18 Jun 2004

Critique: Stupendous Man

Posted by krits in General | 2:58pm

What is it about flying that always makes you want to do it? Sitting here at work on the 5^th floor of quite a trendy building has its advantages. You get a bird’s eye view of the city – you can see the monsoon clouds slowly gathering towards the evening and at one go you have the weather forecast for the whole city. It’s completely enchanting. You can tell whether it’s raining in Secunderabad, or whether the road outside my house will be flooded when I get home in the evening.

On days when all you get is a brief shower, you can actually see the dark clouds parting and a patch of impossibly radiant sun lighting up Mahendra hills in the distance. Like someone’s beaming a torch light down to see whether the people living there were ok with the fact that it rained only 5 minutes.

Then you have the crows, of course. They’re weirder than you could ever imagine. So there was this one crow that got it into his head (crows are all male –period) that he must swim against the tide and fly vertically instead. It wasn’t just a simple nose-dive that this guy attempted…he actually just suspended himself mid-air and kept going down like he was in an elevator, his wings spread wide open. Bump, bump, bump. Of course, the air-layers didn’t make it easy, but he did the one ‘un-crowy’ thing he was allowed in his lifetime.

Speaking of what’s real and what’s not, you must, must, must read a book called the Velveteen Rabbit. Yeah, yeah, I know, you’ve heard about it on ‘Friends’. I don’t know if your curiosity got the better of you, but I decided to seek it out online and read it. Google would be most willing to find it for you. It sort of reminds you of ‘The Little Prince’, the way it’s written and the distinctly ‘nursery’ theme it’s got. It makes you feel 10 and 30 all at the same time…quite a journey, that!

Coming back to flying, I was wondering – how come every little kid dreams of flying at least at some point in his kiddie life? I know quite a number of boys who all but jumped out of a reasonably high building because they wanted to be ‘superman’. How come ‘Stupendous man’ has a cape and flies?

Did you ever meet a kid who said I want to have fins so I can swim the ocean and back? How many super heroes do you know who are the voices of justice in the marine world? Why are wings the coolest and fins not?

What is it about flying anyway?

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