AUG-B-7
AND THEY THAT ARE
LAST SHALL BE FIRST—
CLASS, THAT IS;
HOMEWARD BOUND ON
A DIFFERENT FLIGHT
AND UPGRADED AT
THAT!
August 23, 2002
The “slight delay” experienced after we had arrived early in Indira Gandhi International airport, turned into a very long one, since we were held at the gate before boarding for a technical reason. One of the four hydraulic systems of the 747-400 had developed a leak, and we would not be leaving until it was repaired. An hour after scheduled departure time, we all got through the very long queues for security checking in redundancy, and got seated. The pilot revved up the four engines and we went to the end of the runway, and he announced regretfully, we would be returning to the gate since it seemed that at the lower rpm, the hydraulics repair was not working and that we would not be flying without it in perfect shape. So, we returned to the gate, and sat there as they worked on it as I was in a stupor from the 3:30 AM time of the night.
To soothe the savage beasts, the captain ordered drinks to be served and the first movie to be shown—Monsters, Inc.—a kind of film made for Andrew to see over and over again, like Toy Story. But, I napped through the film. One fellow got up two hours later and shouted loudly in the kind of Hindi that seemed to be increased in volume with the free drinks, and announced to all that we should leave and take an alternate aircraft—presumably more reliable and also somehow available, and he had convinced about a dozen people to come with him to the exit doors, at the time the plane began to roll for its taxi to the runway. So, we got a late start on the very long flight, so that it was already daylight over Afghanistan as we pulled up to altitude. I did not watch the vapid three and a half hour Bollywood movie drama with all the heart throbs of the popular movies of Mumbai in breathless overacted poses of high dramatic tension interposed with random synchronized kick lines in costumes, and I napped through the flight until we arrived at Frankfurt about an hour late for all connecting flights missed.
I stood in a long queue at the Transfer Desk where each person there had to be reticketed and each had a hard luck story for their getting preferential treatment—of about thirty minutes duration. So, I spent a long time in the queue, and when I got to the front, rather than being hostile as most of the people had, I just congratulated the agents on doing a good job under pressure. I was told I was already booked on an alternative Lufthansa flight at 1;10 PM and to get to the gate for a seat assignment. I did go as fast as I could through the manifold security re-checks of this era, and waited for the young woman at the gate to ask if I could get my coveted window seat reassigned. She looked at my premier card and said she would see what she could do if only I would have the patience to wait. I did, until all the passengers were booked on board and then she remembered me, and thanked me for my kind words and patience and gave me a first class seat with a vacant seat beside me, so I have room enough on this luxury return trip home. I can paginate my 150 pages of travel log of the primary notes I made all the way through Lingshed-02, and finished the student evaluations to be mailed. I could watch the Discovery Channel on primates and a TV special in which the new king Abdullah of Jordan takes a reporter on a five-day tour of the wonders of his country, all but two of which I had already seen. I then had a rather luxurious dinner, and rich fare for a fellow who has been eating camp cooking of Basu’s dal bhat for three weeks. I have not run since I originally arrived in Leh six weeks back, and wore out a couple of the prior crew in the run up and over Leh, so that I will have to learn how that is done while on the move through the Annapolis Ten Miler the day after my arrival. Since this flight gets me in later, I will not be able to turn in the film I had packaged to do so, since it will be late on Friday now by the time I get to GW struggling with the two big bags and my carry-on, but this will allow me a chance to clear the mail and get the household re-stocked with perishables for the coming weekend and the time of the week that follows when I should be getting library work to further support the initial work I had done on the thesis proposal I could no longer open when I tried to get the laptop to do so (“Unformatted disc’) when I had my interval between Ladakh and Lingshed, so that I had turned to typing up the year-end letter when I had electricity and time to do so.
So, my “re-entry” this time should occur on the weekend with a few domestic chores to accomplish, but no extensive film sorting to do, since that will not be ready to look over until mid-week. I think this rather luxurious end to my adventure travels is a rather interesting twist, since it seems that I had just made a note of the extreme contrast of the rich, young affluent consumer posters of Bollywood stars on billboards advertising the deep desire for---cell phones, Pepsi, some from of luxury item that a truly rich and famous wannabe cannot live without—each of these dramatic luxury scenes erected in urban environments of India in front of which pass scenes of the most abject poverty and hard-scrabble subsistence. And, now, I am returning from a two month extended period of carrying for the really remote and neglected poor people of the Himalayan Roof of the World, and am now flying over the height of any altitude to which I had climbed, and sipping fine wines, while collating the pages of my log of the extensive experience on this medical mission and adventure trek of my own hard-scrabble time in the mountains. But, my visit there was self-imposed, and at the best time of their year, when they have to be there year ‘round trying to keep their lives together despite ten months of cold as harsh as –40* and a very limited series of options for a life of any variety other than staying alive and waiting again for the next summer, when some small contingent of the outside world might drop in on them and grant them the kinds of things that they have heard about and seen now—our own form of advertising a Western lifestyle of consumerism, at least of drugs, which is a thoroughly inculcated need as expressed by several of my own demanding team who consider these agents part of life’s basic necessities that they cannot be denied, even if they do not need them.
But, I am often shuttling between the two worlds of first and third, and wonder which should be considered the “developing one?” It has been a good experience overall, with the stresses of the arduous hardships we took on telling more about the weaknesses of the first worlders than about the toughness of the third worlders. And, it is said, one of us has come to help the other. And at least one of us, returning home, after a very extended absence from the first world while living in a prior millennium in the third world is going back in first class to remind him there are several sorts of contemporaneity in the world of the third millennium today, and I seem to relate to both, but feel much more real in the one than the other, to which everyone seems to find it very easy to become accustomed in a world of easy advantage, and entitlement which they deserve a s a birthright, as an accident of the time and place of their birth. There is much to learn on these trips—one of which may be lost on man y participants—and that is how to live more with less!