The ground staff is not averse to a bit of hanky-panky either. Burly security guards scruff people just for the heck of it - squeeze, squeeze, as if they were stress toys for big boys. One particularly remembers one Saudi Arabian security guard, a very beefy specimen, who pushed me out of a security queue just because I refused to consign my laptop to his waste bin, which he was using for collecting personal articles. They sure could use a little more oil in those parts of the world.

If this gives you the impression that I am a globetrotter, then you are mistaken. I have lived all my life in Trivandrum, a small town in India. I may not be a globetrotter, but Paul Theroux is - the man who wrote The Great Indian Railway Bazaar. India figures as “turd world” in that book. Those are the perils of train travel. You get to see things closely. You get a micro-perspective, where even a macro one would be hard to stomach.

You can't see steaming turds from the stratosphere. Next time, Paul Theroux might take an airplane, but that is not romantic. Paul Theroux is a great writer, despite the cliché. Forgive the cliché, since language is so limited. The man is a genius. He came to JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) - and how.

I was taking a stroll along the bookshops in JNU when I saw a man walking as swift as the wind, a billowing cream coat leaving its trail behind him. He could've been Columbus, discovering the real India at last.

But later in the day, in the conference hall of the English Centre, the same man was entertaining his audience. He spoke as if he was grateful to the University for giving him that opportunity. I felt he meant it. “Literature is a field, and there are furrows. You have to follow a furrow to its end,” he told us.

I know a venerable lady, the wife of an airline manager, who has been to 63 countries - all by air. Her paintings are suffused with the ethereal quality of air travel. I will buy her paintings one day, when I'm rich. Otherwise, it seems I’ve had my last jet engine laugh.