Global Warming

They said Rita and Katrina were so furious because of the global warming. My first reaction was that women don’t need so much of a reason to get furious… why blame it on global warming if Rita and Katrina were angry… I was told by a sensible person that these are actually storms which hit the central America/Caribbean region every year… I dug in further and realized that alternate systems are named male/female respectively… My question is – why take the risk??

Anyway, the global warming is effecting the weather all over the world, they say. We have just entered July and Pune has already received 70% of the normal Monsoon rains. The fact is that the definition of normal needs to be changed. The weather in general has changed so much since 2005 that normal is much more than the normal.

Well, there must be a reason why suddenly I have become so worried about larger issues like global warming and writing about the same… there indeed is! It’s because I felt the brunt of global warming yesterday…

Here is what happened –
I took a flight from Nagpur to Pune. It’s the new Indigo flight… Indigo is a budget airline and they refused to provide everything including newspaper, ear plugs and even the infant belt! As it happens, my daughter got hungry and I ended up buying the most expensive sandwich ever… I always wonder why we feel like eating and drinking in a one hr flight, irrespective of the time of the day…

Fortunately (well, I thought I was at that time!), the flight took off on time – 11:10AM and was going to land ahead of time – 12:25PM. About 30 seconds before landing, the pilot aborted the landing and shot up in the sky… people were looking at each other… After 5 minutes, captain informed that there was a stray dog on the tarmac and hence he had to abort at the last moment!!!

We came back after 15 mts… about to land… and the plane shot up again… people were scared now… my daughter started crying… the plane started jumping up and down… some people started puking… after 5 minutes, captain informed us that he had to abort landing because of bad weather and now we were going to Mumbai! I wondered if he really knows how to land… may be he only knows how to take off! May be we got .NET resource instead of J2EE because of resource crunch (quote thanks to my friend Vinayak)!

We reach Mumbai and the .NET resource proved that he could land. The weather was still bad in Pune and we had to wait in Mumbai for hours. They would not let us out of the plane due to ‘security issues’ – guys, I learnt that all Puneiites become dangerous criminals once they reach Mumbai or was it a tact by Indigo to save some money. It was well past 2pm and some people were hungry… unbelievably, they were charged by the airline for the shady food…

After a while, the captain says his flying hours are over… we wait for the new crew to arrive… May be they finally found the J2EE resource!
People turned angry and started fighting with the crew… they finally got some food for passengers and started distributing at around 4pm… as it happens, the Murphy’s law kicked in - the Captain announced that he is taking off and the attendants stopped the food distribution… it’s a minor detail that the flight did not take off for another 30 minutes… was this another ploy by the budget airline to save some money?

Well finally we take off and reach Pune but the weather was bad… the Spicejet plane (yes, there were more like us!) had already tried landing for the 3rd time without success… Captain informed us that we had fuel to be airborne for another 1 hr (I concluded that we would crash land after that!)… anyway, we landed at 5pm…

The luggage came all soaked and I realized they had tied the luggage on top (just like in a bus) because the cargo space was full… I got a taxi which was the last one available (and I felt fortunate for the 2nd time in the day… was I?)…

We hopped in to the taxi at 5:30pm and reached home at 8:15 pm… thanks to all the water logging, traffic jams, lost ways, wrong route decisions and a taxi driver (another first in my life) who refused to drive above 30 kmph… once I urged him to drive faster and he snapped back asking if I would pay if he hits someone!

The only bright spot was that the taxiwallah did not ask for a single paisa extra though he took a detour of 15-20 kms and had to drive for close to 3 hrs…

Having gone through this with 2 small kids, now you can imagine why I am worried about the global warming suddenly!

The journey from Pune to Nagpur was equally interesting but I will save it for some other time because that one can’t be blamed on global warming… technology is to be blamed in that case! The only thing you need to know right now is that my ticket says – “PWT” – which means “passenger without ticket”!

Btw, are dogs (or rather bitches) breeding more because of global warming? The whole trouble started because of the bloody dog on the tarmac else I would have been home by 2pm.

Parting note – Stock yourself well if and when you take a low budget airline… you never know!