Airports. They just might be one of the busiest places you’ll find on planet earth. I mean, you’ll find people everywhere, at every hour of the day. People working – or pretending to work – with their laptops open, crying infants, senior citizen, big families, travel groups, students, solo travellers – you’ll find them all here. Airports are like a congregation of different lifestyles that we are seemingly oblivious of. And yes, airports have a time schedule of their own. A coffee at 3am or a pasta for breakfast is considered perfectly normal.
Ever since I was young, I’ve been fascinated by what you call ‘the airport vibe’. As a small girl, airports meant traveling to new places – to mountains and beaches – and returning back with a phone screaming ‘your storage space is almost full’, a suitcase bursting with memories, and an unnaturally large amount of souvenirs. Over the years, this definition changed. Nineteen year old mugdha wanted to travel solo by a flight with a cup of Starbucks coffee and a book, watching the clouds from her window seat. That’s where it all started. That one solo travel lead to a series of solo travels, shuttling between two cities that now carry huge pieces of my heart. Since then, airports became a place to contemplate and to slow down – even amidst the rush around. The take-offs and landings over the past few months have been something like the start of an era and the end of another. I’ve started to notice how there’s comfort in the smallest of things one associates with home – like the sound of people speaking my mother tongue once I reach that boarding gate or the transition of bulletin boards written in a script that I cannot understand to the one that I grew up with. It’s amazing to see that things that I never once bothered about now have a compartment reserved in my head. And that is why I feel that airports are a plethora of vivid stories all around us. They stand testimonials to the fact that just like no two people share the exact same set of traits, no two take-offs and landings are the same.

yours truly,
22 year old mugdha, who can vividly recall the 20 year old mugdha sitting on the same airport where it all started