The Anatomy of an air-travel

Take a BMTC bus, remove the conductor (preferably his age-old leather bag too), fix the windows and weld them tight to prevent ambitious youngsters to try a trick or two, clean up the usual paaam-paaam bulging-honk, drive it into a room which has wallpapers of cloud formations pasted everywhere and make violent shakes . Yeah, that is how your first trans-continental flight feels, and that includes movies much like our buses down here. no wonder airbuses are called airbuses. And when i say a bus, i mean a bus, only a bus, and nothing else but a bus. They only had to screen some rajkiran movie and i would have happily told myself am on my way from madurai to madras.

If you are a travel-phobiac who lives smelling lemon and eating avomine (anti-throwup tablet) when travelling up a hill, you going to have a ball when the flight lands. I had one, and if i hadnt actually controlled the urge to throw up, the guy sitting next to me would have had one too.

As you slowly doze off thinking of all those tv ads with nice seats and feathery pillows, waiting for your pretty looking airhostess to cover you in sheets as you dream about home, you see a passing-by hostess give you a hopeless pillow and sheet. Now what you saw on tv was the business class, and unless you have a singularly impressive relationship with your travel and business managers, you can only cross it with a sigh as you walk your way to economy.


"Sir, would you like pork fried rice or beef stew" is a question that can throw me off even if am on firmer ground. It is a question which would probably make my great-grand father pick up a cannon from his british times and shoot us off the air. Everytime someone says pork, i dont see little white pigs playing happily in a picket-fenced lawn, but big, black, hairy ones rolling in ditches. Cant really think of a better appetite-killer. I gave a feeble "I asked for a vegetarian meal". I think the lady suppressed a laughter out of respect for her job. "Your last name ??". anticipating silence. "Sir, we dont have a vegetarian meal in your name". disappointed silence. "but we seem to have an unused veg meal in someone else's name. would you like to have it". On any other day, or if i was in a restaurant at home, i could've made faces and walked off. But since to walk off i would need a parachute and the south china sea is not exactly my favorite landing spot,i said yes.

She brought me something which she thought was vegetarian. I thought it was stale pongal with spinach and tomatoes. One spoon of it goes in and i thought we entered some turbulence zone. No, this was a turbulence in my own personal universe since if what i ate was vegetarian, then the Earth is a parallelogram. "Err.. is this vegetarian" "Sir, yes sir" "You sure ??" "Sir, yes sir" and that is when it dawned on me that the word vegetarian is such a relative term. For a bengali brahmin, if fish can be a vegetarian, for someone who loves snails and squids, chicken is probably pure vegetarian. Ah, no, i dont pick my menu from discovery channel. thanks.