Does this need a title?

With all the recent goings on -- busier work schedule, travels, etc., etc., the best I can come up with, once in several weeks, is nothing but a ragged patch of disconnected thoughts and observations. Darn! It is hard to write once you lose touch, especially if all you write day in and day out is code, proposals, estimates, project plans, and emails. And an occasional shopping list that never gets looked up.

Thankfully, I can still read. Though not as much as I used to. I read Lajja recently. It was long pending but I ended up not liking it. Found the style very immature. Maybe it was the translation that did it in. Still, I fail to understand why the author was taken so seriously recently in Karnataka where people ended up killing each other over something she was supposed to have said.

***

What is worse than getting stuck in the middle seat between two men on a long flight? Of course, getting stuck in the middle seat between two women on a long flight! No wiggle room whatsoever, and you can't even nap fearing you might sway a bit too far like a drunk and embarrass yourself!

But then, you can't always help it. I couldn't on Monday.

A hefty lady to my right. She wouldn't even let me imagine that we had an armrest between us. And she closed the windows even before the plane took off cutting me off totally from the outside world and thereby depriving me of the joy of seeing sunset from 30000 feet.

To my left, a skinny woman who busily worked away in her notepad calculating some strange numbers -- tens of thousands of dollars per week. Wonder what business she was in.

And me, with my skinny book, sitting like an overwhelmed school kid. And Pandit Jasraj singing my favorite Todi variations into my ears to help me forget the discomfort.

I was hardly 3 rows from the door. So as soon as the doors closed, I started looking around for an empty aisle seat, and I didn't have to look far. The 3-seater row to my left had an empty window seat with the other two occupied by a young Chinese couple. The guy then moved to the window seat, leaving the aisle seat vacant. Perfect. And as I was eyeing that seat, the guy noticed me and in one quick perfect move, asked the girl to move to the aisle seat leaving the middle seat vacant. What a disaster! I resigned myself to my fate, and settled down uncomfortably into my seat. But I couldn't help notice, albeit grudgingly, that the young couple flew the entire flight sitting a seat apart! It was as if they were saying "We would rather keep a small distance between us than allow a stranger invade our privacy." Fair enough!

***

I have seen women cry for all kinds of reasons, "absolutely no reason" being one of the more common. However, I had never seen a woman cry watching a movie on a plane! The skinny lady who was working some crazy numbers before the movie started got so absorbed in the movie that at the end, as Leo Tolstoy was dying, broke into uncontrollable tears that wouldn't stop even a good ten minutes after the movie ended! I just couldn't believe that somebody could cry in public while watching "The Last Station"! Sure, it was a good movie with some great performance by Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, but still....cry?

I guess this lady has never seen a bollywood movie!