No, I am good

On my way back from Delhi to Ahmedabad, I requested the boarding pass official to give me the aisle seat. Putting on his fake smile, the guy gave me the aisle seat… As I went through the security check, the guy checked me thoroughly… if I hadn’t pushed him back, a little … he would have dissected me and checked if my intestines had any explosive in them…

While entering the plane… I could only think about the most obvious – airhostesses … but the cabin crew greeting at the entrance was a male… he kept nodding his head while saying welcome… welcome… welcome… in my mind it registered as.. why come… why come… why come… I reciprocated… Thanks… which was more like a question that elaborates “where are the chicks?”

The window seat was taken up by a stern looking middle-aged man. He didn’t even give a second look to my half-hearted smile… I took my seat… and grabbed the in-flight magazine… and started reading about diamond studded exorbitantly priced cell phones… Before I could read the features the cell phone had… two ladies probably in there late fifties came up to me… and in the most polite form of request one of the lady asked me if I could swap my aisle seat… with a seat behind in the middle… before she completed her sentence… the word “swap” told me the complete story… triggering my memory when numerous number of times I was asked to swap my seat… I probably have swapped MY seat a million times… and by now I had a big problem with the word swap… Why should I? Why I? It brought back many memories from the past… I have swapped my ice-creams because my younger sister/brother didn’t like their flavors and they thought I had a better one… My mind was blaring at the lady asking her… would you like to swap your necklace with my shoelace… or can I swap the beautiful airhostess with my water bottle…

Nooo I said to myself… I was destined for the aisle seat… I won’t swap it… I wanted it AND I got it… with a determined intent I spoke out NO… without looking at her eyes… as if I was committing a crime by turning down her request to interchange seats… While listening to my subdued No she still was pointing to the place where she intended to transfer me … As my eyes followed her finger… next to the seat sat the most beautiful girl on the plane… it only took me a fraction of second to crown her Miss IC 817… This is a typical condition where ego is pitted against the greed… I wanted to the greediest person alive on the earth… But I guess, my No and the indecent behavior was seen and heard by many of the fellow passengers. My thoughts were jammed by all permutation and combinations to resolve the situation that I got myself into… My inner self was persuading me to get up and kiss the old lady on her head … telling her that I was ready to swap and was just joking … Or tell her that I have a rude behavior syndrome that gets activated once in 25 yrs and now I am over it.

Before I could come to the conclusion that took care of my emotional needs and was logical… the middle-aged man sitting near the window seat… volunteered… He VOLUNTEERED to SWAP… I didn’t have a weapon… But I had a pen… which I wanted to poke in his drowsy but lewd eyes… As he passed by I wanted to tangle him and make him experience how it felt lying in passage of plane… but if I had that kind of guts I would have better used it in abducting Miss IC 817 rather than hurting a powerless but shrewd middle-aged man… and this time he even smiled at me…

The two old ladies took their seats… and I could listen to their minds say in synchronization “some people.. uhhh…”. My indecent behavior made my 1 hour something journey look like a decade… I had a different kind of feeling that was a mix of lost opportunity, indecent behavior but a stronger feeling of doing what I wanted to… The No I said to the lady made me feel stronger and more powerful… I have heard people/read self help books taking about importance of saying “No” but for this very moment I had realized… If today SRK walks up to me with his 6 pack asking to swap lives … I know what to tell him… “No, I am good.”