Departing From GNOME Asia 2024

Following the plans that Sumantro Mukherjee and I made the previous night, I woke up as early as 0600am Indian Standard Time and was downstairs in an hour for breakfast. I had finished packing my luggage before departing for the dining area but I decided to fetch it downstairs once I was done with the meal. After a quick breakfast consisting of Masala Omelette with cheese and Golden Hashbrowns, I started looking for Uber cabs at around 0800am Indian Standard Time. We wanted to make a stop at Soumadeep Dhar's place at Stanza Living Newport House before we made it to the Kempegowda International Airport (BLR). We boarded the cab soon and after a ride of about ninety minutes through quieter morning roads in Bengaluru, we arrived at the outskirts of the city.

During a brief discussion of around thirty minutes or so, Sumantro started looking for cabs because we wanted to ensure that we made it to the airport by around 1030am Indian Standard Time. As my flight back to Pune Airport (PNQ) was scheduled for 1225pm Indian Standard Time, I needed to be through the security checking gates at least a couple of hours before that. I had to leave a bunch of drinks at my brother's residence as I was sure that I could not take them through the security gates. With Soumadeep and his friend, Harsha, bidding us farewell - Sumantro and I set off for the airport in an Uber cab and we made it to the T1 terminal in about thirty minutes from then. As we did not have the DigiYatra app installed, we resorted to entering through the Gate 5A for domestic departures.

As Sumantro and I were travelling on Indigo flights back to Kolkata and Pune respectively, we joined the populous check-in queue to retrieve our boarding passes. Seeing him pull the luggage trolley through the check-in queue made me feel confident about my choice of travelling with only my backpack for a relatively short trip like that for GNOME Asia 2024. While I could have gotten through the departure gates with the online check-in document on my phone, I insisted on following through the queue anyway to get a printed boarding pass. With the boarding passes in our hands, we headed upstairs to the security checking gates where Sumantro had to revert twice for the false alarms on the electronic devices he had in his backpack - before we started wandering around the Duty Free area.

We were ahead of the schedule so the minor setback of having Sumantro's luggage checked twice did not trouble us much. He decided to pause at one of the Duty Free stores to purchase some goodies for his family and while half of me wanted to wait there, the other half wanted to find a seating around my designated gate. After bidding farewell to Sumantro as he was designated for gate number 17, I left for gate number 36 where my flight Indigo 6E 6563 was expected to depart from. The departure gate was quite some distance away from the Duty Free area and all I wanted to do then was to put down my backpack. I was soon visited by Sumantro again while I was on a call with my family members, who mentioned that his flight got slightly delayed and hence, he had some time to hang around me at my gate.

A couple of conversations later, the boarding of my flight began at around 1230pm Indian Standard Time and after saying goodbyes to Sumantro once more, I made it to my window seat 3F. With some offline saved Spotify tunes in my ears, I decided to catch some shuteye as the flight took off. For my pre-booked corporate meal, I was served with sugarcane-flavoured biscuits, mango-basil juice and a vegetarian sandwich for lunch. None of it was anything special but those did manage to keep a slow eater like me busy until the flight drifted into Pune Airport (PNQ) at around 0145pm Indian Standard Time. As I did not have any checked-in luggage, I did not have to wait on deboarding and after being harrassed for bookings by the cabbies lurking there, I was finally picked up from there by my dad at the arrival gate.