First impressions...

Ladies and Gentlemen - We'll be landing shortly at 25 minutes past 2 at the John F Kennedy international airport in New York. The outside temperature is 22 deg C. Please fasten your blah blah blah...blah blah blah. Immediately my neck goes craning to the left window to catch glimpses of the world famous sky-scrapers of NYC. Darn! disappointment. A fat person' back was all the view I could get. To the right now, and it seemed sea was the only thing in view...all blue. Only thing I now had to look at was the emirates personal entertainment screen, and the occasional air hostess whizzing past with a sense of urgency.

As soon as the plane taxied and came to a halt, the noise level in the plane suddenly goes up - Mothers, brothers, sisters, everyone seemed to be calling everyone else. Well, I (and my friend) having to call no one at that moment, gave my colleague a hi-fi and then the long procedure for actually setting foot on American soil.

A million hopes, a million dreams...man, this is America. End of the tiresome and boring Emirates flight...no good food, no good air hostesses. We hired a private taxi, had a black driver - a nice guy at that. He realized that we were first timers (should have been obvious from the way we were staring at the countryside and the buildings. The tallest building back in Chennai, apparently is the LIC building, which paled in comparison with the variety and architecture of the buildings in the financial nerve centre of the world) and was good enough to point out the various landmarks of NYC. He had a keen financial acumen, and almost left us embarrassed with his repertoire of knowledge. We had to dig very deep to answer his questions. Be it the recent market crash or the billions of dollars of loss that Merrill Lynch posted, Citi's Indian head or the Oil prices, he had an answer to all of that. Before we could be subjected to more such probing questions, luckily we arrived at our destination in Jersey City. Certainly he made us realize, we were a small cog in a big wheel.