Calcutta Trip-2008-009: to home and back

After sixteen months and twelve days, I came home to spend sometime. Three weeks passed like a weekend, and I am once again packed to return to Pullman. None of what I had planned on doing in Calcutta was actually being done. Despite that, my heart is content to make me feel poignant. This time I had to attend a social event where my presence was instrumental. From the day I arrived, I was put into a schedule that I almost had no idea of. The pre-event, the event and post event took the better part of fifteen days. In these days, I got closer to my family and its extension. The non-existent bonds became visible and the strong ones became stronger. Though I always found too many people as an encroachment to my privacy, I miss them in my house. For three days about sixty members of my family and friends had breakfast, lunch and dinner in our house and on the third day about five hundred more joined in. Yes, I will miss them. Because of the breadth of the program, I could not spend quality time with any of them. I believe I will make that up the next time I hit Calcutta.

When I was a resident of the city, I was a regular patron of Barista and Café Coffee Day (two of the better coffee shop chains). This time I could only go to a Café Coffee Day once. The menu had changed significantly. My favorite “caffeine kick” was missing from the menu and I was given a single shot instead of the ordered double. Not to mention that has been a forty percent hike in almost all the items. I guess my romance with coffee in Calcutta as explicated in http://avimanyu.blogspot.com/2007/07/sweet-taste-of-coffee.html and http://avimanyu.blogspot.com/2007/07/glowworm-innocence-and-phd.html is reaching its end.

The remaining seven days I lay sick due to the resultant equilibrium between the ruling government and opposition party in regards to emission of pollution by autorickshaws (three wheeled vehicles used as a means of transport). While the government did nothing proactive to make transition from two strokes to four strokes and four strokes to CNG as per Supreme court orders, the opposition using the auto drivers as a vote bank called for strike. The result is continuation of pollution, which resulted in a gray sky which once used to be blue.

In my trip back to Pullman I have a twelve hour layover in JFK and a seventeen hour in Seattle. All of this because Delta delayed a flight from NY to Seattle by a hour and a half. The result is I am missing the last flight on 11^th January from Seattle to Pullman. The next available one, with empty seats was at 2:45 PM, January 12^th that goes to Pullman via Boise. Needless to say, I hate the words Flights, and Airports as of now.