Bidding good bye to my parents, bro, and relaives at the airport, I started my flight at 8.20 pm on Air India 191. I was expecting a seat inside the cockpit, beside the pilot, but I was frankly disappointed. But still, I kept wondering who would be the lucky passenger to be seated inside.
My flight reached Mumbai on time, and I had another 3 hour stopover here. This was my first visit to Mumbai and luckily, I did get the real real experience of being a Mumbai-ite in this short duration. I was waiting for my plane to Newark, and coincidentally there was another flight to Bangkok on the same terminal. An airport official informed one guy to not board the plane without the boarding pass and this started a big commotion. This guy along with his 6 friends started swearing at the official and vice versa. The airport staff and security were so afraid of these guys that none of them were about to give even a helping mouth to this official. It all stopped just as it was about to physical. So, now I know for sure Mumbai is not much different than what is being shown in movies.
The next flight arrived after some 2 hours. While boarding the plane from Mumbai, I thought the next stop would have to be Newark because all the customer care officers told me that Bombay-Newark was a direct flight. After some 6 hours , it came as a huge surprise to me when the flight landed in Frankfurt. Keeps me wondering if this is also one of those many dirty scams from Air India. A fake employee list, fake assets, fake flight itinerary, fake boarding passes & a million other ways to make illegal money have been widely exploited, but none of them do ever get a mention in the MBA textbooks. May be I gotto ask my university to have a few subjects like "How to scam without being caught", "Bribing for Dummies" etc. Do not get the wrong idea that I intend to create one of my own scams reading these subjects. My interest in these subjects is purely to kick off scamming colleagues!
Another 10 hours of journey. I felt like having a bath, but plane did not have a shower! Finding a tooth paste was difficult as some guys had stolen the "Air India" tooth pastes from the restrooms. Passing time was not a big deal, had a novel to read, movies to watch. I even suggested one bored German passenger seated beside me to watch "Taare Zameen Par" and she too shed a few tears for Ishaan Awasti.
After reaching the Newark airport, I was in a cultural shock. I had never seen so many white people in my life! People dressed as they wished. Flight attendents in short skirts and even security officers in shorts! People dressed as they wished, no pressure on them to live upto society's expectations. Its a free society. I had a long wait of 5 5 hours for my next flight. I tried to call my relative to inform of my arrival but the faulty coin phone booths just eat up the coins without alowing me to make a call. Scams are everywhere! I was also hungry, but food is mostly non-veg and not spicy in any way. A safe option, I grabbed a bootle of Odwalla Mango juice and waited for about 5 hours to catch another flight. The flight to Atlanta was delayed cos of weather conditions.
I was totally worn out from my journey and had not slept for about 24 hours. The 1 and 1/2 hour sleep in the flight to Atlanta was to be only saving grace. On flight, I met one American born Lahore boy about 23 years who showed me his laptop and all the games he had. He kept on blabbering about the high end desktop he had bought, the quad core speed and memory and all crap. The only way to silence him was to beat him in chess and just 5 min after that I was sleeping peacefully!
Atlanta is a very huge airport. I had a half a km walk to reach a train pickup and another half a km by mini train to get my checkin baggages. I had missed my 6.30 shuttle to Auburn and so comes another 2.5 hour wait for the shuttle. There was a stark difference in what I saw between these airports. Newark airport had a mostly white majority, and the Atlanta airport had a black majority. And some women were so obese, I pity them. Finally the pickup arrived and I reached Auburn. It took another 10 minutes to find a nearby phone and call from the hotel nearby and the isa guys soon arrived and dropped me off at my place. All in all a 41 hour transit from when I started from my house in Bangalore.
