Eruptions near and far

What a week. Did anyone ever realise they would use the word Eyjafjallajokull?u00a0 That's the Icelandic name for the volcano which made sure the planet couldn't get on a plane. Now if you think that's a bit of an odd name, do keep in mind it is Iceland where most people have first names far more complicated. So much so that the volcano name could pass off as an Icelandic nickname.u00a0 For consideration, Icelandic man walks into a bar and says, "Hello my name is Eyjafjallajokulliliyarajakiminanjaro, I sell insurance in Reykjavik. You have pretty eyes, you can call me Eyjafjallajokull" Though unfounded, many claimed the financial crisis which almost made Iceland bankrupt happened because most people couldn't tell whether what they were pronouncing was the name of a bank, a person or an eruption.



If you're worried about how to pronounce it, don't worry, nobody knows, because no one imagined we would have to pronounce Icelandic volcano names (or Icelandic anything for that matter). Vesuvius is as far as we got with volcano names, which, as an aside, is also the name of a gym instructor in Oshiwara. Don't ask me how I know that but clearly if you're looking for what volcanoes can do, (apart from shutting down the world), Vesuvius Kothari, who helps aspiring Aaj Tak anchors bench press, will tell you that it gives him a name appropriate to his size (he is large, though I haven't seen him emit ash).u00a0u00a0

There was no mistake with what Eyjafjallajokul was though. It was clearly a volcano. One that spit fire out of the arctic glaciers into the Northern skies. Clearly, the argument what goes up, must come down doesn't seem to hold true for volcano refuse which posits counter Newtonian theory thus; what goes up, floats over Europe, gets into jet engines and causes planes to fall out of the sky. Hence panicked travel authorities with a six-day ban over airspace sending Italians accidentally to South America, DHL couriers bound for Algeria lost in Peru, the German chancellor Angela Merkel on a bus through Poland and our Prime Minister to Brazil from Washington DC with no way back.

Among the more odd stories of the world stranded in another part of the world were British tourists in Beijing enrolling their children into Chinese schools thinking this volcano, like many in human history, may never stop spewing.u00a0u00a0

Now for those detractors who were saying global warming is happening too slowly and the glaciers aren't melting, having 25,000 degrees of a shooting cauldron of fire destroying a million tones of ice is perhaps a less subtle indication. It would allow climate change advocates like Nobel laureate Dr. Pichauri to grow even longer druid-like beards and fret while Mr. Al Gore will perhaps do a sequel to his Oscar-winning documentary mildly titled, "The Convenient Truth About The Volcano That Burnt Down Your Continent".

Of course it's brilliant that we (and things) can criss-cross the globe in a few hours and that's made the modern world so ufffdmodern. But one's doing it in essentially a long aluminum tube, eating something that loosely resembles food and watching movies you wouldn't ever admit to on land. No matter how many Mercedes cars are sent to pick up business class passengers, flying has become the cosmopolitan world's unavoidable curse.

And yet, not being able to do it for six days throws off the world's commerce like Lady Gaga would a nunnery.

So lots of lovely things happen when you can't fly. Like a random European man who told me he was going to fly to Muscat from Mumbai, then try to catch a ferry to Istanbul, thenu00a0 hitch hike to Rome and then sail back to London. I think the last one to attempt that was Marco Polo (well, minus the flying).

More volcanic eruptions took place, locally (and metaphorically) with the IPL commissioner Mr. Lalit Modi being accused of everything from nefarious media contracts to the partition of India. It feels like everyone, including the Pope, has a view on this so I'll refrain from mine except to observe that it is ironic that many who now sit in TV studios claiming how wrong this morally is, clamoured for the tickets and parties and drinking and the fun, like the rest of us. If there's a villain to all of this, it isn't a man in a suit with shady deals, it's a billion of us -- erupting like Eyjafjallajokull to the sex, drugs and rock and roll of what IPL has done.

Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year.u00a0 Reach him at www.anuvabpal.com