Up In The Air

As a child you tend to have quite  a lot of dreams.
 Some of them never come true (For Eg. “I want to marry Sridevi when I grow up”), while others do  come true, and then turn into nightmares
.Let me tell you about one of my primary mission statements from the time when I used to be 9 years old , which was to fly (a lot) in airplanes. Those days, air travel was not as convenient or as affordable as it is today ( people generally had to sell off their ancestral homes to pay for a one way air ticket).

 
Coming back to my dream, God must have been visiting our home when I was writing that goal of mine in my crawly handwriting in the last page of my school diary and must have done his “Tathaastu” (Amen), resulting in the fact that as I grew up & entered professional life, I ended up spending approximately 75% of my adult life in airplanes .

Naturally this has resulted in an intense apathy I have developed for air travel.. Let me try and list down the reasons . I hope the narration of my harrowing experiences of the past many years, would deter some of the wannabe high fliers & implore them make changes in their mission statements in time,( lest God does a “Tathaastu” on them as well) and so that they may move to more efficient modes of travel (Bullock carts for instance) –
 
Note – I will restrict my  brief  only to domestic travel here as International travel is a totally different animal altogether and needs a full blown book to be written, to dissuade people from it. I would also choose to avoid business class travel, upgraded or otherwise, and stick to plain, vanilla  Economy travel, as I assume that most folks are still stuck at economy (pity).
 
 
                                        PART A– Before the flight
 
1. Getting There – The 3 major challenges that you face while trying to reach the airport –
( a). The Call cabs will almost never turn up ;
(b). If they accidentally do turn up, they will  invariably get  a flat tyre (or an entire engine failure) within the first 1 km from your house ;
(c). If they still accidentally manage to get past (a) and (b) above, they will invariably choose a route which is clogged beyond repair. So in either case, you have to take your suitcase on your head, your laptop on your back and start sprinting towardsthe airport. (In case you are thinking I am making this up, please don’t. It’s Murphy’s law that whichever route you take, it will automatically become the busiest route in the city,even if it is at 2 AM in the morning, even with a curfew or a World War on).
 
2. Entering the terminal – When you finally reach the terminal building, panting and half dead, you will encounter two guards at the gate, one tall ,slender and the other -  short , pudgy. No matter which airport in India you are at, their names would be O.P. Dubey and S.N.Sharma. They would take your proof of identity and your ticket, and start measuring you suspiciously all over for about 7 minutes and then both of them would go into a corner and start murmuring (you are clearly nervous by now).After about 6 minutes of whispering , both of them break into a chuckle looking at you (as if you are Johnny Lever) and hand over your ticket back to you and wave you in. You are too jittery by now to  even challenge them for having wasted 13 minutes of your precious time.
 
 
3.  Check-In – If you are not a smart traveller who does a tele/web check in in advance, you will invariably end up as the 276th person in the queue (curiously you are always the last person in the queue whatever time you choose to  come to the airport) and wait patiently for several hours for your turn. Yes, if you are a frequent flyer like me  with a pre- printed boarding pass in hand, you will  still  be the 276th person in the queue and  will have to undergo the same torture so that you may get your boarding pass stamped and also collect your “lounge pass” (more about this later).
On many occasions, after this entire punishment, Radhika -  at the counter (they are always named Radhika) will pleasantly inform you that all this while, you had been standing in the wrong queue and would have to rush to the correct counter no. 37 (which is at the other end of the terminal and has about 500 people already camping there for several months before you).
 
 
4.  Security Check – If you manage to get past No. 3 above – Congratulations ! You have made good progress. Now even if you miss your flight, at least your baggage won’t. Let me spend some time on this point No. 4, as it is a critical component of air travel. There are several x-ray machines and dozens of security gates here . However,you would always be ushered to the most densely crowded one, where you would be asked to remove your laptop from it’s cover bag ,dismantle your blackberry, strip down to your underpants and wait for your turn to lay your stuff in a  tray on the x-ray  belt, before you can proceed to be frisked and groped by several smelly, 7 ft tall burly Jats, whose only qualification to have landed this job was their stoic inability to house a single grey cell inside their heads.
So once you are done with this humiliating molestation, you would reach over to the other side to collect your bag, only to discover that Surinder Pal Singh has opened it and laid all the contents on the table in full display for thousands of people to see (your shocking pink underwear, your porn magazines, your pirated DVDs andeverything else is held up one by one in full public view & inspected by him while you stand shivering in your yellow (floral printed) jockeys & while the lady constables keep giggling non-stop as if you are Shakti Kapoor.
One more thing, every security guard is pre-programmed to think that you are a terrorist suspect if you are a man  aged between 20 and 90 years of age. And in case you have a beard, you are not even a suspect. You are a confirmed terrorist. You will have people pulling your beard, sticking flashlights up your nostrils and at other “places” before they take you to an interrogation room and whip you constantly for 3 hours till you confess t that you are a certified Mujaheedin (just to escape their torture) .
 
5. The Lounge – If you have managed to wriggle out from (4) above, with / without your laptop / clothes/dignity , they reward you with some entertainment . A lounge access is a freebee offered to frequent flyers as a snob value. It’s a room inside the airport with  a big plasma TV (always playing some knee balm advertisement featuring Alok
Nath & Smita Jayakar), some sloppily arranged sofa sets and several hundred frequent flyers like you, dressed in identical suits(Most of them  are named “Srinivasan”), barely concealing their exploding waistlines, solemnly reading identical management books (With titles like – “How to fire your boss” or “ Corporate karma,rape and warfare” or “Sun Tzu was a sissy” etc).
Some of the older Srinivasans would be reading religion and philosophy titles (Like “Lessons from Bhagwad Gita for the Indian CEO” or “From Value to Values” etc ) and having a sickeningly sagely & a peaceful expression on their faces as they sip on their flavored  green teas. Oh yeah, there’s also a small buffet set out there in the lounge. NEVER  eat anything from there.
The food is either 15 days old or poisoned intentionally to give you blood dysentery (inside the flight) so that you would never ever venture towards free food again in your entire life ! And while you keep soaking in this entertaining lounge, an airlines employee would come in and announce with a bored expression on her face that you flight is about to take off from gate No. 87 in 4 minutes(Gate 87  is btw about 3 miles away  from the lounge and here’s where your running skills come handy once again as you make a mad dash for the gate and while the entire airport security and a dozen sniffer dogs chase you, thinking that you are Mr. Laden himself).
 
 
                                     PART B - Inside the flight
 
 
1.On board – You are a brave man (& a very very lucky one) if you have managed to  avoid being captured by the security personnel (or eaten alive by the dogs) and have entered the aircraft. If you are a smart guy like me who has blocked an emergency aisle seat in advance, you can try sitting on your seat, without all sorts of gigantic suitcases
banging on your head as people try to shove them into the tiny baggage hold.
On any other seat, invariably the moment you sit down and try reading the news paper( 10 days old), the guy in front of you would push back his seat (@ 60kmph) and break your nose instantly .Also, unless you book your seat in advance, you will invariably land up in a middle seat having approximately 3 cms of leg space and sandwiched between 2x 450 pound hairy and smelly gentlemen with severely upset stomachs, and you would have to reach for the oxygen mask every 3 minutes during the flight.
 
 
2. On Board Entertainment
 

• If you are in your 20s -  Staring at legs.Don’t attempt that if you are flying the nationalcarrier,wheretheairhostesses would have an uncanny resemblance to your primary school headmistress and would be older than your mother).

•  If you are in your 30s – Reading 10 day old newspapers and occasionally watching the inflight movie (“Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani”) . I have watched it 61 times in the past

•  If you are in your 40s and beyond – Working solemnly on your laptops, completing a year’s worth of reports, ogling at some middle aged lady sitting nearby, or simply  sleeping.

 
 
3.   Making yourself feel at home – This is what the Chairman of the airline would tell you, smiling from the small TV screen, or from the glossy in-flight magazine(advertising all exotic locales that the airlines supposedly flies to.
Don’t believe them. It’s just their wish-list for the next 50 years). You could still choose to believe the welcome pitch, unless you are flying one of those budget airlines. There, even if you are in the middle of a small emergency (such as you have just had a massive cardiac arrest or suppose your appendix has just burst, and you need some water) and ask the airhostess for a small cup of water, she would look at you with such disapproval as if you have just slipped your hands inside her skirt (and possibly also call the other airhostesses to beat you up mercilessly for having dared to ask for water).
 
4.Safety announcements – Frankly, don’t believe what they tell you. There are NO parachutes or life jackets under your seats. I have checked them for years and have never found any. Factually, there are, in all only 3 life-saving gear available in the entire aircraft( 1 for each pilot and 1 for the sexiest airhostess). Also, here’s a ready reckoner to decipher the captain’s familer  announcement during the flight –
 
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. You are requested to return to your seats & fasten your seatbelts . We are experiencing a minor turbulence”
 
 
This could mean any of the following –
1. Guys, we have been hit by a bird and have had our windscreen smashed. We are currently hurtling downwards towards the Arabian sea.
2. I need to go to the Loo and since my co-pilot has passed out after 3 vodkas, I am leaving the aircraft in the hands of God for the next 20 minutes.
3. I have a forged flying permit and frankly I am unable to figure out this
 
4. We have just lost the left wing of the aircraft.
 
5. We have two jihadi hijackers inside the cockpit with guns on my temple and they are insisting that I divert the flight to Kabul.
 
6. You morons, you are listening to a recorded message. Jack, Sheila and I have already jumped off the aircraft 12 minutes back, the moment it banged headlong.
 
5. The  bladder – By a strange coincidence, the urinary bladder of a frequent flyer is auto reverse-tuned to the flight status. So whenever the seat belt signs are on(which is almost always), it will immediately begin to feel like bursting. However, you can just helplessly & pleadingly stare at the faraway toilet (while the airhostesses joke amongst
themselves at your plight).
The moment, they officially allow you to go and pee, you see that there’s a full queue of about 14 people already lined up, by when you are almost ready to sit and relieve yourself below your seat(Don’t try that. They would throw you out of the aircraft of you ever did that).
If it’s one of your lucky days and you actually manage to make it inside the 2 ft by 3 ft toilet, don’t look down. Just do your thing and leave asap. I sometimes suspect that people deliberately don’t use toilets at home for days and store their “stuff” so that they are able to deliver it mid-air as if there’s an orgasmic delight in doing poo-poo inside a 2x3 box, 35000 feet above mean sea level.
 
6.Airline food – Avoid it at all costs. It is not designed for human consumption(especiallythe kathi rolls are used by the army during wars to hurl and kill enemies instantly.I have lost most of my teeth in the past decade,trying to bite into them). Also, an aircraft has limited ventilation and I am sure you don’t want to add on to any more global warming inside.
 
7.Feedback forms – This is something every in-flight executive will compulsorily make you fill up (sometimes at gunpoint). So even if you are a devout vegetarian Jain who has just been served a corn beef sandwich, you still have to write good feedback, lest they shoot you, or accuse you of molestation, or maybe poison you during your return
flight.
 
8. In flight auctions – These are specially  designed to make a biz traveller guilty. They will advertise quaint pearl necklaces and Hannah Montana goodies which you feel you HAVE to purchase( to make good your being away from home for 6 days a week) and make you nnocently swipe your credit card, eyeing the sexy Mona (It''s a statutory requirement for all airhostesses to be named Mona, except for in the national carrier, where they can have two choices - Parvathi and Savithri), only to realize afterwards that they don’t carry the stuff on board and you will have to collect it at the airport.
 
 
                                   Part C - Once (and if at all), you manage to  land    
 
1. Baggage claim – After moving aimlessly for several hours, inspecting thousands of bags on the many conveyors you finally give up looking for your bag. You go to the airlines office, file a complaint for missing baggage and head to collect your in-flight auction purchase.
 
2.The auction item counter – Mostly is unmanned. If at all there is someone on duty, no matter which item code you had chosen inside the flight,during your auction adventure, only that particular item would be out of stock and they will promise to mail to to your address within the next 3 years. No, they won’t refund your 50,000 bucks either.
Don’t attempt fighting. Several bouncers (on their payroll) are always lurking nearby, to take you by the collar and hurl you out of the airport at the slightest provocation.
 
3.WTF – Finally, bruised and battered, cheated and defeated , you step out of the airport terminal and start looking for your pre-booked Hertz rental cab. It is nowhere to be seen. Exasperated (and also several days late for your meeting), you hail a cab and order him – “Navi Mumbai – fast !”
The cabbie, who looks like Rajnikanth’s twin brother, flashes his toothless , incredulous grin at you and informs you – “Whatta !!
 
Mumbai Ille.  Anna Nagar – nine hundred rupees a !”
 
Horrified you turn around and look at the airport building and realize that…….
 
You have just reached Chennai instead of Mumbai...!
 
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