VEGETATION

My taxi driver today needs a mention in the blog because he made the morning journey quite interesting. If interesting is the right word for what happened. When I ordered the taxi it was showing 2 minutes away on the map, then 1 minute as he started moving towards me then it got to 3 minutes. So I looked at the app and noticed he'd taken the wrong exit which meant he had to go further away and then come back.

He finally arrived and greeted me with good morning sir (very polite). I couldn't work out what accent he had, it sounded like a type of accent Iranian origin people have mixed with an accent that people from gujrat India have (I've always been interested in accents). He started talking to me while being the most cautious and law abiding taxi driver I've ever seen. He wouldn't go over the legal speed limit even when the roads are all clear and while driving that slow he kept checking the blind spots and mirrors continuously. 

He said that I was his first customer for the day. I had to correct him three times when he was about to miss the correct exits. May be I was his first customer ever. He baffled me by throwing so many questions at me. At the end of every sentence, he was saying, "you know" and I wasn't sure if I should have reacted and said no I don't know. Once he played a trick by asking two questions while commenting on a one way road, he said, "it's good, you know.. Its not too bad you know". And when he dropped me he said, "have a great day sir and happy new year"... What!!!! He didn't say you know and Its 29th of November, how do I react to this? Is he testing me...? I just said, "thanks.. You too" . If I knew he was going to throw so many questions at me I wouldn't have greeted him with salam (Muslim greeting, because I checked his name), I would've used a greeting commonly used by the young generation, "what you saying". I'm sure he wouldn't know how to react to that.

Even though I've been successfully traveling to and from London for over 8 weeks, I still feel some fear while travelling in London underground (tube). I still feel when the underground trains get packed with people like sardines, it would make it hard to breath in them. May be because they're so deep in the ground and because I always break out in sweat when I'm in a tube, even when it's as cold as 1 degree outside. Or may be because I'm slightly claustrophobic.

The tube reminds me of the Wall-E movie. It was a movie where they show humans living in space because theres no vegetation (plants) left on earth and its highly polluted. Wall-E is a robot with some enhanced artifical intelligence who works alone on planet earth because he doesn't require oxygen. He's been programmed to find metal pieces and cans etc., he squashes them into cubes and then stacks them up. But he gets extremely excited when he finds an old shoe under some garbage he is sifting through, with a small plant growing in it. Wall-E gets this excited (almost emotional) because he hasn't seen any plants for decades on earth. I'm sure if Wall-E could talk, the dialogue he would use to express his height of excitement, would be, " This is a VEGETATION of the highest ORDA"...

But, I feel a little confident about traveling on the underground after my Wednesday morning's journey. It was really full as usual when a lady with two kids got on. What amazed me first was the people giving up seats for the boy who was 3 and the girl who was about 5 (they still care... Deep down). Then the whole experience of listening to the kids talking to their mother and amongst themselves was something out of the ordinary. Thirdly, seeing the little kids being perfectly normal in that packed train which is so deep underground made me think its not hard to breath at all in it. Fourthly, the little girl while being a kid in her own little world accidentally kicked someone ever so slightly and her mother said stop kicking. This made me realise not only they are breathing perfectly ok but they are also 'Alive and kicking' and life can flourish in here too. This almost matched Wall-E's excitement when he saw the plant.

Why do people behave differently when something like this happens? Normally in the tube, everyone minds their own business, everyone is grumpy, no one makes eyes contact or even says anything. But because of them kids in the train, things changed. I saw people smiling, some to their selves and some even looking at each other and exchanging smiles. Even I had a couple of eye contacts and smiles. It shows that we change according to the atmosphere we're in. Well some of us do anyway. 

Same morning, on the DLR (Docklands light railway) I gave up my seat to a little princess dressed in pink, when a man got on with a mini female version of himself. He was trying to match the little girls way of talking (in his Indian accent which sounded kind of cute but funny) and was showing her things from the train's window. What made me laugh was when the train got to  Canary Wharf Station, He said, 'look Santa Claaaz and he's smiling'.. But that wasn't Santa Clause nor was he dressed as one. It was a small billboard with a picture of an asain man with a beard who was smiling. Was he trying to make the little girl think Santa Clause looks different than how it's perceived to be?

Have a great weekend everyone.. I hope you like the way I see humour in things. Please share this link with your friends too.

Adeel