Sunday, October 05, 2008

Pigeons & Flights of Thought

Sunday mornings are meant to be slept through. But today wasnt meant for such a pleasurable activity. Early morning I was waken up by strange noises in my room. The source of noise turned out to be a pigeon fluttering about my window. Had to get up and shut the glass window to stop it from coming inside. And then I saw another one moving along the floor. When I tried to shoo it away instead of going through the second open window it decided to fly into the hall. The hall has glass doors on the balcony side and glass windows at the other end. Now pigeons are supposed to be pretty intelligent animals, with a great sense of direction and all that. We also hear a lot about pigeons being used for delivering messages. But after what I saw today morning made me think that how could any one trust these stupid creatures. This particular pigeon went into hall. It flew across and banged into the balcony doors. Flew back and banged into the windows. And this process was repeated again before I could go and open the sliding doors. And then it proceeded to settle on the fan. It was pretty tough to make it fly away. Some bird!!!
Well, by this time I had lost all thought of further sleep and proceeded to stay in my 14th floor balcony watching the other members of the species flying around. Overhead at regular intervals aeroplanes went passing on their way to land at the Mumbai airport. And this is when my thought process started taking flight. Human beings have been always trying to copy from the nature around them. Seeing the birds they also wanted to be able to release their spirits and soar across the wide sky. This dream came to be true, albeit in a different way, with the invention of the aeroplane. Now, the though which came across my mind is would we have thought about flying if there had been no birds to teach us about flight. And if no such thought had come would there have been any aeroplanes. And without the aviation industry how different would have been the world today. And more to the point, would the progress made over the last hundred years since Wright Brothers' invention took off, have been possible.

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