Flying high, low cost

Nandagopal Rajan

I was returning to the skies after 15 long years, almost a lifetime as far as Indian aviation is considered. The last time I flew was much before the bright-tied Damania tried his bit to bring the Indian skies to the middle-class below. Then flying was anything but low cost, the reason why my grandfather decided that the best way to give me a trip of the airways was by taking a flight from Thiruvananthapuram to Bangalore. The flight was so short that by the time I'd overcome the bitterness of the welcome drink, we were circling over the Garden City.
But, things have changed this millennium, mainly because of Air Deccan – the very carrier I opted for to break my rather long interlude from the skies. I was flying Kolkata-New Delhi, all of two hours.
The first few hurdles, right from getting the boarding pass to the security clearance–yes, I too had to get my wallet x-rayed–passed without a glitch. Hmm, the Deccan experience wasn't as bad I thought it would be.
"Be the first off the bus and first on the plane to get the best seats," we'd been warned by frequent fliers, reminding of the daily jostling for seats on the college bus. I was hoping to be greeted by the colour-coded saris of the airhostesses, but was instead ushered in T-shirt clad contemporaries touting the latest deals on offer.
The flight soon filled up and we were in air within a few minutes, just five minutes late…this was getting better. Soon, it was time for snacks and coffee. Our eyes lit up on seeing the Café Coffee Day on the paper cups, time for an early morning cappuccino, I thought. A couple of minutes and Rs 25 later, I got to know that it was going to be a make your-own-coffee experience at 25,000 ft. The rest of the coffee break isn't much to write about.
Hovering over Delhi I tried to locate my colony, saw the Qutub Minar and spotted our office building nearby, and yes it was much better than Google Earth. I glanced at my watch as soon as we landed. 8 am: we were dot on time. No wait for the luggage either. We were on the road by 8.25. I had made up my mind, Deccan it will be from now on, after all it costs just a few hundred rupees more that the regular AC III-tier.
But the euphoria lasted only till I reached home and opened my suitcase to find the LCD of my digital camera smashed. Maybe Deccan did some cost cutting with the baggage handlers. A week on I'm waiting for a reply from the company. The repairs will ensure that my trip to Kolkata is billed first class…so much for low cost.

my fish

The one under the stone is an Oscar. He's dead though. The two silver dollars are also no more. The jewel fish now enjoy their retirement in a cement tank.

Dance of the learned

To understand Kathakali is like learning a new language and mastering it. It's tougher since you have to comprehend the sign language as well as the spoken (padam) at the same time.

A watery grave?

Nandagopal Rajan

It’s a long wait for me every evening. I wait, all dressed up for office, to hear the hissing and spluttering which announces the arrival of my daily ration of water. Often, it fails to turn up on time, and I have to leave, my mind full of fear that the tank will run dry in the midst of my morning ablutions.
But when she comes, she comes with a bang. Often with so much silt that I wonder if the water is being piped in straight from Lake Pareechu. Thank God my buckets are better than Nathpa Jhakri, or I’d have had to shut shop for desilting. But even they call it quits by the weekend, their innards so murky that I have to disembowel them and give them a good rinsing. Soon they are ready to take on the next day’s muck. Don’t get tense; I have better sense than drink something which has a chemical content more elaborate than H20.
I get a weekly supply of bottled water. Come on, stop smiling. It’s better than that piped stuff. Yeah, I’m sure it’s full of pesticide too, but at least it’s been filtered somewhere. But I’m trained to tackle contingencies like this. “In a disaster zone drink tea,” they used to tell us at journalism school in Orissa. Soon, we had the chance to put our survival training to practical use.
The Super Cylcone of 1999 made sure we had nothing else to wash down our Haldiram’s Soan Papdi, the only packed food available, except carbonated drinks. There weren’t many takers for colas in Orissa, they were just too expensive. After hearing the horror stories that the catastrophe bought with it, most of them associated with water in one way or the other, we were happy to be drinking the liquid “safely bottled” before the cyclone.
But that was seven years ago. This is my first summer in Delhi, and I already dream of the wells back home in coastal Kerala which used to nearly spill over after every monsoon downpour. But then we’d scorn at the sight of ground water, often coming up with weird excuses: “It smells of moss…where do the fish shit…it’s salty.”
I’m sure God Almighty is taking his revenge, subjecting me to the torture of having to bathe in water that reminds me of a particular sewer in downtown Cochin. I distinctively remember my chemistry teacher saying the smell was that of a sulphuric compound. I’ve been vaccinated against Hepatitis, but I’m still afraid of all the underworld connections my glass of water is making before making his appearance through my tap. I’d rather drink a glass of pesticide. 

Two sides, same coin

The best thing christian education has given me is the ability to understand how other religions
work. Though I am not very religious myself, I know for sure that I will never become a fanatic. You just cannot think that way when you have learned how other religions think. There is no one RIGHT after that, its always your right and their right. You just have to acknowledge there are two sides. All communal problems arise when you end up saying that this is what I think and I'm right. There is no scope of fanatical thought if you even acknowledge the other side.

To be continued