As pretty as an Airport

A very wise man had once penned, “It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.’ “ To those of you who find the above lines familiar, I raise my non-existent hat. But my personal preferences aside, there is a general perception in the Indian populace that the airport is a great place to be. Of course it is. It is a shopping mall with a runway.

Let me clear it out that my experience of airports has been limited to four flights and three airports, namely the ones at Hyderabad, Ahmadabad, and Bangalore. Me and the one at Kolkata have only exchanged a few looks at each other. If you think that this makes me an inexperienced flyer and that I should not be writing about Airports, you are probably right. Good luck convincing me of that.

If you are from the ever expanding Indian middle class like me, you probably take a cab to the airport. Oh please, lets face it, the flights that we can afford are never at the time when a bus can take you to the airport. So, you are on your cab, about to reach the airport, when your cabby tells you, ” Sir 5 minute se zyada rukne ka parking charges extra lagega“. For the un-initiated, parking charges for a four wheeler can be up to 20% of your ride fare. Suddenly, you are a bollywood hero (or for the dilwales amongst us, the heroine) in a Bollywood flick, picking up your luggage and running out of your cab to meet that beloved who is getting away the moment the cab stops. Get, set, go!

You are dragging your wheeled suitcase up to the gate marked “Departures”, holding the printout of your “makemytrip” ticket and some ID proof in one hand, trying to look for the shortest queue to stand in along with checking the counters for your airline and the gate/status of your flight at the same time. Amid this herculean effort of multitasking, you see the trolley fanatics. There is a particular type of people you will see at airports, whose aim seems to be pushing a trolley. Sometimes their trolleys are so minimally laden that they have to put their children on it to make it look full. And that is for the ones who are bothered. I have seen people carrying their hand bags in a trolley. Kudos to the genes of your forefathers showing through! Both Amitabh Bachhan and Govinda would be so proud to have influenced you with their masterpieces in your tender years.

Once you make it through the gates, congrats! You are in Wonderland. Let the wonders unfurl themselves in front you. But first, you need to check in your luggage. This shouldn’t take long, at least it did not in my case. And wherever it did, old uncles who were after the pretty airlines staff at the counter were responsible. You might even get to see the occasional bargain about the additional luggage fee. We just can’t help it, can’t we? “Bhaiya do kilo ke liye itna?!”

So now you are ready. All tagged and suddenly lighter, you notice people still carrying heavy bags around you. Why? Because hand luggage is not weighed na! *clever wink*

The same clever people can be often seen painfully unloading their bags of laptops, phones, baseball bats, machine guns, mixer grinders etc at the security check. Some just don’t let go of their phones. Can’t blame them. Afterall, “har ek friend zaroori hota hai!” Forget about being groped, we are more worried about whether someone else will pickup our laptop or phone 😛

Anyways, the sentries of wonderland have let you into the inner citadel. Now its your playground. Take selfies, buy coffee that is priced 20-30 times what it costs to make it, and sip it while you look at the amazing architecture of the airport. Have you ever noticed how every airport tries to look like anything but an Airport. I mean, cmon guys, is it really that hard to design an airport without going overboard with the ambient lights and the glass windows and all the gloss? For a service that is supposed to be a waiting place (read:PORT) for your mode of transport to arrive, it seems as if Airports are trying too hard to get you to stay there and sell your kidneys and donate your blood while you are at it. I have seen brands and outlets at Airports which I earlier imagined as fictional. Doesn’t it remind you of that big mall in your city? Then again, maybe they are for the same purpose for which malls exist: time-pass.

Recently, at Bangalore airport, I felt thirsty. Now, in an airport, you would find instructions for things which are as simple as which door to walk in through and which one to walk out through. But when the airport authorities decided to put fountain style drinking water basins, they decided that their efforts to ape what happens in certain “developed nations” are much more important than trying to stay relevant to India. I can bet that even the biggest and most costliest stores and clubs have taps for drinking water, not these abominations which can never fill your mouth with a gulp of water. Why am I so pissed about it? Because I was having a bad headache and was looking for drinking water to have medicine with. I am not asking you to remove them. Just stop trying to make us use them. Put them on the international flight terminals. Isn’t it already enough that we are trying to ape toilet paper when water is more hygienic any day? (Doubt me? try wiping your curry bowl with a piece of paper next time, then eat off it after 12 hours). Trust us, IT and mathematics is not the only thing we are good at, outsourcing some common sense to us could do you a lot of good too.

Yet, out of all the above things, there is nothing that irritates me as much as what I am going to talk about now: The Pretenders. There is a particular breed of people you see at the airports. The mock Ambanis, the pseudo Angelinas, the twitterati glitteratis, the selfie queens and the swag kings. The ones who dress up for a flight as if they are going to skydive into a dinner party or a night club (Sorry, random Punjabi dude on flight 466 to Hyderabad, but wearing gold rimmed black sunglasses for a flight on a perfectly cloudy day seems a tad bit too pretentious, especially while taking a selfie with your equally pretentious group, don’t you think?).

They look as if they are literally trapped in economy class and it is a punishment just to sit next to your puny mortal self. Take my word when I tell you this, these are the ones who are the last to wear their seatbelts and the first to get up the moment the flight lands, as if the pilot is an idiot to have instructed otherwise, the last to switch off their devices and the first to take the flight wali selfie and upload it using the free airport wifi. As if the uncle shoving his butt accross your face along the cramped aisle while oogling the air hostess and the aunty spread out over her seat like butter over naan weren’t enough. One thing you would never find them doing is ordering from the in-flight catering. That is still Uncle-ji’s forte.

Its that easy to follow

No, I do not hate airports. I am just plain confused. Do we really need all that glitz and glamour and overpriced necessities at a place that is supposed to be a transit halt? Did we get this majorly wrong as a species?

Yet, after all the effort and money burnt, we are yet to hear, “as pretty as an Airport”.

Image Courtesy: Google Images