One of the travails of modern-day travel, is getting periodically buffeted by backpacks, hauled typically by a young person, both while boarding and alighting.
Time was when all luggage was carried by hand in the form of a suitcase, air-bag and such. At some point of time, the load got transferred to the back. It might have started in school, in the style popularised by the cartoon icon Dora, the seven-year-old Latin American girl with a backpack containing knick-knacks. Schoolchildren began to carry them, thereafter software techies. Barring the foreigners who come to ‘do’ India on a shoe-string budget, the backpack aficionados are mostly youngsters.
The other day, my over-booked Bengaluru flight was boarding. Several techies, with backpacks, moved up and down, turning sharply in search of their seats. One or two hit the back of my head, and moved away without even the mandatory lip service of an ‘excuse me’. Perhaps they felt it was my mistake to be in the aisle seat, positioning my head in the space where their backpacks swung. I moved my head to my left and right like a boxer avoiding a round house punch. Nevertheless, got hit twice. Soon the back-load was in an overhead bin.
The gentleman seated across asked me, “How many times did you get hit?”
“Maybe four. Perhaps five times. How about you?”
“Ditto. That guy in a red T-shirt, targeted both of us, hitting you when he turned clockwise, and me when he turned anticlockwise, like a programmed mechanism.”
“It’s a pity backpacks are here to stay. They will mulishly ride the way the vetalam did on Vikramaditya’s back. But they do seem to have certain advantages. Like the one who carries it need not look for it, like others who keep them away from them that might walk away. They are always on their shoulders, safe like the cub of a kangaroo in mother’s pouch. The young ones may get lost if a mother is not watchful.”
“The laptops in the back packs are getting down-sized and dresses are fewer in number because of the reduced duration of trips, conference calls and such.”
“Dora had Boots, the monkey that hopped and scrambled around her. But the mouse, a laptop’s companion that accompanied it, is not separate. It is in-built. So a mini-backpack!”
“That sounds great,” he said, laughing, “we may not get hit by a soft backpack the size of Dora’s.”
jsraghavan@gmail.com
