Meeting An Interesting Airport Character!

It's been a nice flight from Chennai to KL and interesting because of 3 things -

1) I caught 2 movies and that is a record because I always sleep through the entire flight (yes, all 80 odd hours on 4 flights to and fro from the US). And one of them, 7 things to do before I am 30 had a nice message..

2) I started writing a letter. I realized it takes SO long to write a note. It's still incomplete as food popped by just as I was finishing a page but was very nice. I should probably write more letters..

3) Meeting the character was the big one. I met a very nice Swiss guy sitting next to me - a lawyer on his internship and taking a summer study trip to Beijing. We got along well and decided to spend some time together in transit. And that's when we had a 3rd character join us, an Indian guy who had lived in Switzerland. This meeting was interesting for a number of reasons..

What intrigued me was his point of view about everything. He was talking with great pride about being expelled from various international schools in India (his parents sent them over from Switzerland as he was too much of a troublemaker there apparently) and the fact that he's working at a telecom company now and how he plans to get his BBA by joining a friend's school in Bangalore. Given the friend is the education minister's son, he figures he doesn't quite need to attend classes and can fly in to take his exams. As for preparation, he's sure he can get his hands on the question papers. So, that takes care of that..

After all this, he went on about how India changed him and how he's against western attitudes and way of thought. He obviously had a lot to say and after a while, we had to bid adieu and my new Swiss friend and I decided to just sit down and browse. Our Indian friend promised to be back after a smoke..

Of course, he never came back..

Maybe we were too boring for him. What hit me was just that I couldn't wait to get out of his company. While I've matured (I think that's what it would be) not to judge him or his opinions or his actions as right or wrong, I just realize that I've very little bandwidth to spend time on things I don't want to do.

I just love the quote I read the other day 'Whenever you are saying yes to something unimportant, you are saying no to something important!'. I guess this will be a good morning quote soon..

And its true, I am enjoying typing this out and learning from the incident.. :)

It's been a busy few days but lots of learnings coming through.. very soon! :)