The Launchpad of Dreams and the Amoeba of Life

December 27, 2007

India started the Boxing Day Test on a very positive note, bundling out Australia for just 343. Though it is a decent score by all standards, but when it comes to Australia, which is a class apart, the scores deemed decent by other teams are found to be below par by the mightiest team in the world—a team which is a class in itself, which sets its own parameters and raises its bars of excellence in every department of the game.

Pitted against such a marvellously organized team, all the other teams in the world hope to salvage some pride by making the Australians sweat harder for their victories. You find some solace even in a defeat against the Kangaroos if you make them exert extra pressure for their victory.

In this matter, our Indian team, carried valiantly by our legendary veterans and exuberant youngsters, has rubbed, heated, argued, slanged and close-shouldered with the number one team in the world. We definitely lack in some skills in comparison to the Australians, but of late we have been trying to make up by getting aggressive, sometimes unnecessarily as well, on and off the field in order to reach nearer to the victors.

Kumble, the knight captain, leading from the front, flummoxed the batsmen, took five wickets and bundled them out for a total which many would consider well below Australia's strength. So, at the end of day one, the Australians looked circumspect. Indians looked well pleased with their achievement.

But all this euphoria was very short-lived.

They struck back with a vengeance. Though the Little Master, during his fluent 62, provided some glimpses of hope, like a pack of cards the wickets fell once he was back in the pavilion. India today got out for the paltry score of 196.

So, at the end of day two, the customary smile is back on the Kangaroo faces, and back are the glum faces which, unfortunately, also look customary on our players' faces—on the captain as well as his brood.

And as I have been writing these diaries from September, October to this time, taking time out from our Djibouti venture, I have also been taking care of business affairs here.

Apart from writing these diaries, in the night I went to IGI Airport, the launchpad of dreams and destinations, to see off Sajjan Pal on his way to Djibouti by Ethiopian Airlines, scheduled to depart at 2:20 in the morning.

The departure lounge was buzzing like a beehive, and here, as a rural man, even after having multiple experiences of entering the posh lounges at airports, I get a bit apprehensive about standing as a misfit—a commoner in the midst of all those classes which are customarily thought to throng airport lounges, classes superior in money, manners, looks, clothes and whatnot. Against them, you find your rusty rural self just a poor and pathetic figure.

But these are mistaken apprehensions, given the boom and burst in the Indian economy and the consequent unfolding—the supreme unfolding of the petals of international interactions at the individual, group, institutional and state levels through business, education and cultural activities—times are changing. Rapidly. 

Now airport lounges no longer speak of a class bastion with their refined, reserved attitudes. They are, on the other hand, lively places of common people with upwardly mobile dreams and aspirations.

There are noisy crowds humming with uncontrolled gesticulations. They are dressed in their customary colourful finery. They talk and walk around freely, bump into each other, love to push the baggage trolleys, love to ogle at beautiful air hostesses. All in all, most of them are common people like us. You don't feel like an alien object among them. You feel a part of that lively throng.

You see many eager, desirous faces on the verge of tasting the skies for the very first time. Their family members troop around, fully drenched in the airport feeling of being special, shedding genuine tears for the coming months and years of separation.

Then there are seeds of class amidst this throbbing mass. They seem to be losing their class colours in all this hullabaloo. They know that this place no longer belongs to them exclusively, so they surrender to fate.

Taxis and cars arrive with full, eager force before the glass-fronted departure lounge. For every prospective passenger, there are many on board. It buzzes almost festively.

The electronic signboard showing flights—on time, delayed, check security—draws constant beams of eyes.

In bright royal-blue-coloured business suits and skirts, the air-hostess staff of a Western airline descended from a luxury bus. A dog played with them; maybe it came by the hotel bus with them.

They were plump, healthy females, full of life and courtesy. Their shiny, well-massaged, moisturized legs shone under their skirts. The dog, standing on two legs, its paws in her beautiful hands, tried to lick her rosy cheeks. I am sure there were many in the crowd who must have felt envious of the dog for bearing such luck as to be fondled by that beauty in royal blue.

One of them even flirted with the handsome-faced, small-featured and slightly built luggage boy of the bus. She even gave him a lovely pat on the cheek and a lovelier word of bye.

When a place becomes the hotspot of middle-class masses, you find chaotic streaks requiring the lawkeepers. So here as well, your attention is constantly drawn by the shrill whistles blown to direct the taxis and cars to drive away quickly after seeing off their wards. For the stubborn ones, challans are issued.

But go to any nook and corner of India, even the most luxurious place, and you are somehow made to realize that there are still masses—impoverished masses—many, many rungs below the upwardly mobile airport-lounge mass.

These are the poorest of the poor, the porters who take the trouble of easing the load of some super-rich who might not have the intention or strength to fetch a trolley for a few yards and put their baggage on it.

These poor, beggarly masses all ambled in one or sprawled on the porch before the glass front of the esteemed roof opposite the departure lounge.

Poor, hungry people, clothed poorly, treated miserably by the circumstances of life—in their torn shawls and chadors, shivering, their bodies curled up under the lashing of the cold, their knees against their bellies.

They were lying almost heaped up against each other to garner the human warmth available in one another, while the world around them, on the brightly lit stage of high-flying dreams and soaring destinations, went on with its aromatic excitement.

The milky-white world was trying to remove shadows from around, trying to undo the shadows in the nooks and corners of the airline passengers and their wards.

But all this dreamy hoopla threw its unwavering, unshadowing rays on the sleeping common mass—the amoeba of life.

The distorted, contorted, misshapen cluster of limbs.

The great rays of light failed to penetrate the fragile shell of this amoeba, the poor creature of the sea of hopes and riches.

It goes on all through the night, flight after flight, well into the other day, when the sun reclaims its lost ground. The soaring, roaring world never gets tired of its hectic speed, of its business, of its ever-flying hopes, of its glitter and clamour.

And once the real passengers enter the gates, leaving behind the mass, it appears as if they have gone into a different world.