Middle-Class Dreams

Remember this picture of Neeraj Chopra? He had posted this on social media saying a small dream of his had come true, that he was able to take his parents on their first flight. 

Why is it so hard to go on an airplane? 

As an 80's kid, an airplane was my ultimate fantasy. I was your typical middle-class kid, fascinated by strange objects, unfamiliar people, and far-away places. Cities and their modern gadgets had a particular pull. 

I was growing up in a village 450 km from the state capital of Bangalore.  It is an 8 hours drive, by today's driving standards and road conditions. The nearest airport of Mangalore was still 75 km away. It was a 2 hours drive from my village. The airport itself was 13 km away from Mangalore city. Today, it costs around Rs 1000 just to come to the city from the airport. Multiple options for airport transfers are still not available. You either take the prepaid taxi or be at the mercy of the drivers outside. They are waiting for return passengers to take back to the city as they drop off the others at the arrival point.  

THAT is the extent to which an airplane was a "far-away" thing for us. 

Forty years ago, it would have been easier to die and go to heaven than go to the airport.

No wonder, the mere sound of the passing airplane was enough to make us stop whatever we were doing. We would rush out, look up at the sky, catch a glimpse of this wondrous modern invention, and wave at it vigorously. I really thought people inside could see us and were smiling or waving back at us! Also, sometimes, this flying machine made thin, white lines in the sky. We were told that chocolates were given to all the passengers on board and that it was free and unlimited. Can you imagine the power of the two words - Free And Unlimited? We love these words. Even separately they were great and here, they were together!

For those of us, who went to Dharmasthala on an annual temple trip, in a 'rented-for-the-day' Ambassador, an airplane was mesmerizing. I remember the moment when I looked at the airplane for the first time. It was on our school trip to the Mangalore Airport. 

The plane was huge. It was long. It was white. It was slim. It had tiny windows. I wondered how people could look out of those windows? Did they have to stand? 

My only references for windows were, those on our local, private buses and the 'big-as-a-door' Ambassador car windows, in which you could slip a child in and out with ease. 

I dreamt about the tray the air hostess would bring to my seat and I would choose the chocolate I wanted. Those dreams, those little wishes, those nights thinking of the airplane - it was haunting. It was haunting because I knew very well, that I did not have the money then or perhaps, worse still, never have the money in the future either, to actually be "inside" an actual plane and go from place to place.

Many years later, during one of my training sessions, I remember a girl saying, her only dream was to take a flight from Vishakhapatnam to Hyderabad. This was in 2020. I knew exactly how she felt. I knew, without saying anything more, exactly what her dream meant to her. But at the same time, I wondered how a dream of a villager like me, from an unknown village, from a bygone era, was still a dream of many, in better jobs, better cities, and in the year 2020! For a middle-class person, these are what dreams are made of - irrespective of where we live. Hum aur hamare sapne!

So, did my airplane dream come true? Yes, it did. It was from Hyderabad to Bangalore in 2003. It was an Air Deccan flight. The low-cost airline of the 2000s. It was the cheapest flight available back then. It was famously said, at the time, that traveling by Air Deccan was as good as traveling by AC first class train, almost the same fare. Captain Gopinath's dream to make flying accessible to the masses had certainly made it possible for many like me to fly. 

I do not remember now the fare we paid. Or where we bought the tickets. Can't be online, right? Most likely it was through a travel agent. 

We were sweating inside the cabin and I was thinking, "Come on now, the machine of my dreams cannot be this uncomfortable, can it?" Someone told us it was so hot because the AC had been switched off. They were waiting for everyone to be on board and the flight to take off for the AC to be switched on. 

Fortunately for me, many of my subsequent flights were paid for by the companies I worked for. 

As a family, paying for an air ticket is something we still go back and forth on, for days on end. I just cannot digest that it still costs so much. I remember our trips to Orissa, Gujarat, and Assam. A large part of the expense was just the flight. Sometimes, 50% of the total travel expenses! 

No wonder, flying is one of the most treasured middle-class dreams.

Parallel Universe

How can you even begin to describe a person whose writing you admire immensely? I can’t. But what I CAN do is refer to 2 of my all time favorite posts on his blog: A Tragic Art and Mystic Meander to give you an idea of how beautifully he writes.

Presenting to you the third guest post on Conversations: Parallel Universe by Rajagopalan Ratnaraj whose blog name is A Beautiful Mind. Read on!

Almost every one of us has a thing for legacy! We dream of seeing our names in tabloids & billboards; our heart pulses up on every mention of our name. We all like to outlive our time in this world in some philosophical form unless your idea of mortality is to store a few of your skin cells in a Petri dish inside a robot programmed to live forever. But half way through our lives, we are smart (or foolish) enough to realize that greatness is destined to a select few who go on to change this world for good (or bad) & thrust their legacy into history books & their neighbors alike. Then we watch our favorite movie star who starts out as a son of a farmer, goes to the best college in the nation, romances the most beautiful girl, fights 20 baddies while smoking a cigarette, turns a millionaire in the course of a 5 minute song & lives happily ever after in the hearts of his people. And then we watch him do just about the same thing in his next movie: this time as a factory laborer’s son. I see one difference between him & me: he has me in his audience & I've me as my audience. Well, heck, who cares! A parallel universe is thus born!

We might or might not learn about the concept of a parallel universe in the inter-twined realms of physics and philosophy but we are certainly introduced to its more conceivable form by the various larger-than-life characters we see around us. Our parallel universe, when formed is a very crude one. It starts out as an inner world where we rehearse our future without the risk of failure. We start out longing to be someone famous, notorious, strong or intelligent. Our thoughts are someone else’s opinions and our passions are borrowed quotations. But slowly literature, science, philosophy, music: all make their way into our universe & we cease to be someone else’s shadow. We create a world that is magical & has the potential to create, give & most importantly make us truly immortal!

A parallel universe has no rules & no bounds. And certainly endless possibilities! A child might dream of being like his father one day while the father might be ready to give anything to be a child once again. Almost every one of us who read Ayn Rand in college would have dreamt of stopping the motor of this world, living out of the fantasy pages of Atlas Shrugged’s Objectivism. Columbus might have used a sextant to find his way through but could've dreamt of a GPS application on a cell-phone. Your mom might be buying a few nautical acres of land in the Indian Ocean to build a vacation home while you might be considering a skiing trip with penguins inAntarctica. Einstein could've travelled faster than the speed of light & thus achieved infinite mass. And all this could one day turn real!

But alas at some point, we are battered so much in our real lives that we resign & seek solace in our parallel world. It ceases to be that missile destined to launch you to glory & ends up as a luxury vehicle that takes you on an exotic holiday. It fuels your ambition no more; it just feeds your hurt ego. We come home, play the guitar, solve the Global Economic Crisis in an hour, write a book & get it published in the meantime. By the way, you do all this while you're partying in Hawaii. Then it is time to go to bed & wait until the next evening for another adventure. We give up reality & embrace an illusion. The parallel universe helps you live a hero’s life; it helps you dream about realizing your dreams without making any sacrifices; it is an effect without a cause. It helps you leave a legacy: at least (only) to yourself! It ends up as just a life within a life to make you feel that your life is actually good!

Parallel universe means different things to different people. It is eventually up to you to decide what you want to do with it. You can look at it as your book of enlightenment or as your evening entertainment channel. To me, it is an incredible philosophical paradox. If you work on it as a dream, it eventually becomes a reality. And if you imagine it as a reality, it stays as a dream. Well, If Beethoven could compose music without hearing; we can try to live a dream without dreaming!

Imagine you just painted your best work of art! You can sell it for a fortune. You can hang it above your bed & keep gazing at it for the rest of your life. You can gift it to the person you love the most. You can burn it down so that no one else ever has the single moment of ecstasy. The choice is yours. But don’t just imagine it: paint it! It would be a shame to imagine but not feel such a precious moment. Go ahead and create your own parallel universe. Who knows one day you might actually get to live in it! A parallel universe exists in the realms of every human mind. The question is: Do you want to be materialistic or not? Do you want it to work wonders for the world or just for yourself? The choice is yours!

My Worst Nightmare

The worst thing that can happen to a relationship is when two people no longer have anything to say to each other. It happened in my first relationship. After knowing him for eternity, we reached a point where we had nothing to talk. We had nothing to even fight about. It was my worst nightmare. No talking, no fighting. No agreements, no disagreements. No suggestions, no objections. We just lived. Like that only!

It startled me initially. I didn’t think I could be so placid about life. Mondays rolled into Tuesdays and so did one month into another. And before I knew it, we were well into our 9th year of having first met each other in college. A decade of knowing & caring for each other had gone by. He hadn’t changed in all these years. Neither had I. So what had changed? Why did I leave everything behind?

Why did I move on?

He was an honest, hardworking, patient man. He loved me. He took good care of me, was extremely responsible; an ideal family man. He was an excellent cook & was, in fact, my first tutor in the kitchen. It was he who taught me how to make rice & chicken & tea. I hate cooking, still do. All I knew when I had come to Bangalore was to make an insipid sabzi & watery dal. He was my man, best friend, brother, father, husband, cousin, boyfriend all rolled into one.


Then why did I move on?

It’s difficult to decide who one should finally marry. There are far too many things to consider - his pay, education, family, food preferences, career, age, and health. This is the traditional approach to marriage, & the safest one too. It has one of those shock absorber logic to it.

I remember reading somewhere that you should marry a man you would want to spend your holidays with. Plain & simple, isn’t it? It’s one piece of great advice for people about to tie the knot. Ask me.

I have been in love twice (‘serious’ love!) & both the times, it’s been with men who at the time were earning less than me. They were also less qualified than me in terms of educational degree & work experience. But it never struck me as significant issues. I cared two hoots (still do, by the way) for what a man earned. After all, I can earn just as much too, if not more. Who needs his money, anyways? As for the degrees, a degree is not an indicator of a man’s worth or character. I didn’t care about those either.

What did I care for, then? I cared if we could talk. I mean, you know really, really talk. Would I want to spend the Sunday lazing around the house with him? Would I look forward to our holidays & trips together? Would I feel happy even if we were just window shopping on an entire ‘off’ day? Having seen all the malls, all the theatres, all the amusement parks & all the pubs in the city, would there still be something we could do together? Would there still be that one place somewhere that we could go & have a great time? Would I be able to look forward to the little things of life? Would I be able to look beyond the salary, the furniture, the food, the clothes, & the utilities of everyday life? Would I be able to stop ‘existing’? Would I be able to truly L I V E?

That is why I moved on.

Carpe diem!!!

I had not watched a single film of Puneeth till I met Sathya. I have watched every film of Puneeth after I met Sathya. I know them both since the past 5 years!

Not withstanding “Prithvi” & his immense admiration for Puneeth, if Sathya becomes a politician, he would be the most corrupt politico that has ever lived on the face of this earth. And I would be the most travelled wife on the face of this earth!

Most people are corrupt because they are greedy for more money. They want more money because they want to prove their one-upmanship to the rest of their clan - bigger car, bigger land, bigger house, and an even bigger collection of jewelry. Their statement is: I have a bigger everything! I am better than you.

I would not like being the wife of a corrupt person. Who wants gold & diamonds & car & bungalow at the cost of work ethics, moral values& conscience? Not me. Never fancied or longed for any of these.

But what if Sathya, being Sathya (chalu, smart, smooth talker) says, “Here’s the deal. You can travel all you want, wherever you want, whenever you want with my hard-earned ‘ghooos’. I ask nothing of you but your ‘janam janam ka saath”. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
Would I still refuse? No … not the janam janam ka saath wala idea. But the moolah with which he could fund my travels? Would I still say NO to his haram ki kamai? Would he be able to buy my silence, my allegiance? Good question.

And here’s my super quick & easy answer: No! I would not refuse!

Just imagine: Going on a world trip, travelling around the globe, seeing every city ever printed on a map, draping every national costume, trying every cuisine, wild nights on a cruise, shuddering on snowy mountains, posing for the lens at exotic locales, dinner in Vegas and breakfast in Mexico, praying in Italy and romancing in Paris, river rafting in New Zealand and scuba diving in Lakshwadeep, shopping in Japan and sleeping in China, …………………………………..these are what my dreams are made of!! How can I let it pass? I could not let this go. Not in my sane mind. No never. Carpe diem!!!

Hypothetical questions…DAMN YOU!