I don’t know how much I will keep it up, but I’m slowly taking thoughts from the journal I wrote during my India trip and transferring them to this blog.
I had lots of time to write and think while I was in India because I took four domestic flights while I was there. Airports and airplanes that haven’t yet taken off are great places to reflect and jot reflections down. So, when I was waiting for the plane from Bangkok to Kolkata to take-off (Jet Airways, by the way, is a beautiful international airline with great food–if you choose the Indian meal–and Bollywood soundtracks to listen to during your entire flight), I wrote the first journal entry. It was mostly a reflection on the immigration line exchange I overheard and wrote about a few posts ago.
When I closed the notebook, the man sitting next to me asked if I was writing about him. I joked and said, “Yes, I was writing your life story,” which he laughed at (thank God). Then he went on to tell me he was in Bangkok for the Indian Film Awards, and probably how Chak de India! took them all, and the name and location of his home state (Orissa). He fell asleep during the flight. I watched half of Chak de India! and then sampled soundtracks for the rest of the flight. When the man woke up he asked me if he had disturbed me while he was sleeping and when I said, no, he hadn’t, he asked me again if I would write about him. I just smiled but now I’ve written just about everything I can about him (besides a detailed physical description that I’d feel funny publishing on the web).
All this is to say that I was initiated into my India trip with this new awareness of what it means that I am a writer, the suspicion that the man sitting next to me had the desire to be written about, and the curiosity as to whether the planet is full of people who consider themselves to be ordinary yet have a deep longing to be preserved in the pages of some passing writer’s book.
