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Hello to Everyone in Dizzyland (a kind of fog of the mind - read below and you will understand):
 On Tuesday evening, Tomiyo and I are about to depart this veil of tears called 'Amerika' from Washington DC (or as the Southern States called the Northern States - 'Uppa U Ass'), for 4 months in southeast Asia. Believe it or not, after a number of snafus and trips into DC that had me tearing at my floppy mule ears, the Indian embassy must have taken pity on us cuz they awarded us 10-year, multiple-entry tourist visas! We are flying Qatar Airways (it's sorta like 'Guitar Airways' only they use 'ouds' instead of 'guitars' on the PA system to get people 'in the mood'), landing in New Delhi at 3:30 am. My Indian friend Mini Singh and his San Franciscan wife Lana Scott, tell us to bring long johns cuz the weather is cold and foggy (kinda like 'the City by the Bay'), and that planes have been sitting on the runway for 5 hours cuz the buses that are supposed to pick up passengers from the planes haven't been able to find them (I always thought that the flight tower knew where everything was all of the time!). There is also the little fact that in southeast Asia people don't believe they should turn on their lights at night in order to save their car battery (unless of course they see something in their windscreen - but by then of course IT'S TOO LATE! One dead cow! One dead donkey! One dead... well, never mind!). My New Delhi friends emailed me this week that there was a rebellion recently when the pilots attempted to secretly disembark after sitting on the runway for hours waiting for the fog to lift, and the passengers staged a riot and locked them in one of the bathrooms until the cabin doors were opened. After a 12-15 hour flight to India, the toilet is not a 'fun place' to wait to be rescued from - if you know what I mean! Now you understand why pilots get paid so well.
When I was a Fulbright scholar teaching media at the Center for Mass Communication (whatever that is!), at Jamia Millia Islamia University in south Delhi back in the mean ole '90's, because of a deal the Fulbright Foundation had with Delta Airlines, I flew alone, with Tomiyo flying later in the day on Kuwait Airlines. She was supposed to land at 2:30 am, however because of the aforementioned January fog, a Russian airliner which was substituting for striking Indian Airlines (the internal airline company and there are ALWAYS strikes in India!), crashed and flipped upside down. Her plane was due 30 seconds later, so Kuwait Air turned around and landed in Karachi Pakistan. The attendants at Indira Gandhi Airport were shocked and amazed when passengers staggered into the airport 1/2 hour later looking like rejects from George Romero's cult classic 'The Night of the Living Dead'. Somehow when the plane flipped, the plane didn't catch fire, nobody was killed and ALL of the passengers managed to stumble their way thru the fog in their sarees and dhotis (without their luggage and makeup one assumes). And I always thought that the flight tower knew where everything was all of the time! Where have I heard that before! It's a case of deja vu all over again! In any event that Russian pilot must have been a genius - he didn't land in water - he landed upside down on land and nobody was killed! Now that's what I call flying!
Whinemeal, Tomiyo's plane filled with Sikh's who had been drinking too many chota pegs of whiskey, landed in Karachi. The plane was immediately surrounded by Pakistani military with AK-47's. Well, the Sikhs onboard her plane freaked out because when the British partitioned India and Pakistan in the late '40's, about 10 million people mutually slaughtered each other on the highways and byways, as they moved between both countries in a mass migration of death. The Sikh's suffered massacres a-plenty and seeing Pakistanis around their plane didn't make them feel particularly comfortable. After some hours, Kuwaiti Airline authorities announced that they would fly everyone to Bombay and then everyone could make their own way (at their own expense!) back north to New Delhi. Well, that went over like a lead balloon (or an upside down Russian airplane!), and the inebriated Sikhs on the plane got even more wild. Finally, the airline agreed to fly to New Delhi. The stewards served knockout drops to all of the Sikhs on the plane, and it finally arrived. Mini and I picked Tomiyo up at 2:30 pm - fully 12 hours after she was supposed to land. The sky was a brilliant blue, the weather was balmy and we didn't hear one fog horn in the desert!
Generals speak about the fog of war. I wonder if is anything like the fog of peace? Course there is a place in Washington DC called 'Foggy Bottom'. I wonder what that's about? Probably a 'weather pattern' in some politician's underwear! As Robert Dole used to say when asked if he wore jockeys or boxers: 'Just Depends'. Onward to Inja!
The Electric Mule
(I hope they clean the frozen 'road apples' off the runway when those 55,000 horsepower jet engines take off!)
copyright Ernest Gusella 2010
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