Tuesday, April 03, 2007

WORLD CUP DIARY: They stalk me

This post doesn't really have anything to do with the World Cup, but comes into the sequence because it does have to do with the flight from Kingston to Guyana (via Antigua, Bridgetown and Port of Spain). Fantastic flying again!!!

People who know me know of my intense dislike of children. And while I have wanted to write on this passionate hatred of mine and had even charted out the chapters in a self-help book that deals in general with torturing and maiming children, I have never really gotten down to putting pen on paper (or finger on keyboard, as it is). This has to do - by and large- with hurting children via suckering them into playing a game with you, using noise as a cover when you're trying to torture children, using your day-to-day tools and implements on children, stuffing their faces to make sure there's no noise and that sort of thing. Of course, what excites me the most is the old trick of innocently passing on bits of information to children and ensuring that they are going to bring it up with their parents in particuarly uncomfortable situations (I believe parents should bear the brunt of the torture).

And in any case, my old friend and fellow-hater-of-children-and-therefore-in-danger-of-inviting-outrage Jai had also recently taken up the subject, so I thought I would lay low.

Anyway, the spur for this post was the number of kids on the flight we had...and how I found out that African kids (as all of these were) are as noisy as their Indian counterparts. Now, this wasn't particularly surprising. In fact, I had pretty much anticipated this. I knew that Indian kids were particularly noisy because Indians, as parents, aren't particularly great. And they allow their little assholes that much more room to misbehave. And their outrage at irrelevant strangers not taking a shine to their little devils is a sight to behold; something that makes their children that much more misbehaved. It's a vicious cycle.

The kids in the Caribbean Airlines flight were as noisy as some that I have encountered on the Rajdhani Express, or even Jet Airways. They cried. Loud and strong. Their parents paid not a heed. Obviously, mothers across the world work on the same philosophy: I went through nine months of hell for this piece of shit; I don't care who you are, but you're going to have to go through at least ninety minutes of the same shit!

A little saving grace in this case, however, was the fact that some of these kids were actually rather beautiful. Especially this little year-old girl (who was actually totally quiet for the entire flight) with almost no hair on her head. It was particuarly sweet because the little hair she had was in dreadlocks (about half an inch long each) and she had on a number of colourful clips on her hair (head actually). Black people are more beautiful than most other races, and evidently their kids reflect this.