Thank You, Stranger!
Some strangers end up giving the best inspirations ever
This blog is dedicated to the stranger whom I met at the airport and spent over 200 minutes together without the need of exchanging our names and now only I know how much I regret this! I was on a vacation and traveling to Kolkata. It was almost 2 hrs journey from Nagpur to Kolkata via flight and for the check-in process, I reached 3 hours before the departure time.
All the procedure was done in 45 minutes and I had enough time to watch an episode of some K-drama I had already downloaded.
I was all set with a popcorn bucket and a nice seat at the corner with a charging point with less noise.
I was enjoying a fight scene but a random number interrupted my happiness
Turned out it was a friend from one of my coaching institutes from school days.
He is working as a freelance website developer and somehow came to know about my digital marketing gigs.
He wanted to know more about what exactly I was doing as he had a few references and wanted to make sure about my services first.
There was a girl sitting opposite me who was reading a book.
She looked at me (or maybe at the stalls behind me, I don’t know) and I sensed that maybe I’m disturbing her. I’m super scared of disturbing book readers, thanks to my little sister.
So I tried to keep the conversation as short as possible and promised him a call as soon as I’ll be back from my vacation.
Finally, it was time to board the plane and the girl who was sitting opposite to me got up from her seat and picked up her bag.
It turned out that we were going to the same city, share the same row and her seat was just next to mine.
She reading a Bengali book hence I discovered she’s a bong just like me.
I thought of finishing at least 2 episodes before reaching Kolkata but a mail from work interrupted my happiness. I had to submit an article within the next 18 hours.
So I took out my laptop and turned it on.
I have this habit of always keeping my laptop in sleep mode without any explainable reason. So as soon as the screen unlocked, the last tab I was working on popped up. It was some research site related to my client's works and my medium profile.
I sensed the girl next to me observing my work. She waited patiently for the next 20 minutes before starting any conversation.
“Are you a writer?”, she asked directly facing me. I understood that she just figured it out by having a glance at my Medium page.
Now I’m so used to this question that if we had any human FAQs in the real world, I would have added this as my first question.
“Not yet. I’m a blogger.”, I smiled and looked at her. Her expressions were enough to tell that she didn’t get it. “I write blogs that are posted online.”
“Oh! I see.”, she was looking at my screen. She looked young like a college student. So to continue the conversation I asked her what she does.
“I finished my 12th board this year and now took a drop from studies.”, she said while fixing her bookmark and closing the novel. “What else do you do?”.
It was the first time somebody asked me or shown interest in my work. I could totally understand her curiosity as a young kid who is in the “figuring out” phase of life.
I explained to her some understandable terms of the digital marketing field.
I liked the part when she was paying attention to every detail and shooting meaningful questions.
Here are some things I figured out about her:
i) Studios girl — probably a topper or at least one of them
ii) Lives in a world of books and not at all social media or internet-friendly
“I learned so much new stuff about the online world”, she was amazed “and I was not allowed to use the social media platforms as my parents were strictly against it”
“Well, that’s because our parents mainly know the negative effects of it. There are still very few people who are putting genuine efforts to educate people about the advantages and power of the digital world”
“And you are one of them”, she said with a bright smile.
“Umm no. Not exactly one of them. I’m currently only focusing on small business owners who have faced severe loss in their business due to pandemic and helping them bring their business online.”
“Still you have to teach them right as they are not aware of this stuff?”
It is actually called consulting. But I thought not to correct her and overload her little head with so much information. She had already heard so many new terms like podcasts, marketing, ranking, editing, scheduling. I just nodded with agreement and smiled.
“I talked with a stranger for so long for the first time. I usually don’t talk during my travels”, She said while the plane was landing now. “It’s so nice to listen to someone whom you don’t know”
I was turning on my mobile phone. “Why do you think so? Probably you were interested in what I was doing, or else you would have finished the book by now”, I said in a little teasing tone.
“No!”, She said while packing up her stuff. “I think you feel free to talk about anything. There’s no fear of judgment or confidentiality. You’ll just talk and feel much better after pouring your heart out.”
“Wow!”, I was just processing every word just said by her but my phone rang before I could say anything. It was my cousin who came to pick me up. I gave him the details and hung up the call. It hardly took even 40 seconds. But when I looked around, the stranger had left. We couldn’t even say our goodbyes.
It’s been over a month since this incident. I came back from my vacation and wrote everything in my journal. While I was writing her last words to me in the journal, I realized that I did felt better while talking to a stranger. Hence the idea of my next blog series hit me — Letters undelivered. I would love to dedicate this series to the stranger I met and unknowingly inspired me.
