Thursday the 6th of May was by far the longest Thursday of my life, and probably the longest day as well. To be precise, it lasted exactly 34 hours and 30 minutes. That’s because the Eastern Standard Time in the US is 5 hours behind GMT and we are 5-and-a-half hours ahead. Actually, my day had started on the morning of the 5th itself, when we had to demonstrate the damned electronic project, so you could say it stretched itself out over a good 50 hours or so, interspersed with intermittent sleep.
I thought there might be jet lag, especially since the US is pretty much on the other side of the globe from India, but no such problems faced. Considering the prided propensity for nightouts we IITians have (we almost live in the American time zone), I was sure I would have no jet lag issues, but what was surprising was that even the rest of my family had no problems adjusting to almost an inverted time zone.
The flight we took was Emirates, and I must say it has to be one of the world’s best, in stark contrast to the last time I flew, when it was Alitalia which is one of the worst. Admittedly, legroom will always be at a premium as long as we Indians fly economy, and I can’t wait until I’m close to the top of the Forbes list of billionaires. The major impressive factor about Emirates was that the food was clearly distinguishable from the containers that packed it, both in terms of looks as well as taste (No I did not taste the cardboard containers although I am very much capable of that as well, but imagine lukewarm soggy paper pulp; that’s Alitalia for you).
Another most useful thing about Emirates was their entertainment library. It had close to a hundred movies or so, and infinite songs, and I ended up watching The Informant, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Law Abiding Citizen and slept through most of Crazy Heart.
The third thing that’s great about the airline is the stopover at Dubai. I was impressed by the revamped CSIA, with its new duty-free area and stuff. Dubai put it to shame. The terminal at which we had to make our transit probably had more gates than all the airports all over India put together and then some.
We pride ourselves calling Mumbai a cosmopolitan. Let’s face it, it’s not; we’re only kidding ourselves. The sheer ethnic diversity visible in just about π/4 degrees of solid angle (I crave forgiveness here; after all we’re engineers) is simply overwhelming. To classify things broadly, there are 4 major races in the world that my family likes to put in Marathi as kale, gore, chapte aani aapan (translating to Blacks, Whites, Orientals and us) and each and every one of these was visible in ample measure. New York is no different, with the small exception that the proportion of Blacks shoots up and the Middle Easterns goes down. Mumbai is still only a metropolitan and has a long way to go.
Dubai airport is also where I caught the very first live sighting of what I strongly suspect were you-know-what implants. We’ve read about them in the papers, drooled over them on the net till we were sick of them but hadn’t seen them actually. Obviously, I cannot tell for certain when they are fully clothed and approximately 7.5 metres away, but suffice it to say that their obnoxious proportions in comparison to perfectly normal-sized other body parts, not to mention my expertise in these matters thanks to my fabled passion for pondiyaap is reason enough for them to be labeled implants.
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