Current mood:	calm
Current music:	Leonard Cohen - The Future

Long Ago, Faraway - Anniversary of Cab Ride

Wide eyed,I sat inside a yellow-cab 'space ship', enjoying its effortless sail up and down the humongous curves of concrete cats, which arched and stretched across an endless city. Before I knew it and much to my delight, our cab/cruiser glided up on one of the feline highway arches. Down below, I could make out the clover-leaf pattern of a mega-highway intersection. (I could recognize it, thanks to a friendly ghost of a boring transport planning lesson that turned up a light in my brain, right in time.) I had to blurt it out, “Whoa…clover-leaf highway intersections do really exist?”

“Oh, they are common and it is not a highway, these are called freeways,” N corrected me. Of course, a free world never stops advertising its virtues, I should have known. Nor did it stop advertising its avocados on FM.

What in the world were avocados? “It’s a buttery fruit, you’ll like it,” N offered his wisdom like Columbus explaining pineapple to the Portuguese for the first time. The first ever commercial I heard in the New World thus announced that Hass avocados were the best and the most nutritious fruit to be had on this side of the planet. The question of what to eat would never be a problem during the rest of my stay, thanks to Hass avocados. The funny thing is that I never heard a commercial for either fruits or vegetables (least of all avocados) ever again on FM or TV! Was it my mind, playing dirty conjuring tricks and all that it could ‘conjure’ was avocados? tsk tsk tsk..What a waste of gray matter!

But who cared, with nose squashed against the window and eyes glued to the fleeting scenery I was busy drinking in the newness of the New World. Slightly masked by a gauze of swishing cars, mile after mile of flat glass sheathed concrete blocks peered back at me , with a powerful nonchalance befitting the logos they spotted on their foreheads – Sun, Cisco Systems, Oracle, HP and so on. They seemed to say, “Hey puny stranger, take a good look us at us while you can, we rule the world.” San Francisco BayArea – one of the largest urban agglomerations in the world, if the books were right, was rushing up my brain as I started my nose-dive or life-as-you-call it in the New World. A part of life's journey began with that cab ride out of Fog City's interntational airport to my new home.