Memoirs of "His and Her"

His posture was calm and composed, defying the thunderstorms of anxiety building in the underbelly of his outer composure. She was sitting next to him for the first time in an international flight. That however, was not the reason for his anxiety.

The last few days had been quite a chaos. It was more of a fluke that everything had worked as if it was pre-planned. The reality was a far cry from that. The tickets had arrived just two weeks prior to the departure. The third bag had been purchased just days before their flight and only in the last week did they order haphazardly on the online web portals, giving little thought to who was giving the best prices in the town; The things that would perhaps be their most important tools for survival in the days to come. 

The land though not new to the him, held still a lot of challenges that it would throw up once he started living there. She looked more calmer than him. If it was her obliviousness to problems which were to come or her immense trust in his abilities to look out for her and keep things under control couldn't be made out by her looks. 

The captain announced the arrival of their flight in the Frankfurt airport with the outside temperature hovering just a few degrees above the freezing point of water. "Typical German weather for this time of the year" declared the mid-aged person sitting next to him. He had tried hard to get a 2 seat slot on the flight, but had to end up sitting on a 3 seat one with him sitting in the middle. She was to his left and had slept on his shoulder most of the journey. 

"It is going to be cold outside. Try to keep yourself warm", he warned her as they started removing the stuff from the upper cabinets after the plane had come to a complete halt. Already the semi-chaos had broken, with kids starting to cry due the sudden change of pressure and noise, young software engineers who had come for the first time trying to get a glimpse of the land through the fogged windows of the flight, trying to not lose a single minute of their time on the foreign soil to look around, In-transit passengers looking for where they had to go to catch their connecting flights and so on. She knew that the next step was to collect the bags. That had been a point of worry in his mind, since they had lots of them and knew that the concept of a "Coolie" which was fast dwindling in India, was hardly ever present in Germany. 

"Woher kommen Sie und wie lange beleiben Sie bei uns ?" ("Where are you coming from and how long are you going to stay here?", asked the guy at the immigration desk in a police apparel. He knew that she would look at him for the answer and had accompanied her to the desk, inviting strange looks from the people around who knew that normally one person could approach the immigration desk at a time. He explained, "I have got a permanent job here. We are going to stay here for unlimited time". For a moment it took him back to the time where things were not working out for him and everyone around him told him that he was not good enough to do anything to but continue at the mercy of his current bosses. Thankfully, he had not believed them and had applied for job positions in Germany and as luck could have it had landed himself a job in a well reputed company. He smiled for the first time in the past eight days as the immigration clerk, stamped their passports and said "Viel Gluck. Aufweidersehen" ("Good Luck, Goodbye). 

Luck and Destiny! That is what had got him here across seven seas. He needed the former more than the later at the moment. Looking around he found the symbol with the text "Gepäckwagen".  It took him a moment to realize that he had to pay two Euros as a deposit money for the trolley and could use it to take his heavy bags down to the Railway station. How he would bring them back or where he could leave them at the end was still something he hadn't worried about. Happy that she would not have to drag the bags herself, he was relaxed. He knew all too well, that she was too puny and would really have a hard time pulling the heavy bags. 

Frankfurt am Main, one of the busiest airports in the world, has a direct train connectivity in the floor right beneath the airport. The flip side though is that from the moment you left the airport the outside air wouldn't be too kind to you. It would suck every bit of warmth in your body, no matter what you wore. He had to time their exit from the heated airport so that they did not have to bear the brunt of the cold outside air. The free Wi-fi provided him an opportunity to use the VOIP based call to their parents, who both of them were already missing. He was worried that she would become too emotional. She did not get emotional and that was a surprise learning for him. He had never taken tickets from the D-Bahn terminal by entering a code. Back at his own country, no body would send you a code to print a ticket. The concept simply did not exist. He didn't know if it would ever work. He had always had the privilege of travelling by plane from the starting destination to the end point. 

She wanted to visit the rest room. He looked around, showed her the entry door to the ladies toilet and explained her that he would wait just before the exit from the airport and entry into the railway station. He waited for her. The wait kept getting longer and he got exceedingly worried. 

Humans, Dolphins and Orangutans are among the few species which have a huge frontal lobe in their brains which gives them the immense power to imagine. This imagination leads humans to do wonderful things like paint masterpieces, build bridges, create compositions which would melt the hardest hearts, achieve remarkable sport feats. On the flip side this also leads to internal conflicts. The realities of two people are never the same since both have a part of their perception polluted by imagination. For him though, his imagination was right now hyperactive.  Had she got into some trouble? Was she crying now in the rest-room? Had she got lost he way in the humongous airport? Had she missed the spot where she had agreed to return ? Time on the other hand was running out. He realized that she was not aware of the train timing. 

[To be continued...]

Atheist and Theist

A few years back i wrote a few things about the ideas i carry about god and religion.[ here] In the years from then to now, a couple of things have changed my views about these subjects. 

Before i write more, i would like to place myself as a "Questioning Believer". At the same time i carry the view that both atheism and theism are matters of personal choice, one not being superior over the other in any respect. Today i would like to just put a few things into perspective for those atheists who write off every believer using scientific reasoning. 

When my parents where young, if someone would have told them that communicating with a distant land using a device that could be the size of ones palm, he would be considered someone who had had one too many. 

However, by records English caricaturist Lewis Baumer had miraculously got the vision and had painted this in one of his cartoon in 1906. Now, one could discount this as saying that already radio communication was available and he could have just minimized the size whereby nothing much to argue there. 

The point is that if something is not yet scientifically available or proven, but someone believes that it is possible, he isn't crazy. It is his idea or vision, which could be realized some day. 

Socrates the famous ancient Greek philosopher had stated that "What i do not know, i do not think i know". This is something that all of us have to follow, because unless proven untrue isn't true and apt in all situations. Nicolaus Copernicous from Poland, had proposed that earth wasn't the center of the universe. The church condemned him and even banned his work. Great !! +1 for all atheists. 

At the same time everything he stated was also not true. We know that Sun is not at the center of the universe today. Yes, he had experiments and hypothesis that showed that Sun was at the center, but his idea of the universe was as weak as today our idea is about sub-bosonic particle (if existence of such a particle could be proven in future). 

This could perhaps lead to the same surprise that followers of Newton's corpuscular theory of light had when Huygen showed them that light could and would behave as a wave. 

The point is that atheists who make fun of the theists should try to understand that even their own understanding is quite limited. The ideas that the theists carry are the ideas that give them comfort and a sense of well being, some of which could be at some point be scientifically proven. 

On the closing note, i would like to also point out that theists shouldn't also insist that every buys into their idea of god and supernatural powers. The atheists are qualified for their views as much as the theists are to their beliefs, howsoever absurd it may sound. 

So in the end, as long as we are not inflicting pain, misery and problems to the other group, each is free to hold their views on the topic. 

Note: In one of my previous post Rags had posted a question in the comments. I have been since then trying to find the answer to the question. Some recently acquired knowledge seems to help me comment on that topic. But that will be the content of following posts.