Category: Travel Ramble

Turbulence

In a recent flight from Bengaluru to Pune, mild tremors of turbulence took me back to a time when I was travelling extensively for work. Most of this travel was on small flights in the North-Eastern part of India. I reproduce that note to record my thoughts on something that a frequent flyer would always encounter.

From a note back in 2008 –
“I have been travelling continuously for the last 15 days and most of this travel has been Air Travel. And all the air travel has had one thing in common – Turbulence.

All the sectors that I flew recently had turbulence. Invariably the plane would get into either a cloud or a dust storm and rock and roll the passengers till such time that even non-believers like me thought of a higher force. In a couple of journeys, we felt turbulence when we were flying above the clouds and in a true blue sky.

Around 50% off this travel was in ATRs – a small 37 seater plane with 2 huge fans like propellers on either side. When an ATR starts, the fan on the left side works first. The right one starts working as the plane taxis onto the runway. After a 2 minute halt, which is used to bring the fans to full speed, the ATR makes a dash across the runway and takes off suddenly. As soon as it reaches a certain height, the engines are brought to normal speed – for the faint-hearted or new passengers, it seems as if the engines have been shut down.

I have written earlier about plane journeys. The reason why I write again about them now is that my book of experiences just got richer in the last 3 weeks.

I understand that planes fly at a certain altitude which is given to them by the folks in the control towers. What I don’t understand is why can’t they go back to the control tower and say that there is a lot of clouds here, give me another altitude. While the pilots & crew and the control tower guys might be ok with the bumbling tumbling, I was not & neither were the passengers.

By no means am I a guy who gets scared easily. But the fact that you are a certain thousand feet above sea level, and you can’t see any reasons for the bumbling & tumbling and yet you are bumbling & tumbling makes me think of some questions that need answers. At every instance of turbulence a small “ding!!” sounds and everyone is told to fasten seat belts. Another “Ding!!” accompanied by a small word from the pilot about the impending disturbance and whether it’s normal or not would be nice.

Communication is the key. A week back on the Indigo flight from Guwahati to New Delhi, prior to deplaning, the hostess informed us of the belt at which we would get out luggage. Simple & effective. Yesterday on the IC flight from Ranchi to Delhi, the AC was not working while the plane stood at the Ranchi Airport. As the passengers took their seats, the cry for AC went up. The pilot made an announcement that the Auxiliary unit had gone bad and now the AC would work once the engines came on. As soon as he finished, someone asked the question to the hostess and she curtly replied”Sir an announcement has just been made.”

Back to turbulence. So ATR’s or Airbus, all are hit by turbulence. Yesterday at dinner with family, I shot the topic and realised that everyone has faced turbulence recently. And all agreed that there was too much turbulence. My brother thought that I am scared. But he is neatly mistaken. I am not scared, I just look for answers. If I pay money for a smooth ride, and when the stakes are of life, I expect to be told that we will fly into rough weather & what it could mean.

On a flight to late evening flight to Lucknow last week, the plane was in a clear blue sky and flew into rains and black clouds. The pilot did some circling, the hostesses were asked to return to their seats immediately, and the passengers just bumped and jumped. On landing did the pilot say something about landing from another direction because of the dust storm. What’s the point??? Hardly anyone listened to him.

I have another week or so more to travel. Let’s see what else gets added to the already existing turbulence.”

Travel and A Film Camera

From a formally educated photographer this could be unusual. But the events leading to the thoughts mentioned are such that it is compelling for me to put this down in words.

Education doesn’t make a photographer. No amount of it can. There is enough literature within the world that talks about how photos are experiential – they are borne when the six senses of the photog come together. It is then, the photog’s fortitude to push the limits and create pictures that stun sensibilities before normalising to satisfaction.

On travel a couple of months back, I found myself managing a Lubitel. The Lubitel is a fully manual medium format camera; popularly also known as a Twin Lens Reflex. In one roll of film, one can shoot 12 square photos. One can modify a few settings in the camera to bump up the number of shots to 16, but I like it as it is – 12. To operate the Lubitel, one needs to hand-complete all activities of creating a photograph. Loading the film and winding it to a shoot – ready position, looking through the waist level viewfinder to get the composition correct without the help of grid lines, managing the exposure settings in a half imaginative state – a light meter or a digital camera help partially in pre empting what the photo would look like; is what my life became as I went about creating photographs of the trip.

Goa 2016 ©KartikayaNagar
Goa 2016 ©KartikayaNagar

But what really does this have to do with travel?

Processing of these photos is done by experts. So I sent my film rolls (210 photos in 8 different films) for processing to the experts and after three weeks of waiting they handed me 92 photos. Just that. The rest were all washed out. As I peered at the photos that the agency was able to process; the sense of longing for the ones that they could not took a back seat.

As I saw these photos, the memory of the process of creating each one came back. I was in Goa in the last week of March – and that is perhaps the last week before the hot and strong summer sets in. Moving out the hotel between 10 AM and 5 PM is sacrilege. It is also sacrilege to not spending time by the pool in the same time zone. But shooting with film took me out. Armed with a bag full of film, a tungsten powered light meter and a small digital camera I rode out to places that I thought would be fit to be shot. So while beaches remained a easy go, climbing Fort Aguada and Fort Chapora in the severing heat, being chased down a small hillock that overlooks the Vagator Beach by stray dogs and losing my way and landing up in a small village while on my way to Arambol. I never reached Arambol though – turned back because at the point of losing direction I realised that I was 15 KMs away. Making a picture using a TLR attracted attention of all kinds. People stopped by, confirmed if it was the camera of the olden times; some wondered as to why would I spend time doing this if I could easily create digital pictures. Most people ask the cost.

The thing about shooting with film is that it makes a photog look at his or her trade awfully lot more closely than they would. It made me “look” and “wait”. The key to success was not to press the shutter at the wrong time – the moment had either just passed by or had not come. It made me work to getting to the place in light that mattered.

And I realised that while doing all this to create the pictures that I was, I had discovered a new face of Goa. I ventured up a hill, a fort that I had never climbed, into roads that always looked deserted and boring. I stopped near fields and small pools. I saw chapels and houses of locals. I got into a village and spent time talking to a lady about how my way was lost.

It was then a realisation that has eluded me for the most of my travelling life. It is imperative for a traveller to push the boundaries on a trip. An extra kilometre, an hour less of the normal sleep time, a conversation in the middle of no-where – might just lead to that all important moment in the trip – where you find the picture that sums it up.  

Photos on Film by Kartikaya
Goa 2016 ©KartikayaNagar