The Betaal at Airport Security

As we were going to Goa on a weekday, the airport queues were quite short. As luck would have it, both the slots of the ladies’ security check queues were empty at the same time. So my wife told our 11 yo daughter to go in one while she went in the other.

 

The lady doing the security check asked my daughter where she was going. Panic stricken, my daughter yelled for help, “Amma!”. This from the same kid who will talk incessantly all the time. The one who can speak a mile a minute. The girl who can argue about any topic under the sun, even when she has no clue about the matter. But ask Miss Chatterbox a simple query with a one-word answer, and suddenly she is dumbstruck. Like the betaal had finally posed the question for which even Vikram does not have the answer.

 

The two ladies doing the security check had a hearty laugh. Like they were expecting just such a reaction. That this was par for the course among kids. A way for them to liven things up at work.

 

I wonder if airport folks have a term for this phenomenon – maybe even a cool one like “broken arrow” from the John Travolta movie by the same name:

“I don't know what's scarier, losing nuclear weapons, or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it.”

Except this one is funny.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Why we Deceive Ourselves

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird: “If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?” The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead? The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory: “In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winn
Read more

Handling of the Satyam Scam

The Satyam scam. How does that fit into Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s book on reforms in India, Backstage ? The reason is that, as both NASSCOM and the government of India felt: “(Satyam’s) collapse would create a great deal of disruption for clients worldwide and seriously damage India’s reputation as a reliable source of software services.”   Therefore, the government decided to work with the private sector to “organize a quick takeover by a reputable new buyer, who would quickly restart the company”. But that could not be done overnight. In the meantime, the new board would have to reach out to Satyam’s clients and “reassure them that the company would survive”.   For the new board to have credibility when it made that statement, it had to be staffed with people who understood the private sector, the IT sector in particular, and commanded respect and trust. Deepak Parikh from HDFC was made chairman, and other members of the board included a former NASSCOM chairman, CII member,
Read more