Birthday presents...

They say that the only date a woman remembers is her birthday. And that as she grows older, she forgets that too. Perhaps one day I'll belong to that category as well, but not right now. For some of my friends make sure I won't forget, and make my day simply because they remember; indeed, one or two of them will call regardless of which part of the world they are in.

Like a number of other kids, I've had birthday celebrations - cakes with candles, ice cream, balloons, presents.... When I grew older, I stopped having the parties, of course, as I'm not a very social person besides the fact that I find it awkward being the centre of attention. However, some of the birthday presents (only birthday, mind you) I've received over the years still stand out in my mind.
Here they are. In no particular order.

• The Sheaffer fountain pen Dad gave me while in school. Dad would always give us fountain pens for birthday presents. And he had good taste. But this pen was exceptional. A heavy, black, metal pen that wrote like a dream and made me forget using Parker pens. As time went by, some of the black lacquer chipped off revealing lovely brass below. The cap is dented and some people would say it looks really shabby. But it still is my most used pen, and I have started every examination paper with it since it became mine.
• The picture dictionary Mum gave me on my tenth birthday. It was my pride and joy and the envy of everyone in class.
• The job I got with a huge organisation. I went through hell just getting to the interview (described in an earlier blog post) but I truly believe it was a birthday gift (I got my appointment letter on my birthday and I remember it particularly as I was wished when the letter was handed over to me) from the Universe simply because of the way things turned out. And it was here that I got my basic grounding without which I would not have been in a position to successfully deal with my jobs that followed.
• The note my sister wrote me years ago when I was going through a phase where nothing seemed to be working out. For it helped me believe in my self again. And made me realise that if other people believed in me, then I must be doing something right, after all.
• The spur of the moment, surprise birthday party that my Lehrerin and the students in my Elementary 1 German class threw me on a Sunday with whatever they could get at short notice. It was really wonderful though I did feel a bit embarrassed.
• The bunch of orchids that one of my directors based in Gurgaon sent me two years ago. It was a nice surprise and came at a time when I was going through hell at the workplace. Actually, that was like icing on the cake for around that time I had cleared my London ICSA exams.
• The diamond pendant Dad gave me in 2000. It was an advance birthday present but I got a job within a few days of getting it.
• My godson wishing me last year with the words, "Happy Birthday! Where is my present?"

Serendipity

This evening was to have seen me attending a corporate function at a high-end restaurant. While I'd been looking forward to this (especially the dinner), at the last minute, I just decided not to go and came back home instead. So, alighting from the auto-rickshaw and walking back home, I stopped humming to myself and turned back a bit to check if what I thought I'd seen on the road was really what I thought I'd seen. It was. A hundred rupee note. I picked it up not knowing whether it belonged to someone who stayed in the house, the staircase at the foot of which the note was lying or if one of the bodybuilders at gym next door had dropped it. I stood there for a few moments wondering if I should ask. But asking didn't appeal to me since I ran the risk of handing it over to the wrong person; so, I finally decided to keep it. Maybe, I'd find the person who'd lost it. Maybe, it was my abundance. Well, somewhere on the way to my house, I saw this guy searching his pockets and I asked, 'What's wrong? Lost money?' 'Yes,' he said, with a very dejected look. 'Hundred Rupees!' The look on his face when I handed it over to him put a grin on my face and a smile in my heart.

I never cease to wonder at how awesome the Universe really is!!!!

Being connected

Someone told me, the other day, that one needs to meet a person face to face to really know what a person is like. I disagreed with him silently.

All the years I've been working, I've had to interact with a number of people over the telephone and/or the internet, sometimes without ever meeting them. In course of such communication, I got to know some of them pretty well. I count one of them, a lovely lady I 'met' on the telephone in 2003 (if my memory is correct) as one of my close friends. Though we've met each other just a handful of times to date, it didn't stop her from opening her home to me a little more than a year ago and treating me like an honoured guest. Indeed, we became friends even before I met her in person.

Over time, I've met people from all over the world on the internet, something I would never even had envisaged around ten years ago. I've been in touch with some of them for years, exchanged views, shared confidences, sought advice, cried on shoulders and lent mine, and probably will go through life without meeting them. But I consider them as friends. Enough to divulge my postal address or even my mobile number - something I may not do with people I meet on a regular basis in real life.

Indeed, I know/know of some people who've gone on to get married to someone they've met over the internet and/or on the telephone and met just once or twice in person before tying the knot, started families and have been together for years. When asked, a few of them said, they 'just knew' even before actually meeting the person and went with their gut; everything else was not of consequence. And then I know those who've dated/been together for years before getting married and yet, the marriage lasted only a few months.

You meet some people in real life and take an instant like or dislike to them, without even knowing why. You may know someone for years, run into them everyday and yet not exchange anything more than pleasantries with them. Yet, you can talk to someone you've never met in person for hours on end.

So, isn't this just a bit weird? I don't think so. I may be wrong but I believe it's about being connected more than anything else. About energy. We're all connected to the same Source and the same life force energy that flows in me flows through you and everyone else. But the type of energy we give out - our thoughts, our emotions, our intentions - is what determines what or who we attract into our lives. Like attracts like. And energies change. Sometimes people come into our lives for a reason or we're brought to a situation only because we have something to learn from it. That is probably why the kid we were best friends with in kindergarten no longer is part of our world now. Why the person who spent hours with you or said he or she couldn't live without you at one point of time left, with or without saying goodbye. Ever had the same lousy situation repeat itself time and again until you realised what it was you needed to know and then things started to change for the better? I guess I'm digressing but I feel life is a series of choices. Your choice now determines how you spend the next few moments or days or weeks or years or even the rest of your life. We really can't say which way things will work out. And easier said than done but perhaps the best thing to do is let go of the past, drawing from it only that which we need to learn, listen to our instinct and make our choices knowing they're the best at this point of time and live in the present.

Books and me

For as far back as I can remember, I've loved books. Among my earliest memories are those of me and my brother sitting on the sofa with Mum reading to us from one of those 'Sapphire' fairy tale books we still have. When we grew older we would associate ourselves with the three billy goats gruff (in the Ladybird book series), me being the oldest and my sister the youngest, until the day I thought that ugly troll in the story was rather cute and decided to change roles. I remember my Dad reading stories like Chicken Little, the Little Red Hen, the Enormous Turnip, Ass' Skin (one of my favourites), the Musicians of Bremen, and even drawing a picture of Dorothy and Toto from the Wizard of Oz. When I got older and realised I could wield a mean paintbrush, I painted a monkey on my cousin's T-shirt, a dragon on my brother's and that naughty Matthew kitten on mine - all copied from books.

In those days, our pocket money just about covered the daily icecream we would buy and a little bit more; so, we had to wait for presents and I was happy when they turned out to be books. Plus, I would wait for the annual Parents' Day at school since that was when the prizes would be distributed and I always (except for one year, I think) got a General Excellence Award which was - yep, you guessed it - books. Usually, they were story books but for winning the best speaker award in a debate in the tenth standard, I got a Pears Encyclopaedia and for topping in the sixth standard, I got a dictionary (Websters'). That was my third dictionary, the first being his own 1937, Second Edition, The Little Oxford Dictionary that Dad gave me and which I still have and treasure (it has his schoolday notes too) and the second being the picture dictionary that Mum gave me which was quite a hit in school. Of course, there was this massive Chambers Dictionary ( I will never refer to another English Dictionary since this is the best) for common use at home, from where I picked up the Greek and Cyrillic scripts, and the Hindi and Marathi dictionaries. The first dictionary I bought was a русско-английский словарь, a Russian-English dictionary, from a book fair held in college by Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga, since I was teaching myself the basics of Russian at the time so I could identify cosmonauts on stamps from the erstwhile Soviet Union, but Dad gave me the money for that. So technically, the first dictionary I bought (read picked up with my own money) was the Cassell's German and English dictionary for Rs.70 (a lot of money in those days) which I still use.

I never could figure out though how they chose books as prizes. After getting a dictionary and books on electricity and mechanics, I got a fairy tale in a higher class so it was a little weird. I once got a book on gymnastics as a prize which was strange considering that our school was never big on sports and obviously as there was no gym, we never had even basic lessons on gymnastics. I didn't mind that book though as, in those days, I was an avid fan of gymnasts like Dmitri Bilozertchev, Aurelia Dobre and Natalia Yurchenko.

Back to getting books as gifts, one birthday gift from Mum was a set of two books by Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island and The Black Arrow. While I liked the former, I found the latter dead boring. I tried and tried to read it but I didn't manage to get past page 25 or so. So I hyped it up, and gave it to my brother as a Christmas present on condition that he gave me one of his Three Investigators books. He wasn't pleased with the agreement once he started reading it and that book still lies unclaimed. While on the subject of boring books, I did once come across an Agatha Christie (a Tommy and Tuppence book but I don't remember the name) where the only bit of action, if I remember correctly, was a dog running. I found it dead boring but I did manage to complete it, reading page by page in the hope that the next page would be interesting. Perhaps, if a movie has been made on that book, it would be a good deal more bearable. Sometimes, however, you watch a movie after reading a great book only to realise that you would have been better off without it. I enjoyed reading Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra but was sorely disappointed when I saw the movie. If I had to choose between reading a book and watching a film made on it, I would opt for the former any day because when you read a book, you are transported to a different world, a world where you are free to imagine the characters the way you want them to be and where you can proceed at your own pace. Having said that, particularly in cases where there is more than one volume of a book and a television series or a movie has been made on it, it'd be very difficult to read a book without associating the actors with the characters, especially when one approves of the choice. I can never read Sherlock Holmes without seeing Jeremy Brett's face nor can I read the Yes Minister or the Yes Prime Minister series without imagining the characters to look just like Paul Eddington, Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds.

So, as we grew, with each passing year, our taste in books changed. Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, the Three Investigators,... We had limited choice in books, there being not many bookstores then as there are now. Every week, Dad would pick up a comic from the newstand - Phantom, Mandrake or Flash Gordon (whatever was published). And during school vacations, we would frequent the local library everyday for comics we didn't have (Archies, Richie Rich, Spooky, Casper, Sad Sack) and the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. At first we would get just one of these books a day and three comics until we realised that while one of us was reading the book, the other two were just twiddling our thumbs waiting for it to be finished. We then would get three books everyday or every two days depending on how fast we'd finish them. I was crazy over the Biggles series and I managed to get a few hardcover books in those days for Rs.20 each. In 'The Cruise of the Condor', a 1932 story, there was a character called Slimy Silva and we kept that as a nickname for every slimy character we met. I guess we went through these phases where one sibling reads a particular author and the others also jump on to the bandwagon. For, when I was in college, more authors started appearing in the market and we latched on to Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series. I remember Dad taking me to the hospital for dental surgery - consequences of a botched-up root canal job. I had my jaw drilled but on the way back picked up a load of Perry Masons at the railway station because they were just Rs.22 apiece and settled down with one of them in the train. The big joke was that the school library restricted reading of these authors (Christie and Gardner) to just the teachers (no idea why) and when my sister, naturally having read the books at home, started recommending reading material to the teachers, most of them were scandalised. This was about the time I'd started building up my collection of classics as well, one of which, War and Peace, was appropriated by my sister at the time when she should have been concentrating totally on her Secondary School Certificate exams; she completed it overnight when all of us thought she was studying.

In college, I would save my pocket money and visit the old paper mart after class and pick up commando and western comics, both old and new for 50 paise to Rs.2 or a 3-in-1 for Rs.5. The price stayed steady for a few years within which period, I bought quite a good number. It was a lot of money in those days but now that I think back, it doesn't seem like much. But then, the cost of everything has gone up. I could travel by bus to college in just 50 paise; now, that coin has almost gone out of circulation. And so have those comics. Fortunately, Archie comic digests, of which I've also built up a collection over the years, are still available though they are getting more and more expensive with time. Did I forget to mention I also collect Asterix and Tintin ?

When I'd pick up those comics in college, the girls thought I was mad since they'd all read romance novels. Well, I guess I am a bit weird but I've also had my share of reading this stuff. It's okay when you're bored and want to complete book in an hour and have a good laugh in the bargain. Though I would settle for reading Pride and Prejudice over and over again, anytime, if it's romance one wants, or good old William Brown for a few laughs.

Over the past few years, I've been collecting books on history and historical personalities I like, stocking up on books by a few select authors, reading both fiction and non-fiction. Unfortunately, I can't buy anymore as I've run out of space to keep them all. Which may be a good thing for the time being considering that I still have a huge number of books I own that I've yet to read.

While I was studying, I would write in textbooks, usually underlining what I needed to read again or mark in the margin, either in pencil (if the book is expensive) or in ink and make notes wherever space permitted. In school, I would colour the drawings in my Hindi textbook as I found black and white rather plain. And in college, I'd draw pictures in my English textbook during the lectures based on the contents of the lessons. The back covers of accounts journals, being longer notebooks, were ideal for sketching my favorite football heroes; I still regret not having kept that back cover where I'd sketched Alexi Mikhailichenko.

In school and college, it was not uncommon to lend books though it was scary as sometimes people (students and their parents) accused you of not returning books you borrowed and sometimes pretended they'd never borrowed from you to begin with, as my unfortunate siblings experienced. Nowadays, I refuse point blank to lend my books for while I treat my books like babies, to a lot of people, a book is just a book - to be read and discarded once done with, whether they forget it somewhere or lend it to some other needy soul. When you're lucky enough to get it back from the borrower, you wish you had had the guts to refuse to lend it in the first place because more often than not, you will not recognise it as your own. So you lose your friendship or your book or both.

People at home are still getting used to my idiosyncracies when it comes to books. I generally cover a new book I start with plastic to prevent it from getting dog ears and to safeguard it from getting soiled. I hate it when people mark their place by folding the corner of a page and it makes me mad when they'll use one hand to read a book by the simple process of turning the pages they've read so the front cover of the book will touch the back. It makes my blood boil when a book is returned with curry or ketchup or ink stains (I guess there wasn't a tissue around) and I shudder when they use books to kill mosquitoes. I do not open a soft cover book fully to prevent, as far as possible, the spine from getting wrinkled. And I absolutely abhor the fact that some bookstores let people sit and peruse a book to their hearts' content without even bothering to check on the condition of the book when it is put back. I suppose I'm more fussy than most people about books, but that's me. Where books are concerned, I will not change and I don't think I want to.

Coincidence?

I'd reached the airport one early December morning to catch a flight to New Delhi and was just congratulating myself on making it an hour before scheduled takeoff when a voice on the public announcement system informed us that the flight was delayed by 45 minutes and would now take off at 7:45 a.m. After doing some quick mental calculations, I figured that allowing for a further delay of 10 to 15 minutes, we should land in Delhi shortly before 10:00 a.m and considering the time it would take to get to the arrival gate after landing, finding the chauffeur of my hired vehicle, beating traffic and finding the location of the new office building at Gurgaon, I would just about make it in time for my meeting at 11:00 a.m.

So, the flight took off at around the (new) scheduled time of departure and at around 9:35 a.m., when we should have been getting ready to land, the captain anounced that there was heavy fog at Delhi (I had actually forgotten that I needed to schedule meetings for a bit later in the day during winter) and while we would be the first to land once the fog cleared, it was expected that we'd be circling for quite some time. But there was enough fuel left for an hour, so we might as well make ourselves comfortable.

This announcement woke me rudely from my slumber and when I looked out of the window the fog was so thick, it seemed that the plane was not moving at all. The only thing I could do under the circumstances was pray to my favourite archangel, Michael. I've got to land by 10:00 a.m., I said, and be at the office at 11:00 a.m. It was one of those moments when you want something so badly that all your attention is focused on that one thing only to the utter disregard of everything else. In just a few minutes the captain announced that we were preparing for landing and switched the 'fasten seatbelts' sign on. Most of the passengers thought it was a joke coming so close on the heels of the previous announcement and, indeed, the fellow in front of me refused to straighten his seat despite the airhostess telling him to. (If they were a little firm with such passengers, the inconvenienced ones would not have to get things done themselves.) At 2 minutes or so before 10:00 a.m., the lady next to me said, "I thought we were supposed to land. We still seem to be stuck in midair. Looks like we're in for another long wait. You just can't see anything but fog." "Yes", I agreed. And suddenly, there was a bump as the plane landed and after we'd managed to shut our drooping jaws, we looked out of the window and could discern the shape of some vehicles near the tarmac. When we got out of the plane, though, the fog had all but cleared and there were surprised but happy faces all around.

Coincidence? I prefer to think of it as a miracle because as long as I believe in miracles, I know there's always hope.

Oh, did I forget to mention I reached the office exactly at 11:00 a.m.?

Thanks, Mikey !!

You are like this...This is like that...

It is commonly said that "Assumption is the mother of all f%^&$%s". And yet, whether we realise it or not, we have a number of pre-conceived notions about people and places and things.

I've lost track of the number of people I've met on the internet who, when I say I'm from India, due to the fact that I can communicate in English, invariably ask, "What are you doing there?" or "Do you live there? Where are you originally from?" Why, after so many years of European occupation, is it so difficult to accept that the natives can absorb the language so much so that English is one of the official languages of communication here?

I've read of people from outside India coming here and expecting to see fakirs and elephants and snake charmers on every street. And bullock carts, veiled women, et al. I really don't know what their reaction is when they find high-rise buildings, motor vehicles, women wearing mini-skirts and blouses with spaghetti straps. Must come as quite a shock to find that in a developing country, a good number of people, including fisherwomen, vegetable vendors and municipal swepers, carry cellular phones. Must be another shock to check into a hotel and find television channels not only in English but also in French, German, Portuguese, Chinese...add to that the fact that some programmes are aired here at about the same time (barring a few hours) as they are in the United States. A cricket team from a developed country once came on tour armed with video cassettes simply because they felt there was no way they could possibly watch the native fare. Wonder if they still carry that excess baggage on tour these days.

When I'd started work at an organisation years ago, I'd keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut, and I'd picked up a lot of news about people and things that way. People assumed I was pretty naive until one day some big-mouthed lady from Human Resources, having seen my test scores, told them to be wary of me as I wasn't the dumb one everyone took me for. Well, needless to say, my oasis of information ran a bit dry after that revelation but it gave me a good laugh. This reminds me of the time, a few years ago, when a bigwig was explaining something to me and, being partly in alien territory and partly because I wasn't sure that I agreed with what he said as I needed to get some facts checked first, I was not giving him straight answers. I suppose that irritated him to a certain extent because in a fit of frustration he said, "I don't know what your IQ is but.....". I didn't ruin his day by telling him it was 139 at the time.

Some years back, I ended up going for an (unexpected) interview wearing the clothes I was in at the time I telephoned the organisation - t-shirt and jeans. As luck would have it, I got the job. I won't venture into the details but suffice it to say that it probably was because I looked like I wouldn't be able to read minutes leave alone draft them and secondly because (as I found out subsequently) the people interviewing me were taking me on only because they had no choice; the dumber the person was, the better it was for them as it would mean sharing less power.

I can laugh at the above but, once in a while, stuff like this makes my blood boil. When I had shifted from Information Technology to the Secretarial Department in the same organisation to pursue mandatory training, I was told by the Head of Department that he hoped I could manage as this was totally different from what I'd been used to. I held my tongue (now I wouldn't) but I thought to myself, "What's the big deal? I passed the same exams as the other trainees did. Does my work experience in another line make me less competent or should it be taken as a plus point?"

Stereotyping may be based on gender, age, religion, race, colour of skin or any other characteristic and it happens regularly in everyday life. We're so accustomed to it that very often we fail to realise when we're being judgemental. Here, people communicate in English just as easily as they do in Hindi. Yet, if you need to talk to a lady wearing a burqa or a man whose clothes are crumpled or dirty or the local grocer, one automatically switches to Hindi though he or she probably speaks English just as well, if not better.

At the Qutb Minar, last year, I was stopped at the gate and asked how I was attempting to get in on a ticket that cost Rs.10 instead of the more expensive one (I think it was Rs.100) for foreign tourists. Why ? Because I was wearing jeans and had short hair. A similar situation occurred in 2005 while touring Aurangabad with my sister. People actually thought we were non-resident Indians since we were attired in jeans and communicated with each other in English. The tour guide who was collecting the entrance fee (to the Ajanta caves) from passengers stopped insisting we pay him the higher fee only after being thoroughly rebuked in Hindi. After that incident, I always carry some sort of identification on me.

Man being a social animal, inevitably, there are certain beliefs that we grow up with. A few of them are discarded as we gain maturity, start rationalising and develop our own value system but others stay and we pass them down to future generations. Perhaps because they're the prevailing group beliefs? Perhaps because letting go of them would require us to get out of our comfort zones? Perhaps because admitting they hold no water would show us in a bad light?

I suppose we've all been guilty now and then of forming opinions about people, places, etc even before getting to know them and/or the facts. It can be harmless at times and you can actually look back at whatever happened as a result of people assuming things and can laugh at it. But it takes on a totally different hue when people get hurt in the process. Maybe education can help to an extent. Or is what is required an attitude change since unless we have an open mind, not only would we continue to see just what we wanted to but we would also not admit or acknowledge things even when they stare us in the face. Which is a pity, since that way, we lose out on so much that life holds for us.

Just another day....

Just another one of those days where I had to wake up before the crack of dawn to catch an early morning flight to Delhi and get meetings done. Only this time I switched to Jetlite (or Sahara as it used to be called before Jet Airways took it over) as I'd travelled by it before and found the service and food quite good, and more importantly, plenty of leg room. Furthermore, I got a low fare on this as compared to Jet. The breakfast I looked forward to, though, turned out to be just short of a disaster. So, I was relieved when I reached the office at Gurgaon and a very good friend treated a colleague and me to brunch.

Well, this was a busy day in the Group as the (worldwide) head honcho was visiting and when we got to one of the Group's newly occupied buildings where he'd been, we found security extremely tight - electronically controlled gates, fingerprint scanning and identification (or whatever it's called), et al - not very common here. So I got my work completed successfully and this lovely young lady I'd been only communicating with over the phone until I finally met her (on that day) showed us around the place. A huge cafetaria, a gym, and more than just two cubicles in the restroom. You could virtually live in the office. For a moment I stopped and imagined what that would be like and then the thought intruded, "Nah, wrong city."

The flight back was delayed and tiredness hit as I spent more than two hours at the airport trying to get on with 'The Aeneid' but struggling to keep awake. Too tired to stand and too scared to fall asleep. It was with a sense of relief that I finally boarded the flight for home. Settled down in my aisle seat when Mr. Eager Beaver tries to get past me to his window seat knowing fully well that the narrow gap between my knees and the seat ahead made such a task next to impossible. "Have patience," I said. "I'll get up and you can go in." Once the doors were shut, it was a relief to know that the seat between Mr. Eager Beaver and me was vacant and that I wouldn't have to struggle to get elbow room. But later on, after an awful dinner, this Ms. Restless sitting one row ahead on the other side says to Mr. Eager Beaver, "If you're going to go to sleep, can I take your window seat? You can sit in the middle." "And what," I wanted to ask her, "do you expect to see from the window at this time of the night?" But I held my tongue. Later, I thought she must have just wanted to run away from her own seat because of that Punjabi guy ahead of her. He really was a piece of s%*#. From the time he got on board, he'd been making a nuisance of himself. Pushed the seat as far back as possible and stretched his hands so they hung over the top of the seat from his elbows on. Then he decided to read the newspaper by keeping the seat still reclined but moving to the (front) edge and opening the newspaper wide so it rested on the seat ahead and also on the unfortunate head of its occupant. That gentleman did turn around and protest but Mr. Yucks dealt with the situation by just folding the newspaper in half lengthwise and keeping his hands on both the (side) edges near the top of the newspaper in such a manner that Mr. Unfortunate was now in the unenviable situation of not only having the paper resting on his head but also a couple of undesirable hands. How people can accept such behaviour is beyond me!!

Anyway, Ms. Restless was firmly ensconced in her window seat and Mr. Eager Beaver was sitting next to me wondering how to pass his time now that his sleep had been disturbed. He hit upon this brilliant idea of switching his cell on. I'm not sure what the situation is like in other countries but here, mobile devices are to be switched off before takeoff and can be switched on only when the aircraft has come to a complete halt. Easier to preach than to put into effect considering the number of people we have who pride themselves on their logical thinking. "Logic," said Mr. Eager Beaver when I told him to switch off his cell. "I'm getting no signal; ergo, my keeping my cell on can't interfere with the aircraft's communication system. In any case, I am only supposed to put it off at takeoff and landing." "You're wrong. And tell me that when the plane crashes," I said. "If you have a doubt about it, we can always get the flight attendant to resolve it." He switched off his cell then but apparently had come to a decision that, since he couldn't sleep any more, he may as well pass the time in conversation with his neighbour, namely, yours truly. "So," he says, "are you from Mumbai or from Delhi?" "Mumbai." "And are you a housewife or a professional?" By this time I was starting to get irritated and, apologies to any housewives who might be reading this but, I snapped, "Do I look like a housewife?" "No," he squeaked. And that was that thankfully.

Then I realised that this was my second 'close encounter of the third kind' of the day. Or should that be 'close encounter of the third kind with the weird kind' ? For the morning's flight also had me sitting next to a chap who hadn't switched off his cellphone. It rang a number of times and got me awake and groggily trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. "It can't be this guy," I thought, since the stewardess was standing right there and wasn't saying a thing and then moved away. The phone continued to ring. So I asked him, "Is that your cell?" "Oh, it's ringing? I didn't realise." "Put it off now. Do you not realise you are endangering everyone on board? You're old enough not to have to be told these things." Not even a squeak from this smartass.

So all in all, this made me feel that most people prefer to look the other way or pretend a situation does not exist or even tolerate an uncomfortable situation. Why? To avoid confrontation? Possibly. I'm guilty of doing that at times too if I feel that making a point is just not worth it. Or is it that people don't like to get out of their comfort zones? Or, because they're simply scared and hold others in awe? Or for some other reason?

Whatever the case, in my view, people need to realise that they can't always assume the role of a silent spectator. Sometimes, you need to get involved in a situation and/or tackle it head-on. Because, sometimes, one person or a single act of his can make a world of difference.