Coming back to life
This post is a result of me promising myself to write down about all the thoughts that were rushing across my mind as I returned from France to India. I had been in France for about a couple of months, and was to get back to India after two weeks. And what I felt at that time was a complete reversal of what I felt in the first two weeks over there. Like any Indian who visits a foreign land for the first time, at first I too was all praise for the disciplined life and road sense and what not of the foreign land. Being in India, all we hear day in and day out are honking cars, shouting pedestrians and drivers, arguing shopkeepers, and the rest. So in the starting weeks, it felt so nice to see people waiting for me to cross the road, virtually empty roads, cars maintaining more than safe distances in the rare case of any traffic jams, no overcrowded markets, etc etc. But by the time of end of the trip, the last couple of weeks, these very same things pinched me hard. It felt like the city had no life and I was desperate to get back.
The journey back to Swadesh started, and I was so delighted. I remember while going to France, I was excited seeing the green fields and open lands on the way, but this time, I didn’t care to even look out for any of that. Then I had a flight to Istanbul, and it was also pretty routine. Then a four hour halt, and then good times started. From Istanbul, I had a flight to New Delhi, and as I reached the boarding gate of the flight, my eyes saw a large number of Indian junta, waiting for the same flight. There were people talking in Hindi, and families with three generations, and a lot of other good things. :D. Then into the cabin, everybody was talking to everybody, no one knew anyone, but then travelling Indians, specially those returning from foreign trips are quite frank to each other :P. People started sharing stories about their trips and I had this big smile on my face. Hardly anyone was talking on the earlier flight, atleast no one was talking in Hindi or even English for that sake. The guy behind me had a headache, and the person next to him started giving him some advice about the same, and didn’t stop talking for the entire flight duration. God knows how the guy survived with an existing headache and another one continuously talking :P.
Finally as we approached the airport, I could distinctly see jam packed houses lit in the dark, the high population density making itself clearly visible. At this time I switched from Pink Floyd to Jai Ho (I had earlier scanned the list and decided to switch to it as we close in on the destination). And the lyrics never felt so good, I could totally visualize all the lyrics playing right in front of my eyes. And slowly and slowly until the flight touched ground, I kept on playing that on repeat.
Next I had to catch a train with a time window in one hour, so I quickly went through the customs and baggage claim, and jumped into a prepaid taxi. Then on the way to the railway station, I stuck my head out of the window, to get a brush of polluted moist air :P. The next few things I came across were a traffic jam at 5:30 in the morning, an overcrowded railway station, shouting vendors and fighting coolies. I knew I had come back to life :D.