The Ordeal that was not

IGI-T3 is no Dubai, but it is an airport the capital can be proud of. We were flown to Delhi not by the flight originally decided upon. The alternate flight was 3 hours in advance. At the Calcutta airport, Arpan, Shubro, Anisha and Shalini had come to see us off. Actually it was more of a ploy by Aritra to bring his girlfriend Shalini without his father suspecting anything. Anyway I was imagining the see-off scene in Bong Connection, and was utterly disappointed by the handshake goodbye. 

Again at Delhi, Dadu (Anirban Banerjee) came to meet us. The parting between Dadu and Aritra was definitely more romantic. We had another fellow traveller in Sukanya, who had to bear with us at both the airports. Aritra was at his excited best and bought some stuff, he would not want me to mention here.

The flight was almost a test of character and physique. About 16 hours being seated in the same position. Thankfully the seat beside mine remained unoccupied. After all, the flight including its services weren't all that bad, but still Air India became the butt of all jokes (for ex. Aritra said that 3 months down the line, if we search for Air India, an error message could come up, "Sorry the airline you are looking for does not exist")

Sometimes I was bored enough to think of some common geographical problems like sun taking longer to set when seen from air, or the fact that it is possible to rotate faster than the earth approximately above 60 degree latitude (which results in seeing the sun back-tracing its path and setting in the east)

To take the shortest route, we had to travel along the great circle and that meant against our intuition, that the route was over the Caspian Sea, passing over Moscow, Stockholm, Helsinki and Oslo, cutting the southernmost tip of Greenland, and then entering Canada. Whenever the sky was clear we saw snow fields in different forms:

 Ice covered landscape of Sweden

 Snowy home of Santa (Greenland)

Ice breaking off and melting into the ocean, off the coast of Canada - Newfoundland

Toronto from the air seemed like belonging to a civilization from the future. Orderly arrangements of apartments and top class highways straight from the movies. Even on the way from Toronto to Waterloo, I found that there weren't any crossings, all were managed by flyovers. Another thing you notice immediately is the huge areas of water-bodies scarring the surface throughout - an absolute potholed landscape.