She: Do you have any specific seat preference, sir?
Me(lightly): A seat beside a cute girl would be great.
She(smiling): Sure, you can take that chair and sit beside me.
Slightly taken aback by that unexpected response.
Me: Not now, but maybe some other time. You can give me your number and I would definitely call you next time I'm in the city.
She: That's private.
Me(delivering my well-rehearsed dialogue): Ultimate privacy is a myth. God sees everything. The cloud records everything. NSA files everything. So, live transparently and don't waste useless energy hiding yourself.
She(placing the ticket on the counter): Here's your ticket, sir. If it's meant to be, we'll meet again. Till then have a nice journey.
Me(with a wide smile): Thank you.
Later in the flight, while I was reading a novel, my attention diverted towards something scribbled at the back of my ticket which I was using as a bookmark. To my horror I saw this:
A half wrote name and mobile number with a smiley. One of the security staff must have torn and kept the other half. I re-winded that conversation and cursed myself a million times for not paying attention.
Now, every time I travel through Mumbai I just glance through the Jet Airways counter once, just in case....
Happened today -
While swimming in the Society swimming pool, I saw few kids enjoying and playing with each other in the lovely cold water except for a kid, who was supposedly a Nigerian, and whenever he went close to any other kid the mothers called their kids to the other side of the pool.
I recalled a similar incident few days back when the Senior members of the society were planning to force those Nigerians out of the society based on their speculations of an ongoing drug business and/or prostitution which later came out to be false.
So the kid in the pool went to a girl of her age and politely tried to strike a conversation and make a friend. "Excuse me" he said. "Excuse me" he said again by slightly touching her shoulder from the back when he heard a scream "Who are you? Go away !!" and the girl's mother called her away.
Where, at this nascent age, did she learn such an attitude of treating a different coloured kid? Where would she learn how to treat people of lower strata? Her parents.
Do not be an asshole. Teach your kids the right morals.