Mental Excursions

Mural on the wall at the World Trade Centre Memorial site, New York city Good times in life need no tickets! Perhaps there have been surveys conducted which could support my assumption that most of the seats in a plane landing in the USA from Asia, or even Gulf, are bought by Indian parents going to visit their children/be the support during the birth of a baby/babysit grandchildren, students going for their new academic year/semester or relatives going to attend a family function/avail of the generous offer of amreeka ghuma denge (take you around in US). In that case, shouldn’t the airlines give them some kind of discount or incentives? Sadly, the aviation industry is yet to discover my counselling skills and thus, remains deprived of this wisdom. Me? I can leave within 48 hours (provided I do not have to break a bank to buy the tickets) to not only escape the extremes of heat and humidity but what it brings with it, those things creeping on the walls and everywhere, which I never ...

Sailing through security! You have been through security checkpoint at a domestic airport. The same drill is followed at international airports in India as our paramilitary force CISF mans them too. They are savvy, familiar with our way of living. They can recognise the brightly dressed, heavily made-up woman with dozens of bangles hiding her wrists as a newly-wed. They are used to men in lungis, women wearing gold jewellery, young men and women arranging their hair often, the strong-smelling, spiced hotch-potch delicacy of some town. But boarding a plane in another country, even if you are returning to India, can give most of us different levels of anxiety. I present here experts’ tips to sail through security effortlessly . Airlines and security officials, frequent travellers, and of course, Indian parents, all advise that you arrive at the airport early to allow more time for any possible delays due to reasons beyond your control. (Don’t we know that?) Whatever be their ...

Strip tease or security check! “Sir, belt,” the CISF guard at the security checkpoint pointed out to the rotund gentleman. There was a clearly audible ‘ oh ho’ in reply and then the middle-aged man grudgingly unbuckled the strip of skin of the unknown animal which had been so strong when alive that even now dead, it superbly upheld the dignity of the well-rounded man. The man struggled to whip it out of the loops it was curled in, stepped away muttering sorry sorry in the air, put the belt in a random tray slowly disappearing under the scanner and darted again to stand on the podium. As he lifted and stretched his arms, most of us prayed his trousers do not fall down and looked away so we are not treated to a cruel visual. I also thought the Ministry of Science & Technology should declare belts as anti-gravity objects. Meanwhile, the subject in question helplessly clutched one side of his trousers and raised the other arm. “ Sir, baahein upar (Arms up),” cautioned the guard ...

One foot, two feet, one moose, two…? As a child, one of my wishes was to learn languages. The unfortunate part is that I do not possess any special talent in this direction. Add to that my work-shy attitude and no wonder, it has remained what it was- a mere wish. Yet because I work in English and Hindi, I am sometimes forced to add to whatever little I know of them. First computer mouse invented by Douglas Engelbart  It was on one such occasion recently that I had to look for the plural of a word- the computer mouse: is it mouse, mouses or mice?   After a lot of time spent sliding the singular mouse to look for answers, what did I learn? Although https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2006-02-15-0602150192-story.html wrote In the first 15 years or so of its mainstream life, the computer mouse has had an uncertain plural, word watchers say. But in the current issue of English Today, linguist Alan Kaye argues that "computer mouses" is starting to win out… Yet Wik...

  UFO Day for Earthlings These lifeless mechanical mice that navigate the computer can sometimes give the impression of having a brain. They may accidently open random sites on the internet which can be effective tools for purposeful pursuit of topics unknown to us or the exact opposite and devour your minutes and hours purposelessly. So, when I accidentally clicked on the date tomorrow, what do you think opened ? Tomorrow, July 2, is the World UFO Day. If like me, you too thought that UFOs are mere feathers in the air imagined decades ago by writers like H G Wells, and should be left in some unknown space, forget that and read ahead. The objective of the  World UFO Day is to create awareness among the residents of planet earth so that we study the skies for unidentified flying objects or UFOs. The story is short that in July 1947, personnel at the Roswell Army Air Field, USA, found metal and rubber debris from a military balloon. They then told newsmen that they...