my reflections

A two hour slow train journey, a four hour early morning sleepy drift over Arabian sea, and a short 14 hour discovery of a huge Emeritus carrier which landed  over 600 of us on New York’s not so busy lobby with a cloudy, cold afternoon whispering welcoming notes to America. The courtesy of employees is amazing. A long walk to the next gate which led me to the last air stretch of that journey really made me fresh. Expensive food, cosmopolitan passengers, non-stop touch-downs and take-offs through misty windows – all these did not take long. After the previous carrier, this Delta with hardly a couple of flight attendants and a diet coke on asking seemed like a toy. By now I seem to have learned the art of passing through the rituals of the airports.

                At 9.30 p.m Detroit was awake with Britto and Pearl suddenly joining me. How familiar are they with the road rules, menu cards, where-to-find-what, the American slang, the friendly smile to strangers and what not! The ‘you’ attitude that I read in the management books was very much visible here. The discipline of the roads and queues, the ever courteous welcome smiles of men and women across the counters, frequent mumblings of thank you’s, and  have-a-good-day’s, reminded me that I am in a different region. And when I listlessly knocked down an expensive china pot from its shelf, a shop assistant swiftly came not to reprimand me nor even to ask for compensation, but to reassure me that things were alright. I just reminded myself that I was far away from my home town.