Thirty-five minutes remaining — I have never missed a flight in my life. I inherited the traits of my father — a duty-bound man, who sits in the porch waiting, with well-oiled, neatly-parted hair, a perfumed handkerchief in his trouser’s pocket, wearing polished leather shoes, with all luggage packed two to three business days before the travel date.
I am usually on time, but today’s different. I have just managed to reach T2 in Delhi — an airport that doesn’t deserve a whole integer for its name. It could have been a T-1.5 or something. It’s just a food-court with an attached runway. It always feels like it’s evacuating citizens in an emergency.
I don’t really like flying. The only bearable part about flying is when you are 35,000 feet in the air, casually sipping something. Everything before and after that is miserable. It starts with the queue to enter the airport. The Digiyatra line is longer — a sign of our times — and hence I join the usual one. A couple is ahead of me, probably going for a honeymoon. Such couples are almost always a bottleneck. The girl has an understated air of the tickets being sponsored by her family as a “gift”. The guy is just checking out who’s checking out his wife. I look away in the nick of time. Gathering material for this column is tricky.
The queue crawls, the well-travelled ones recall their experience abroad, where they could just walk into the airport. “India is like this only” — upward mobility in India is about how quickly you can trash luxuries you couldn’t afford last week. I have been through that path of hypocrisy.
The security guy at the entry asks the couple for their tickets; the guy hands him his phone, zooms it for him in a bit of proactiveness. The security personnel asks for a photo ID. The guy looks at the girl. The girl panics. “It must be somewhere”. She excavates her handbag. An entire Blinkit-dark-store worth of accessories come out, but no Aadhaar card. After five excruciating minutes, they find it. It’s a classic Indian trait — being carefree and taking life as it comes. Who cares about being ready with your documents?
Once we enter, I rush ahead, carefully overtaking them, lest I find them again, standing ahead of me in the security check queue. Another ordeal.
I think about how global terrorism has added an extra hour to every flight. Imagine the number of man hours lost. That’s one of the biggest costs we pay for terrorism.
With this sobering thought, I show my boarding pass again to a security guy and he allows me to take part in the great Civic Sense Olympics, which is the security check. It’s where the two Indias meet. Naturally, there is friction. But, eventually, it becomes a tutorial, where people learn the concept of a queue.
“What about that Apple watch?” The guard points at my wrist. I meekly take it off so that it joins its ecosystem of gadgets in the tray. The scenes often invoke a gunpoint robbery.
After this procedural humiliation, where pot-bellied uncles are told to take off their belts, I walk out victorious for having been doubly careful, scarred by all those occasions when I left behind at least one precious belonging. I look for a display to check the boarding gate. I am a bit hungry, and there is a cafe on the way, but as an Indian, I must make the long journey to my designated gate to make sure it exists. Only after, can I partake in any acts of refreshment.
When you make it to the boarding area in time, braving everything on the way, your body releases stress-relieving endorphins. In a bid to celebrate this mini victory, you don’t mind paying ₹450 for an emaciated dosa and sambhar that tastes like engine oil. That’s how airport economics works — endorphins pushing KFC sales.
After showing my boarding pass for the 16th time, I board the flight and settle in my seat, only to notice the flight attendant explaining something to the emergency row fliers: “Are you guys comfortable in English or mai aapko Hindi mein brief kar doon (should I brief you in Hindi)?”
People in other rows crane their necks to see what’s going on. Suddenly, it becomes a prestige issue for the emergency row. One of them goes, “Yes, yes. English good I am.”
Macaulay left a permanent scar on this nation. With this thought, I look for something to sip at the 35,000th feet.
Abhishek Asthana is a tech and media entrepreneur, and tweets as @gabbbarsingh. The views expressed are personal
