FROM YEMMENS( MN, My dear Father)

Dear PD and friends,

Devan (Devavrathan, my son) had been to your Wagamon to witness the paragliding event held there.  (He was in Eerattupetta in connection with some project work of his friend, who is doing research in the Netherlands.  From there they had gone to Wagamon.)

It should have been a marvelous sight of those magnificent men gliding in the sky in their colourful gliders.

He was so animated in describing the details and the thrills that he expected to see my misery and despair in missing it.  After all, he was very much aware of my intense desire to fly in the sky like a bird or at least in a glider.

This brings to my mind the story of a truck driver in Los Angeles who went up in the sky in his aluminium lawn chair hooked on to some forty – forty five helium filled weather balloons. I don’t remember his name.  This was in the early eighties.  For as long as he could remember he wanted to go up:  to be able to just rise right up in the air and see for a log way.  The time, money, education and opportunity to be a pilot were not his.  Hang gliding was too dangerous for him and any good place for gliding was too far away.

So there he was  up in the air over Los Angeles.  Flying at last.  He had a parachute on, a radio and the necessary equipments for popping up and down the balloons.  He shot up over ten thousand feet, right through the approach corridor to the International Air port.

When asked by the media why he did it, he said, “You can’t just sit there.”  When asked if he was scared, he answered “wonderfully so.”  When asked if he would do it again, he said, “Nope.”  And asked if he was glad that he did it, he grinned and said ‘Oh, yes.”

The human race sits in its chair.  On the one hand is the message that the human situation is hopeless.  And the Ian Wrights (‘The Globe Trekker’ of National Geography and Travel and Living Channels) and Steve Irwins (‘The Crocodile Hunter’, who, though, lost his life in one of his adventures) of the Earth soar upward knowing anything is possible, sending back the message from ten thousand feet: “I did it, I really did it. I’m FLYING!”

Some cynic from the edge of the crowd insists that human beings still can’t really fly. Not like birds, anyway.  But somewhere in some little garage, some maniac with a gleam in his eyes is consuming vitamins and mineral supplements, and practicing flapping his arms faster and faster.  Who knows one day he will not really fly?

Dear 10 Rose, don’t despair.  Let us paraglide or at least go up in the sky in our lawn chairs hooked up to helium balloons.

Any way, one day I am going to do.  I have a child like enthusiasm and desire to go up in the sky and fly like a bird.  The desire has been increasing in geometrical progression ever since I had seen the film ‘The Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines’.

Don’t ask me then why I had done it.