Truly wise, seasoned international travellers use their in-flight time to sleep. I am not one of them. I'm not talking about domestic flights that are of the more touch and go variety, but rather those plane journeys where you land in either another country or continent; ones that are at the very least between three to eight hours long. Whether I'm travelling business class, (which has happened only twice), or economy (more the norm), while other passengers around me are catching up on sleep, I can be seen with my head held high by my neck pillow, sipping from my glass of wine stationed on my tray table, with a blanket wrapped over me from head to toe. I look just like my fellow passengers; except, if you look closely, you're most likely to find tears streaming down my face. I'm not talking about moist-laden eyes. I mean a silent, but all-out weep. I'm supremely dignified about it, and unapologetic, too. I'm convinced it has everything to do with a combination of cabin pressure and the crying juice I'm sipping that's otherwise known as red wine. This has become assumed the status of a delightful ritual, especially since I travel alone.

At first I didn't realise how much consideration went into selecting the perfect film to watch on flight, because I wasn't aware of my tendency to cry. I still exert the same effort deciding what I'm going to invest time in. It's just that now I do it more consciously. What I watch has come to assume significant meaning. I can now remember whole flights because of the films I saw while I was on them. When I was en route from Singapore to Brisbane, for instance, the longer leg of the flight from New Delhi, I watched Miles Ahead, an inventive, fictional film about Miles Davis and his renegade attempts to retrieve an album he cut that was stolen from his home because he didn't want the world to listen to it yet, because it wasn't ready, because he had yet to arrive at something and didn't want what he had recorded to interfere with his legacy. The second film I watched was Youth, by Paolo Sorrentino, starring Michael Caine, who plays an ageing conductor on a spa retreat in Switzerland with his daughter, who is visited by one of the Queen's men with a request for him to conduct his famous suite, Simple Songs, which he has refused to have performed for decades. I cried at the end of both films, sometimes
also in the middle. On my flight from New Delhi to Singapore, when I travelled business class on an Air India Dreamliner, while everyone was asleep (because it was past 2 am), I was busy sobbing over An Affair to Remember while sipping on a generous portion of Talisker.