Another article coming from an airplane! I have a solid hour and a half to write some shit. It's funny how the word 'shit' is used in general these days for anything at all. Anyway, it's not much use getting senti over things like that. Language is constantly evolving and we humans should be constantly adapting, as we probably can't out-evolve our own creations.
Oops, some turbulence... All's shaking... This is a small aircraft - ATR - Jet Airways flight between Hyderabad and Pune... Shaking scarily now. Just now felt like a free fall for a while, like in a giant wheel while coming down. Am sitting right adjacent to the engine and the fan is making a lot of noise... It was loudest when the plane was taking off, almost hurting the ears. I guess am now flying between clouds, coz the visibility is extremely poor. Must tell you it's 10.09 pm at night - so indeed dark. But with these clouds I now can't even see the grids and lines of lights on the ground. Don't think this small toy-like plane is flying too high.
Since I joined Wipro about a year back, I have been traveling very frequently for official purposes. And all that by air. When I was a kid, flying in a real aeroplane was inconceivable for me. I used to think that seeing one noisily fly high up in the sky was all I could afford in life. I grew up, world changed and air travel became both affordable and normal. I flew for the first time in 2004, when I was 22. Am sure the younger generations fly much earlier than that age. It's just like how the age-of-losing-virginity kind of statistics have been falling over generations. Anyway, the first time is always special, in whatever age you do it. And after many times, you don't even regret the years lost in being-eligible-but-not-doing-it state.
Among a few things that I think am losing time on is traveling the world - all kinds of places (not the obviously risky ones), all over the world. Almost half my reasonably-energetic-for-lot-of-travel life is over, and I've seen only 3 countries - India, Maldives and the US. And even in these 3 countries, just a few parts - though a lot more in India as most of my life has been spent in India... and just a few months in the US, spent mostly in hotel rooms and offices. The latter tells me it's no fun traveling for work. I went to Maldives as a tourist, and it was awesome 5-nights-6-days. Therefore, I want to travel the world as a tourist. But where's the money for that?
I've started reading the book 'The Great Divide' by Joseph Stieglitz. It's a collection of his articles in the recent times and is focussed on the theme of rising inequality of wealth in the US, and how the top 1% own the most of it, with their share increasing in the past few years due to fucked up government policies designed to favor the rich. His earlier book - 'The price of inequality', also dealt with the same topic. I read in some article I came across on facebook today that if Bill Gates decides today to exhaust all his current wealth in the next 30 years, he has to spend a whopping $6mn every day, on an average. While I don't need to explicitly say that's a crazy amount of money he has, I feel it is very unfair that there's this great divide. I will never make that kind of money, probably. It's both sad and amusing to realize the fact that with Bill Gates's average 1 day spend that exhausts his wealth in 30 years, my wife and I can travel all the places in the world we want to and also live happily ever after. Funnier is this - I just made a rough calculation: if Bill Gates keeps all his money in my savings account in SBI just for 1 day and takes it back, at 3% per ammum interest rate, I would roughly make the same amount of money from the interest for the day that he needs to spend every day for the next 30 years to exhaust his wealth, and that I need so as to travel the world with my wife and spend the rest of our life happily ever after. In fact, if Bill Gates keeps all his money in SBI today, he can earn $6mn dollar interest every day which he can spend or do whatever he wants and his deposit will stay as it is forever, unless he spends more than the permissible average on an average, which is insanely high anyway. So, if he keeps his money in a savings account in India, Bill Gates can never exhaust his wealth by spending like normal rich people. He can only give it away. But the idiot will keep it in some American bank, which pays no/low interest. I hope he reads my blog and makes some wise decisions.
Flight has landed safely! Bye for now.
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