I was in London for Christmas. The lit-up angel wings hanging over Regent Street, the glorious Christmas market at Covent Garden, and a guy trying to snatch my phone at the Oxford Circus tube station, were all beautiful. The pickpocket reminded me that it’s the Commonwealth.
It wasn’t easy to get there though. My port of entry was London airport, and not Dover Beach in a dinghy; hence, I had to furnish my property papers, six months of bank statements, and my firstborn to get entry. I hope the immigration official had fun parsing the 57 pages of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions.
A sudden development of thick skin is a unique trait of Indians who migrate overseas — or even those applying for a tourist visa. No amount of casual racism, bigotry, rudeness, and requirement of income-tax returns deters them; they just laughed it off. They just complied. The same people who would break your rearview mirror if you dared to overtake them in India would suggest you ignore a racial slur while standing in a ticket queue in Glasgow. Everything is a means to an end. The end is to stay put, till the time your passport changes colour.
Back home, after a few anxious days, the family got their passports back, duly stamped. It suddenly struck me that our kid is just three years old and has done three international trips this year. Whereas I took my first flight at the age of 24 and my mother took hers at the age of 48. Not just that, she boarded the AC coach on a train for the first time around the same age. That’s how India is growing. Each generation is doing better than the previous, but it is taking longer to get married and produce kids.
Our flight was at 2.30 am. An odd time, especially with a toddler, but the erstwhile national carrier has got swanky new A-350s now, with actual seats, food that doesn’t feel rubbery and complimentary WiFi at 30,000 ft.
As I reached my row, I found out that fellow passengers had already packed the overhead bin with the luggage of their entire village. I just smiled at this familiar sight. That’s why people queue up at the boarding gate half an hour before the boarding starts. Even an overhead bin is like IIT-JEE. Thankfully, the flight attendant was sympathetic.
Finally, I settled in my seat, finding ways to put myself to sleep in a chair. So, I fiddled with the in-flight entertainment. The screen threw a catalog of movies I chose not to watch at different points in my life. The reject league. There are some movies you reserve for only these times when you are strapped to a seat with no fast Internet.
After respectfully requesting the crew member to fill my paper cup again with some white wine, I retired to sleep, preparing myself for Greenwich Mean Time. “It’s pronounced Grenitch,” my wife poured in my ears softly. Nine-and-a-quarter hours later, we landed at Heathrow airport. An airport named after an old village — Heath Row — over which it was built. A clear waste of political opportunity. “No dead prime ministers or kings to name it after?” I mulled over this thought as I made the long walk towards immigration and baggage claim. The queue was long but thankfully we had a priority pass — our toddler — to fast-track security checks and immigration. This is the only reason one should have kids.
But it does not work at the baggage claim. If patience were a sport, Heathrow is the Olympics. It took the conveyor belt exactly two hours to bring our luggage. And it took another two hours to reach our destination in a taxi.
After putting in the necessary sleep to respect the local time zone, I ventured out into the city. We had read the London crime rate is at an all-time high, but I had never expected to spend my first three hours in the city at an active crime scene. Spread across 18 acres — the British Museum — has over 1,000 CCTVs to prevent “theft”. That bit of irony aside, I found it a magnificent waste of time.
Every museum at one point was a rich man’s living room. And the rich weren’t the most virtuous in those days. So, most of these artefacts were the result of plunder. The British Museum is the mother ship of all such plunders.
Frankly, I don’t have any hardcoded resentment, I just found the whole place utterly boring. In fact, all such museums are utterly soporific. The information presented is just like your NCERT textbooks — statues, coins, older coins, a prehistoric axe, a sword, a manuscript, and some footnotes. Information overload, with little retention. History is taught through stories. That’s why period movies are blockbusters. And museum queues are getting shorter year after year.
I came out a bit disappointed. As I was mourning the demise of museums, I got a call from the Missus: “I am at Cafe L’eto at Leicester Square, which serves Alia Bhatt’s favorite Tres Leches, come quickly.” And I immediately dropped all my philosophy to embrace London, its lights, its milk cakes and its pickpockets. I could feel that thick skin.
Abhishek Asthana is a tech and mediaentrepreneur, and tweets as @gabbbarsingh.The views expressed are personal
