The Terminal

As I stood at the Chennai International airport awaiting the arrival of my dear friend Atipriya from Singapore after a week long new year celebrations, I started looking around at the seamless faces around me. The faces carrying a single expression of anxiety which would be broken by the sight of a loved one. It was 12.15 am when I reached the airport and soon found that the flight won’t touch ground before 1.15 am. So, having a full one hour at my disposal and a cup of tea in one hand, I started staring at the people standing at the arrivals terminal.

The first thing which I realised was that there was a wave of happiness all around. People waving happily on spotting a known face emerging out of the terminal, mothers handing over their children to grandparents waiting outside, husbands embracing their wives, people wishing each other “Happy new year”, parents kissing the foreheads of their “foreign returned” sons. Suddenly, I remembered the lines from the opening scene of the movie Love Actually(This is what generally happens with a person who watches too many movies. Scenes and dialogues keep popping up like popcorn) and I realised that I was right now a part of that scene.

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaking suspision love actually is all around.“

And as I was loosing myself in the realms of this wonderful feeling that the earth is still worth living, I was again hit ( Yes!!! again) by a scene from the movie Blood Diamond. The dialogue spoken by Danny Archer(Leonardo de Caprio) haunted me for days when I watched the movie for the first time. Ironically, out of the two movies which came to my mind one had “Love” in its name and the other had “Blood”.

“Sometimes I wonder… will God ever forgive us for what we’ve done to each other? Then I look around and I realize… God left this place a long time ago.“

The Terminal darkened and my mind started throwing images which it has accumulated over the years. Dark images of human sufferings…humans killed in gas chambers so that their skin could be used to make shoes and bags, a 100% burnt woman lying on the road during the Iraq-America war, a student burning himself alive as an aftermath of the Mandal Commission report, the face of an 18 year old boy in Punjab whose family members were shot dead in their own house and his sister raped repeatedly by the terrorists before being shot, a Sikh burnt alive in a taxi in the riots following Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination and people dancing around the taxi as he screamed, trains full of slayed people being sent across the borders during the partition of India and Pakistan. So many flashes of images started to explode in front of my eyes that I had to close them as I asked my brain to shut up.

My mind was in a whirlpool. Is there any form of love and pain which we have not inflicted on each other? How can a race have a history of such extreme behaviours? How can we have two opposite minds like Hitler and Mother Teresa in the same species? We are the most intelligent race on this planet but if I look around, how are we dissimilar to other animals? Today we assume that another war is not possible, but all it needs is another spark and we can be more ravaging than before. Whom should we blame? The first man who invented wheel or the man who invented fire or the one who came up with the idea of living in communities or the modern man who thinks that a piece of land is more precious than a human life?

I was repeatedly asking my brain to slow down.

“Chill man.”, I was telling it.

Slowly I opened up my eyes. The Terminal was again visible. I looked around me. Yes, there was still some love left in the world. There is still hope. Its always there.

“I wish the world would be like this terminal. Painless and without sorrow.”, I whispered.

My phone started ringing and I came out of the trance. It was Atipriya. She told me that her flight has landed and she was standing in the endless immigration queue. We chatted for 15 minutes about her trip and bitched about our project too till her turn came. Soon she was out of the terminal, waving and smiling, and as we sat in the cab, I pushed my thoughts behind and started analysing her latest iPod, munching the banana chips she got on her flight.