Flight of Imagination

For the past one year I had the opportunity or to put it in proper sense, the misery of travelling alone quite a number of times. Although invariably all such journeys ended up offering nothing which could be called good, but still you always hope to have something ,every time you are about to travel. The expectations are same whether you travel by train or flight and just like any other expectations, they are not devoid of build-ups.

If you are about to travel by air, there is a significant time of yours which goes in praying to God to make you sit next to an interesting (read hot) co-passenger. There are few things which are considered worth praying even by the atheists, and this tops the list. So you spend some time praying to god for such beautiful coincidence at the same time parallelly imagining things that would happen once God accepts your most cherished wish. The moment you reach the respective airline counter ,you start looking around, searching for the possible "gift" sent straight away by the master above, whom you had not bothered with any requests since your last travel. Presence of god’s gift would not fulfil your wish rather you have to work out a way to ensure that you get the gift. So you observe the gift’s movement and ensure that you stand behind her while she is getting her boarding pass processed. You have to keep your ear lobes fully functioning to hear out and if required (which will be in most cases) your eyes, to look for the most important numbers printed on her boarding pass. So when the airline executive asks for your seat preferences , you confidently mention your choice and quiet clearly- well my lucky number is 17 so I would prefer the row of same number and since my name has "E" in it (somewhere) so I would want to sit on the seat which has the same letter, so 17E would be good. The flummoxed executive would think that this guy is out of his mind, but on face he would pass a smile and will say, “Sure sir”; after all, these are the moments where their training of hypocritical hospitality is tested.

So finally you think it is your lucky day, god has colluded with you and finally you got what you had been dreaming of since the moment you left your home for the airport if not longer. From the moment you have secured a boarding pass to the moment boarding is announced, you start creating dummy conversations,that you would start with your cherished neighbour. Your imagination, charged with the power of positive thinking, would create numerous topics in your mind incidentally all of which would appear to be insanely interesting to the neighbour. You do not want to be disturbed in this critical exercise of scenario projections and hence would switch off your cell phone and cut yourself from every other distraction except the one for which you are planning. As in dreams of inception, you would have had endless conversations each lasting more than 2 hrs, multiple times for many scenarios, squeezed in a small time frame of 30 minutes, flat. If somehow IQ was measured at this time, you would have beaten Einstein by a margin which would have made him look like a lunatic. So finally boarding is announced, your moment of glory, the time when you would test all those hard worked scenario to put in place, has come. You would have butterflies in your stomach, nervousness which would be same as what Sir Edward Lutyen would have had when he would have laid down the foundation of Viceroy's house in New Delhi. You think that your scenarios are perfect but as always there is some scope of screw-up but today the person with the blue umbrella sitting above has been helping you a lot; so while you are standing in the line to board the aircraft, you start praying for each of your scenarios to go as they went in your projections.
You enter the aircraft, manically rush to reach your lucky seat 17E , only to find your neighbour totally turned towards the window and looking outside. You sit next to her and now start revising all the opening sentences, as by divine help you have got some extra time to prepare your master act, act which would be as important as the opening presidential debate of Mr. Obama. You keep rehearsing, meanwhile the flight has taken off, and she is still looking outside, totally ignoring your presence. You start getting impatient but can't do anything other than wait. Suddenly she turns and starts searching for something in her bag, you think that you would offer her your help for whatever she might be searching but then she finds it. It is the sleeping eye mask. She wore it and slept and with it your flight of the dreams, crashes. You console yourself by ogling at the airhostess, who would unfailingly pass fake smiles, which they would have learned at Frankfinn. So with it ends your journey which remains etched in your memory as it is amongst the only cases where you would have hated the situation when a hot girl slept next to you!