Adventure on our first visit to an airport
On Friday, I along with my friend Amit (aka Pandey) went to the Kozhikode airport to receive the guest Mr. Aditya Sengupta of FOSSEE, IIT Bombay. This was our first chance to visit an airport. We went in a taxi provided by IEEE Students Branch of our college. The peculiar thing about the taxi was its name: Taxi Kinglikutty (pardon me if I am messing up the name).
We reached 15 minutes earlier than the scheduled time of arrival and found that the flight was delayed by 20 minutes. So, we roamed around - took some snaps; concluded that that airport was nothing different from a railway station in terms of cleanliness at least; tried to watch the landing of a plane by peeking through the gaps in the gate of ATC premises (Pandey succeeded and I missed it by a second). Then he even tried to take a closer look by entering the building. He had noticed a Sardarji among the guards and boasted that he will allow us to take a look at the aeroplanes. But to no avail, he was already pushed back by some other guard before even talking to Sardarji ;) I was quite behind him and asked him to come back as the Jetlite plane had landed.
Now, we were back at the airport and were wondering how to meet our guest as we hadn’t seen each other. As I had Aditya’s mobile number, I called him but in the conversation forgot to inform him about our appearance (I could have told that I was wearing a black T-shirt with NIT Calicut printed on that, the Tathva 2009 T-shirt). Amit was saying from the beginning that as Aditya is young and from IITB he will easily recognizable. Just after the phone call we spotted a young, handsome guy with long hair and a single back pack coming out from the Arrivals gate at the airport. We unknowingly started approaching him but as we reached the closest he left with some other person waiting outside like us but with a sign board in his hand (similar to what we had seen in movies, we were regretting not doing something like that). We hadn’t read what was written on the board. I heard, rather faintly, ‘Aditya’ being said among them.
We were astonished to discover that that was not him. After waiting for about a minute or more, I received a call from Aditya saying he is standing outside the airport main gate. I was surprised again, I turned my face towards that direction and found the same guy talking on the phone and waved a hand at him. I told Amit and we were relieved. Aditya told that he went with some other person who had also come to receive “Mr. Aditya” incidentally. I finally saw the sign board as the person came back to the Arrivals gate in a hurry and smiled.
The above was supposed to be a post on the IEEE workshop on SciLab and LaTeX conducted during 6-7 March 2010 at my college. Due to my procrastination, I was able to finish only upto the description of what happened during our (my and Pandey’s) first visit to an airport. Publishing it now (March 13, 2011) a year later, with a changed title, to keep it out of drafts after this blog has been restored after so long.