Recently on a cool sunday evening, I was standing over the balcony of my flat and was watching the sun go down so slowly behind those big buildings and suddenly a pigeon from the nearby wall just flew very close to me. Oh! how lucky, it can just fly whenever it felt like. This thought somehow reminded me of the days when I used to fly so much :), well in airplanes though.
It was the time when the flight rates rocketed downwards and it was a 1000 Rs from my place of work to my native town, and it was the cheapest among all. For almost two years, I hopped in and out of my native town in flights (well I have been in Kingfisher, Deccan, Sahara and Jet and even Indian Airlines). It was like riding a bus for me. I was used to flying to my place so much that our house owners kiddo, who live in the ground floor in our native town, (he must be 2-3 yrs old), remembers me as the one who comes home always in a flight :D. Whenever there is a airplane going up in the sky, he just shows it to me and asks me, did you come in that ?. And if anyone asks him about how I came home, he would signal a flying plane.
For a person who is afraid of heights, flying was a new experience altogether. It was so much fun and somehow, irrespective of my acrophobia, I enjoyed each and every flight journey of mine. There was this time when I travelled at night and it was so rainy and so much of turbulence inside and it was lightning outside. It was so good to feel the jitters. And one more time, it was as if we are on a cotton bed, it was fully covered with white clear clouds and nothing was seen down. I enjoy the ride above the western ghats especially, where we could see in a clear day light the never ending stretch of the mountains.
I do miss them all now, because of the high tickets rates and the distance between my place and the airport (it got shifted to a very very far off place). Wish I could fly to a new destination and to a differently new place sometime this year. Let us see..... But I was lucky enough to enjoy the pleasure of riding high :D anyways. It was really a time when even a comman man could afford to feel the sky. Hope those days come back soon.
