Uncle Omer goes shopping

My sister's kids were the reasons DVD became a part of family vocabulary. (The younger daughter was 3 when she asked her grandmother to put her Barbie DVD "on"). Anyways, there was this whole kid's section in the Sadaf store in Rawalpindi. I had to pick three at least - one for each. There were ones I knew they had seen. There were others that were popular enough that I was sure they had seen. Spiderman. There was Spiderman! My own childhood favorite. I made sure everyone who visited saw it back then. Spidey was cool. There were the Turtles. They were "it." We had posters, stickers and what not. Then Jungle Book. Maybe show them what real stories were supposed to be. But then it came. A moment of wisdom. Why hadn't my parents fed me the classics. They could have forced us to listening Noor Jahan, Nayyara Noor and Farida Khanum but the didn't. The process of discovering them much later after having grown up listening to music of "our age" was much more enjoyable. Surely I could not let these kids miss that process. I settled for Winnie the Pooh, Bob the Builder and Adams Family. What THEY would have chosen. Okay, maybe not Adams Family, but Adams Family is cool.

Superhuman.

Another all-nighter. Prob'ly the first one in a loooong time in a "Pakistani city."

Listening to: Khallbali (AR Rahman, Rang de basanti).

Virgin Atlantic

The ultimate in air travel, and at a special-offer rate too. That's virgin atlantic for you. Yes the check-in queues were really bothersome and it would've been nice if they started handing out those wet tissues and glasses of water from the queues then and there, but still they more than made up for it.

15 minutes past take-off, I was listening to some of the best songs I hadn't heard in a very, very long time. And some that I had. There was the regular Coldplay and Oasis latest, but other than that Kylie Minogue's breathe (last heard at junior year in undergrad, or was it senior year?), confide in me and can't get you outta my head, Guns N Roses' November Rain, You could be mine (I double checked if the sound was disturbing my neighbours, but one was snoring and the other engrossed in the news) and Don't Cry (They can remove that track from their v-port system. You could be returning from (or headed to) a battlefield but you prob'ly won't cry here). Escapism at its best.

Saw Walk the Line again (given the chance of watching a nice movie again, or a recommended movie anew, I guess I would do the former). And then it came. Rang De Basanti. This many had recommended earlier, but little did I know I'd manage to see it up in the skies. AR Rahman's soundtrack over some really crisp cinematography and a story that was both slick and real at twenty thousand feet.

Life should be a series of virgin atlantic flights.

Tips: Decide early on what you have to watch and start soon. Time really flies up there on a VS flight. Also try the DIY check-in (online check-in). Alternatively, just sit down near the queue. An hour before departure they're start going to call passengers for the flight anyway. Just rush to the short queue for your flight then.

And take some coke. There's a reason why you don't see Virgin Cola outside a virgin atlantic plane.