went missing and nobody in the Police took a notice, rather refused to take notice?

Barkha Datt was interviewing Kiran Bedi on a primetime talk show and the same question was asked to Bedi. Kiran Bedi told her upfront that it was impossible that the police were unaware of the issue. It is just that Police are under immense pressure from the ruling ministers not to lodge the FIRs (First Information Reports) of people of, should I say, lesser gods as it ‘unnecessarily’ reflects in the crime rate of the state. These statistics are used by the rival parties as a political weapon only to snatch the power.

These were the words from the horse’s mouth. To give an example, among the various attention seeking politicians, Mayawati also promptly visited the Nithari village in Noida where the killings took place. The first statements she made to media people after the visit was,” The UP government has failed to keep law and order in the state and has no moral right to rule the state so the elections should be held at the earliest”. Explanations ain’t needed on the earnestness.

In the UK and rest of the Europe if a child is reported missing, the first reaction of the Police is to look for any possibility of a pedophile in operation. In India the IPC and the overall training imparted to the entry level officers is so off beam that I wonder even a thought of a possible case of pedophilia should have crossed the minds of the Havaldars and the SHOs.

What should happen if the accused are given capital punishment in this case and they ask the President for pardon? Are they even eligible for a pardon petition?

At this juncture I find myself in serious conflict with my belief that “We should not kill people to tell people that killing people is bad”. My logical mind is at loggerheads with my pragmatic self. If someone asks me now to speak 'Against' capital punishment for the accused in Noida killings, I prefer to disagree.

Real world...

After passing out from VRCE in '02 I joined Parry & Co., a Geosynthetic flyover construction company in Baroda. That was the time when the calm and peace 0f the city was under a veil and it needed just a light breeze of hoax and political gimmicks to burst into a chaos of riots, loot and killings of innocent lives. The reaction of my friends and parents when I told them about my decision to go to Baroda for the job, everyone was not only critical but also tried hard to revert my stubborn head. I decided to go.

I spent a nice 4 months of my training period hovering between Baroda and Ahmedabad where one my friend used to work. In Baroda, after coming to my apartment from office, I used to have dinner at a particular restaurant near my apartment. There were two reasons why I used to stick to this place for food, firstly the dinner was always served with lots of smiling gujju faces and the guys there were of my age so I needed no real time to get along well with them. Everyday after dinner it became customary to spend some time there chatting before heading back to the shack. The discussions were far from serious by any standards, mostly about our day to day lives. One day when the ghastly incident of Riots surfaced in our post dinner chats, I heard some chilling accounts of escapades of 'industrious' and 'maverick' people who did their best to fuel the riots. The worst part of all this was all this time their faces were beaming with joy and satisfaction…sadist it was. It was hard for me to digest the hatred these guys had for the other community. The dinner chats ended soon. I never could erase the memories of the deplorable, to say the least, deeds of those guys.