Smile..
One
of the characteristics that makes a difference between humans and other
living beings. A facial expression which make things better in this
world. I had experienced the change it could make to one's day to day
life few months back.
It
was late winter and I was to travel to Mumbai that day. I had to catch
an early morning flight from Nagpur. Getting up in the morning during
winter is difficult and that too, getting up early in the morning to
catch a flight with airport that requires you to be present atleast one
hour before the departure is such a pain..
I
woke up that morning thanking God for giving me an another day and also
cursing my schedule of traveling so early in the morning. It usually
pisses me off to get up early in the morning, as it had never been my
habit till now. Though if I had been given an option to change one thing
about me, getting up early would top the list. With great effort and
difficulty, I got ready and reached airport. I was till in a drowsy
mood. All Indian airports requires you to go through the following
checks. As soon as you get down at airport, you need to show your ticket
and ID card to the security who is positioned at the entrance. I seldom
find justification for having these people stationed there. His role is
to go through your ticket, find the name mentioned there and that
mentioned in the ID and see whether the photo present in the ID matched
to the person. This simple task often takes a lot of time resulting in
long queues at the entrance.
The
same task is repeated again once you reach 20Mtrs past the entrance.
Think we people take a lot of pride in doing the same thing twice. The
guard positioned here though does the verification work very fast. He
doesn't even go through the details. All you need to do is hand over the
ticket and ID to him, he will take it from you and hand it back to you
within a second and will allow you to pass through the gate as if he is
Chitti the Robot - Speed 1 Terabyte and Memory 1 Zetabyte.
The
next stage is baggage screening which is often done by the airlines
people in which you are traveling. Once all this is done, you stand in
the counter to get your boarding pass. With numerous travels that I had
made during the past few years, I had noticed few things that are common
like all Air hostess have short and sweet names. Are these really their
names are pseudo names assigned to them at work, like Sendhil becoming
Stephen and Janardhan becoming Jonathan. Haven't got an answer for it
till now. May be next time I will ask the air-hostess itself.
Having
got my boarding pass, I had to wait until boarding announcement is made
so that you are allowed through the gate to board a bus which takes you
to the aircraft and after which you board the flight. I was eagerly
waiting for the boarding call as it enables me to lodge my luggage and
go back to sleep for the next one and half hours. Finally the boarding
announcement was made and I was again standing in queue to board the
aircraft. This time your boarding pass will be checked by an air-hostess
who does it with the help of a bar code reader and then by a guard to
ensure whether your hand baggage had gone through security check.
I
handed my boarding pass to her, she took it, called my name, scanned my
boarding pass, looked up at me and with a sunflower smile said, have a
nice journey Sir. That smile which lasted for a fraction of second,
illuminated my mood. The smile was as if thousand sunflowers were
smiling at you. I received my boarding pass and boarded the flight.
After keeping my luggage in the overhead bin, I took my seat and closed
my eyes, the smile flashed over again and made me think. This Smile had
changed my mood and the way I was looking at things from the morning. It
doesn't take much to lighten up One's mood, a Smile will do. May be
that's the reason why God has bestowed upon us this simple but highly
effective characteristics of Smile. That day, the first time in my life I
understood the importance of Smile in my life and the change that it
would make if we could sport one on our face through out the day. I did
get few chances to see her during many of my travels, the smile remained
and this time I had smiled back. It would have been like a Monster
smiling back at her :D. Anyways..
So all you people there, just keep smiling and make other people lives better with your Smile...
Ilakshi it is...
