Part 1 - Boarding Order

Apparently in international flights there is a boarding order - not according to seat nos, but according to personality types. First children less than 2 years, then infants travelling with their mothers, then old ladies (curiously enough no lady came forward during this boarding call), then IIT-IIM types going on an offshore project complete with laptop, mango pickle, iddly podi & all the masalas that have today made their list into banned articles in hand luggage, then firang backpackers who on the strength of the exchange rate can afford business class, then the unfortunate ones who paid full fare on this flight & finally in a condescending voice, we who were clever & grabbed the promo offer which would probably cover fuel costs from the Airport to Adyar were called to board the flight.

In spite of forgetting to login to seatguru.com to find out the best seats for our flight, we managed to get emergency exit seats which had more leg room than business class. The moment the pilot showed us the route map, I was a relieved man. We were flying over land for most of the way, surely in the case of an emergency the pilot would be astute enough to head for the nearest field or a highway atleast instead of heading for the sea? But I also saw Iran in our flight path, & for a brief second I wondered about the soundness of logic of choosing to fly an American airline (Delta) over Iran, exactly on the date when Uncle Bush and his band of musketeers had chosen that specific country for his next cowboys & injuns game.

As part of the onboard announcements, we were assured that even though during the flight you may see the Captain taking a nap or the flight attendants dozing or the pilots little girl at the wheel, trained personnel were always doing what they were supposed to be doing. Sure enough, some 20 minutes into the flight the Captain settled down with a book two seats away from us & woke up only at Paris. I could almost hear a midflight announcement saying "The tail is not responding. Windows cannot end this process itself. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to terminate immediately or wait for the programme to respond"

Over the next 11 hours, every time someone flushed the loo (every 215 times), I shuddered in my seat looking for the spot where air had rushed in to the plane. My better half slept quite well through all the noise & you will later find out how crucial this turned out.

We landed uneventfully in Paris, the most fashionable & stylish city in the world & I set my best bare foot forward - wearing skimpy floaters. In the next one & a half hour I found out that I was the only one in the entire airport complex, which incidentally is bigger than some of our mid sized cities, attired so. As paranoia set in I saw that the entire developed world was staring at my feet & then looking away saying 'tsk tsk'. Luckily the visa officer could only see me chest up & so I slipped through the Paris style net. The fact that I almost lost a couple of toes to frostbite did not bother me so much then.

Holidays

I am not one to brag that often, but me & my wife just came back from a holiday to London, Scotland & Paris. (Yea!) I am not that afraid of flying, but to overcome an overwhelming temptation to think of how it would be like to plunge down 20000 feet while in the 10 hr flight, I carried a writing pad & a pen. All I managed to write was "Boarding Order" (the two words, not any funny anecdote) through out the trip. So here is an exaggerated version of the trip from memory. To fuel interest in this story here are the various chapters that will go into this travelogue.

1. Boarding order
2. A performance at Garrick
3. Elementary, my dear
4. Lebanese are lebanese wherever they go
5. A DJ dressed as a driver
6. Egyptian escalators
7. Shauns Elysse
8. Du E