Pieces of a Puzzle

For Ayan, it was falling in love. He says “I think it was the first time I met the London Bridge and saw it was doing fine, thank you, a good 20 years after having read in nursery school that it was falling down."

Unlike other travels where the prevailing emotion is possibly of serendipity, Britain the first time around was almost like trying to match together pieces of a puzzle. The one set of pieces, imaginary, that resided in your head as memories, associations, stories ranging from the nursery rhymes to Sons and Lovers, from the grass courts of Wimbledon to 221 Baker Street. The other set of the puzzle was what was real and what you could touch and feel and see and capture on photographic film. "It was almost like this woman who I had always heard about but had never seen - I had imagined her to be beautiful. When I saw her, she was, and I fell in love with in that moment.”

Opportunity: Put the pieces of the puzzle together

It was 6 months into my marriage. A strained pocket and the insanity of a crazy job had connived to keep the honeymoon pending. But the honeymoon period was soon to arriving and before I realized, I was begging for leave. My boss, a gentleman in the truest spirit of the term, looked at my leave application, signed it and returned it along with a return paid ticket for 2 to Dubai. I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and Emirates did not seem like a point I needed to worry about. So off we went to the airport on the appointed evening, two bundles of unadulterated joy and anticipation. But somewhere in the corner of my heart, was slight apprehension. Would the arrangements that had been made good, sufficient...even close to delightful for the lady with me who I so wanted to impress? She’s not the kind who would necessarily balk at economy carriers and inexpensive hotels but on that occasion I wasn’t looking at meeting basic criteria. Even if the pocket didn’t allow, the heart wasn’t stopping at ‘just making do with’.

My worries were ill placed. Suffice to say that from the moment I got to the airport and stood at the Emirates check-in counter, to the minute when we stepped out of the airport on return, the trip was amazing. As we rode back home, my wife turned around to me and said ‘This was wonderful, thank you. Wherever we go the next time, we’ll fly Emirates. But I’ll kill you if you ever play (video) games and keep chatting with pretty strangers on the onboard networked gaming system that they have, like you were doing on the flight out’. I still wonder how she knew.

Opportunity: Don’t break the magic

Posted by Hinoti, SAATCHI & SAATCHI, INDIA