Ambiguities of a Journey: New Delhi to Beijing

Dear Readers
Bringing to you the second chapter of the series on China trip. The first chapter of the series being Setting off On a Hitchcockian Voyage: China I

The hour was almost approaching 12:00 in the noon of June 25 (China time) when the Air China aircraft touched its wheels on the Beijing runway. I could see considerable greenery outside the window pane right from a time when the flight was still in its descent. Approaching fast towards the runway while the plane was still in air, I realized that one set of myth that was bestowed upon me by some back home was to be shattered in a short while from now.

“The place is full of buildings and skyscrapers, I have heard. I am sure green is a least known colour there”. I remembered, someone had proposed to me before leaving, which I had mentioned earlier.

I looked around at the fellow passengers as the plane came to a stationary halt at the Beijing aerospace. Curiosity was in ubiquity. Pulling out small diaries and notebooks, noting down few quick markers at the moment of landing, peeping restlessly outside the window panes, looking at awe at the China Eastern flight parked on one side and the glassed aerospace on the other, a considerable lot inside the plane appeared full on charged despite the sleepless previous night. In this ambience of excitement and curiosity there however were several others who appeared to be not very much on the same page. Taking up the chain of events – ranging from the descent to landing and unfastening of the seatbelts – in the most mundane way possible, this lot was the melancholy lot.

With a momentary pondering I realized this was the lot whom the Air China aircraft was carrying back home. Unlike us, the excited and curious lot for which awaits a whole new world of possibilities outside this Airbus cabin, this melancholy lot has nothing to cheer about as the world outside the cabin for them was home. The trees, the runways, the busses, the roads, the buildings were at once “local” and ordinary to them in all possible ways.

The ambiguities of each journey thus came to pass on me at once. It of course is interesting how a journey from New Delhi to Beijing had two streams of passengers situated at exactly two ends of the curiosity-spectrum. At one end there are excited passengers like us who were travelling to the “foreign” dipped throat-deep in anticipation. At the other end however were few others travelling back “home” from their respective trips from their respective “foreign(s)”. The same old Beijing streets await them. The lifeless routine and a backlog of work stand waiting to greet them much before they can turn away from the fatigue.

With this heart-aching realization I was instantly blown away like a fragile feather to the moment ten days from now when I shall be on my final descent at the end of this trip at Dibrugarh airspace. There would be nothing new and exciting as such except for looking at the photographs of “foreign” and acknowledging the void. There would be work; there would be home and the associated bunch of quotidian duties and obligations. There would be seas of expectations beneath which I shall be crumbled and left at no mercy to stand up and rebel. Trapped in the absurd, struggling each day to find meaning in the overwhelmingly meaningless world I shall yet again exist at the face of vulnerability of deadlines. The Sisyphus of my being shall yet again begin the push up-hill each morning to finally see the rock roll down again by evening. I almost at once could relate myself to the melancholy lot. I almost at once began to sink in to the ever present existential crisis of my being.

Aah! Such Trauma, I thought to myself as a voice from behind brought me back to reality, “please move ahead Sir, or leave the way”.

After almost an hour of getting off the aircraft we were outside the air conditioned terminal finally breathing in the air of Beijing, the capital of world’s most populous nation. Opening up to the possibilities that awaits me, I almost moved on from the remorse at the hour of landing. In anticipation I took out my camera while the duo of Chinese representatives from the China Foreign Affairs University showed us the way towards the bus.

…to be continued…

What followed next was bag full of adventure, wisdom and engagement in overlapping proportions.

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