There is a saying that I heard upon arriving in India:   “ If you do not have patience before coming to India, you will learn it.  If you have patience, you will lose it!”  When you go to the airport in India, you have to leave plenty of time.  The following is a typical experience.    I had arranged for a driver to pick me up at 630 am to run me out to the airport for an 830 flight.   He had been picking me up at 11 all week to take me to the office in Delhi and had been reliable.  Apparently he overslept.  His phone was turned off when I tried to reach him.  Finally at 6:40, I decided to overpay for a hotel car so that I would not miss my plane.    Before you enter an airport in India, you always have to show your itinerary  and passport to a soldier.  It is generally a formality.  I have always had an itinerary, but this morning as I drove out to the airport, I could not locate mine.   I was wondering if I would miss my plane or if they would somehow accommodate me and let me enter the airport without the paperwork when I finally located it after tearing apart my backpack for the third time.  After I handed my newfound itinerary to the soldier, he looked at it and yelled to another soldier,  “Spice Jet! Dehradun!”  twice.  Then he directed me to go talk to the other soldier who informed me that I had to go to Terminal 1.  Now normally that would not be a big deal in the US.  However in Delhi, there are 3 terminals and they are all 15-20 minutes apart from each other.  So I hailed a cab and asked to go to Terminal 1.  As we drove to Terminal 1, I was wondering why I was so trusting that soldiers would know what flights leave from which terminal.  That made me a little concerned.   I thought that I needed to do a better job of finding out from which terminal my flights depart in the future.  Still,  I did not bother checking my I-phone for the time.  At this point, I figured that if I missed the plane, so what.   As St Paul says,  “All things work together for good….”

As I was collecting my things from security, my cell starting ringing in my backpack. It was my driver asking if I still needed a ride to the airport.  I explained that I was at the airport. I then checked the time on my cell  and saw that I still had 20 minutes until my flight boarded for Dehradun.  I bought a mug of green tea, relaxed, and said my morning prayer.