Volvo A380

The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary.

Just Imagine .. young amitabh bachhan in hypothetical Deewar .. standing right in the middle of a cricket stadium.. after shashi kapoor leaves him and goes away with the 'MAA' in tow...grinning, pleased with himself, thinking 'mere paas maa hai'..AB fretting and the events of the day coming back to him all at once.. us admi k sign lao .. wo admi tumhara kaun lagta hai ... bhai sign karoge k nai .. maan tum mujhse bahut pyaar karti ho .....he is trying to shrug it all off by screaming at the top of his voice 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!' with the deep baritone echoing in the stadium in the dead of the night,...Weird. no?

When a thousand thoughts hit you, it leads to strange dreams like the one I had last night....It was a weird ensemble of snippets of information I had collected in my mind over the past few days.....I live in a place not too close to the airport, but, Hyderabad Airport is bang in the middle of the city and you see and hear airplanes taking off and landing every few minutes from every nook and corner of the city.

Being from another corner of the nation, the noise of an aeroplane fills my heart with a longing to get home to my loved ones. So the thoughts that lingered in my conscious mind as I fell asleep thinking of my next trip home was aeroplanes , the familiar air that fills the lungs as i alight at the Delhi airport, the joy in my heart everytime I see the runway at IGI from the plane anticipating the comfort and warmth of home. I was also thinking about how it would be to fly in the airbus A380, all I had seen so far were the cramped cabins of Boeing 747s,737s and Airbus 320s...

The thought of A380 brought the images of the first flight of Singapore Airlines' priced possession A380, the perfect take-off from the freeway in Singapore( I was told by my brother ,who has been to Singapore, that the freeway is actually a highway which is sometimes used as a runway when there is a dearth of taxiing space on the actual airport).

And the cramps in my legs were constantly reminding me of the journey from Hyderabad to Bangalore and back by Volvo bus just last week. I was transported to the wonderful world of dreams , drifting into sleep with these things on my mind.

I woke up next day grinning from ear to ear thinking about the dream I had. Usually, I dont remember the dreams vividly the morning after, but this one I can narrate scene by scene..Here it goes ...I dreamt I was travelling in an A380 from Hyderabad to Delhi with my family...The A380 was exaclty like the numerous pictures I had seen of it in the mails doing the rounds ever since its launch, but there was a strange twist to it. It was as high and wide as an A380 should have been. But was as long as a Volvo coach :-D...the window panes could be opened just like those in a Volvo.

There was no cockpit and I could see the pilot sitting right in a front like a bus driver(told you , it was really weird!!) donning the controls and muttering things in the radio endlessly.

I have travelled a lot by train too...People getting into wrong coaches and then arguing over seat numbers with people already ensconsed in their coupe is a sight I am too familiar with...So here, in my dream too, I witnessed such a sight- a family coming to us with boarding passes bearing the very seat numbers we were occupying. After a long argument, the stewardess intervened and asked them to occupy other vacant seats...

As soon as the pleasant sight of the IGI airport materialized into view, there was the much-too-familiar-now announcement about the congestion on the runway. While we were all waiting for the pilot to announce our rank in the landing queue, we were surprised to hear him announce that the plane was going to land on a newly constructed freeway instead of the usual runway....

Now this being an Indian freeway, it was crowded with commuters, rickshaws, cars,trucks, DTC buses et al...The A380 landed safely, right in the midst of the sea of traffic on the freeway with the pilot constantly blaring the horn ( u might be thinking I've lost it completeley by now, but a dream is a dream!!) at slow moving rickshaws and pedestrians crossing the road. it finally screeched to a halt near the airport.

Right at this moment I was woken up by the blaring of my wretched alarm clock....On other days, I wake up cursing my poor clock that goes off much too soon, but this time, I woke up refreshed from my first trip aboard the airbus A380, with a strange twist but pleasant none the less.. :-)