Smile..

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...