Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Airport Questions

The cops at air ports have the peculiar ability to ask funny questions, ok the term funny might not be appropriate but since I have a limited vocabulary I will leave as it is. Today I stumbled on this Ted talk Hasan Elahi: FBI, here I am! | Video on TED.com about how the FBI picked up someone with a mistaken identity. Now I feel a bit better, if it is the situation in US, how can I be complaining in other places ?!

There was a time at which I was frequenting South East Asia and this very often than not I used to attract the attention of authorities and once I was arriving at a certain country well past mid night, badly wanting to find a bed and go to sleep. Inherently I had this issue of not having a place which I can call as home town, I had one city as my birth place, another city as my residential address and I was living in another city. This very often drew the curiosity of the officials and it was normal that they spent 'enough' time to 'understand' this. But on this day I was damn sleepy and the official was not in any mood to let me go, he was asking the same question set in different ways. At one point he asked me "why were you born in Jaffna?", this blew my fuse off, I replied, "How would I know, you need to ask that question from my mother". Now I am thankful that I was allowed to go after an hour of 'questions', looking at the TED talk I am sure I had been lucky! Specially this is even more blissful when you are treated like this at a place which you call as home!

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