Aviation in India seems to move at the speed of light these days. Time was when air travel in a domestic carrier was subject to the wishes of the mandarins that roamed those innovatively named counters called customer services. The customer would service the airlines and its indeterminable flying schedules by having to change his routine, route or reactions to travel cancellations, delays and unpredictability – not necessarily in that order.
The travails would continue till he touched down on the right airport. The question of landing a flight on the correct airport tarmac may cause you to wonder whether all that which went up in the name of Indian Airlines came down at the designated place on earth. Almost always, I assume. Which is not that bad a record. A personal experience that I went through, some years ago, prompted me to include this uncertainty as one of the hurdles one had to cross before you were assured of walking across the arrival lounge with your head held high instead of being retrieved from a corn field, having been mistaken for a MIG-21 pilot!
I was on a flight from Calcutta to Agartala (Tripura) around eleven years ago. We had flown over Bangladesh (the Indo-Bangla border incidentally, runs along the outer wall of the Agartala airport) when the announcement had just been made that the plane would be landing in a few minutes. Peering out the window, I took in the quaint landscape that breathed through the rolling countryside down below.
The plane descended sharply and touched down with the rattle of an oxcart traveling across the dry Tons river of Dehradun (where the whole world's pebbles seem to exist underfoot)! As soon as it did land, it swung this way and that, and then all of a sudden, picked up speed and dash on the tarmac, the kind that you would associate with a nervous space shuttle challenger taking off, when chased by Osama and his suicide bombers.
In a flash, the plane aimed its nose towards the stars and was hurtling up the sky like a diarrhoea-hit rocket, keen to complete its job before it got worse! I don’t know what a diarrhoea-hit rocket looks like, but I sure now know how passengers sitting inside such flying objects look! I was facing the sky as the angle changed (as did all my fellow passengers). A couple of unlucky, embarrassed ones burst out rather untimely from inside their toilets, wrenched out during the process of undressing. And all of a sudden, the plane was climbing as if it had been released from Cape Canaveral and in a moment, the earth was due to appear like a little irrelevant dot in the distance! Though Columbia hadn’t crashed till then, you could spot the ghosts of the Kandahar hijacking being re-run in everybody’s eyes!
This continued for a few minutes, as the shocked passengers regained composure and demanded to know why they were being forced to become unwilling astronauts. It seemed there were few people, if any, in the aircraft that day who knew the right answers. And the crew was certainly not one of them. The aircraft regained its regular trajectory soon after and proceeded to land safely, although without as much as an apology from the people who flew us. It was only later did the news come through that the initial landing had happened at a wrong, unauthorized airfield, used originally for World War II purposes.
My first reaction was that I had now known what it was to have flown with a modern day Don Quixote as a pilot – someone who was still doing duties as a fighter pilot against the Japs almost sixty years on, and had landed on a World War strip after flying like he was doing a valiant dogfight manouevre. The Agartala airport is a storehouse of many anecdotes, most of which can be left for another day.
Though private airlines have sped up travel and customer service (safety is still a concern), the one thing that refuses to change is the audio system in most airports in India. The funny aspect is that each time such a cacophony would start off in the airport, conversations would die and everyone would be hooked onto this incomprehensible balderdash. Immediately afterwards, people’s faces would contort; they would either be asking each other for clarification of the audio-message through silent messages or would be blasting the sound system as the announcement ended, depending on the level of urgency about catching a flight. Some years ago, Amar Bose of Bose Sound Systems offered to rework the noisy systems at our international airports for free, as a gift to his country of birth. The offer was turned down for unexplained reasons. The result is that the country that has produced the innovations of Bose still prefers noise to sound.
The Mumbai airport may have changed a lot but the approach from the sky hasnt! An incident I particularly remember is when I had to sit with the pilots in the cockpit since the airlines had sold one seat more than what could be accommodated! These were pre-911 times when aeroplanes still landed on flat pieces of earth rather than vertical objects of concrete and steel. Since they ran out of seats, I was happy to volunteer for a seat in the cockpit when offered one. The flight was bound for Mumbai and the pilot, a former Air Force officer, was generous enough to show me how the controls functioned and what those blinking lights all over the panels meant.
When we were about to land, I struggled to find the runway as all I could see was hundreds of shanties, hutments and chawls huddled together right under where I presumed the wheels of the airplane may have been. As I almost braced myself for a crash landing, and this time in the airport of the finance capital of modern India rather than a deserted World War II runway, out came from the miles and miles of shanties below, a black line that seemed at first to be a narrow lane between two rows of hutments. The line grew thicker and thicker and broader into a strip of road. The shanties around kept growing bigger too and I saw long rows of people, crouched like Wimbledon ball-boys, distanced at strategically planned intervals, and relieving themselves – the noise and wind of a passing airplane perhaps conditioning nature’s call. The strip kept growing till it emerged as the full-fledged tarmac of Mumbai’s Santa Cruz airport – the doorway to the emerging economic power of the world where I eventually landed.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
A Degree in Terror
The nature of professions has diversified in the last few years at a phenomenal rate. You name a sector and you can find it - software, energy, fashion, cuisine, networking, diverse consulting and terrorism. The last named has obviously recorded a higher rate of growth than the others - the demand and supply mechanisms chugging along at a frenetic pace, each one keeping up with the other.
Career opportunities have risen sharply since terrorism as a profession has made some stupendous strides in the last few years. Earlier you could be a terrorist by just signing up with one of those lunatic organizations and agreeing to blow up some obscure building in Beirut. However, most of the times you ended up neither blowing the building nor yourself, but ended up having your picture on the front pages of newspapers - peering out from the pages like a lousy idiot who had bungled! Things became more specialized since the 1990s as the profession began to become more corporatised and better funded. A terror grad could now travel to better places worldwide and get televised coverage flying over Wall Street.
Endowment guarantees from that other Buffet: Bin Laid-on, the Oracle of Osama from the Bin Laid-on Terror Monger Associates brought in the money that could hire eminent Pyongyang trained professors like AQ (AQ for Albert Qaida) Khan who were otherwise consigned to becoming dangerous ‘nuclear wastes’. You could specialize in fudging facts, snuffing lives, distorting facts as well as lives. As the money came in, career placements became more assured and internships at crucial ‘hedge’ funds like the Lash-e-Toybar and with relocation industry experts like the Deadwood Ibrahim’s D (D for Democratic) Company Associates helped serious aspirants. Afghanistan soon replaced US as a popular student destination where bren drain (from the word bren gun) helped research on how to create market explosions, how to make skyscrapers out of oil prices and make rubble pieces out of existing skyscrapers.
When my friend along with a career counseling team visited the other IIT - International Institute of Terrorism in West Pakistan (run by the Taliban, ISI fogies and out-of office generals), they were astonished to see that there were indeed innovative education themes to ‘inculcate’ a real learning experience. They met with the Dean of the International Institute of Terrorism (IIT). The Dean was a well-traveled professional who specialized in altering flight paths of airplanes, even while traveling as a passenger! He suggested they take a look at the mathematics and international relations exams for the school that was taking place the same day.
As they walked into the class where the exam was being held, they found in bold lettering on the blackboard some very important rules of the exam.
It read...
i) Students found copying will be shot on the spot.
ii) Any student coming in late after 10 minutes after the exam starts will be shot on the leg (wounds will be tended to, after the exam is over).
iii) AK-47s and Automatic Grenade Launchers are not allowed in the exam hall and its considered bad manners to ask permission for the same.
I am told it was not all harsh though. There were some concessions too. The exam proctor announced to loud cheers that students could keep their personal items like daggers, grenades, revolvers and the bombs they were carrying, as long as they postponed their use till the exams got over!
There were about fifty students taking the exam. You could tell they were amongst the brightest - you could feel the warmth of a dazzle that had the promise to set alight a house even without a matchstick!
My friend was given a copy of the question paper as the bright young fellows set about their task. As he rummaged through the questions, there were a few facts that caught the eye.
The Dean came forward and gave some solid figures about the stats they were targeting. "We have tied up with a company named Albert Qeda Kidnapping & Endgame Bajao Private Limited. They have a good record of threatening 100000 people per month over Telephone. 10% of the people they threaten are cinema stars in Mumbai (this also includes stars that have retired after 1 film and are earning their pension in Malad), 30% are Israeli businessman settled across the world (of which 29.6% worked for Mossad at some time in their lives), 20% are American tourists (in which 1.9% voted for the winning candidate in the last elections), 0.3% are Danes (which constitutes the total population in that country, including cartoonists and expat Danes), 5% are Brits (4% of which are celebrities who are protesting against landmines), 15% are in the Pakistani government (4% of which have been photographed with the current President), the rest include ex-communists, Hollywood guys, Chennai shopkeepers, judges and innocents."
There were those ones that tested your knowledge of international relations. This one, for instance. Question: If Israeli installations are attacked, there’s a 5% chance of success. On top of it, there’s a 100% chance of Israeli retaliation on our bases. If US installations are attacked, there’s a 100% chance of success but then there’s a 100% chance of our base being accidentally retaliated upon. What were the figures for India? This question had the maximum marks. The examiner told the answer to my friend. If Indian installations are attacked, there’s a 60% chance of success, 40% chance of getting caught, 0% chance of our base being attacked but 100% chances of Indians arguing amongst themselves and writing books about what caused such a terrorist attack in the first place. And of course, 100% increase in prison maintenance costs for India if these terror professionals were ever caught, smiled the Dean.
(As imagined by the author)
Career opportunities have risen sharply since terrorism as a profession has made some stupendous strides in the last few years. Earlier you could be a terrorist by just signing up with one of those lunatic organizations and agreeing to blow up some obscure building in Beirut. However, most of the times you ended up neither blowing the building nor yourself, but ended up having your picture on the front pages of newspapers - peering out from the pages like a lousy idiot who had bungled! Things became more specialized since the 1990s as the profession began to become more corporatised and better funded. A terror grad could now travel to better places worldwide and get televised coverage flying over Wall Street.
Endowment guarantees from that other Buffet: Bin Laid-on, the Oracle of Osama from the Bin Laid-on Terror Monger Associates brought in the money that could hire eminent Pyongyang trained professors like AQ (AQ for Albert Qaida) Khan who were otherwise consigned to becoming dangerous ‘nuclear wastes’. You could specialize in fudging facts, snuffing lives, distorting facts as well as lives. As the money came in, career placements became more assured and internships at crucial ‘hedge’ funds like the Lash-e-Toybar and with relocation industry experts like the Deadwood Ibrahim’s D (D for Democratic) Company Associates helped serious aspirants. Afghanistan soon replaced US as a popular student destination where bren drain (from the word bren gun) helped research on how to create market explosions, how to make skyscrapers out of oil prices and make rubble pieces out of existing skyscrapers.
When my friend along with a career counseling team visited the other IIT - International Institute of Terrorism in West Pakistan (run by the Taliban, ISI fogies and out-of office generals), they were astonished to see that there were indeed innovative education themes to ‘inculcate’ a real learning experience. They met with the Dean of the International Institute of Terrorism (IIT). The Dean was a well-traveled professional who specialized in altering flight paths of airplanes, even while traveling as a passenger! He suggested they take a look at the mathematics and international relations exams for the school that was taking place the same day.
As they walked into the class where the exam was being held, they found in bold lettering on the blackboard some very important rules of the exam.
It read...
i) Students found copying will be shot on the spot.
ii) Any student coming in late after 10 minutes after the exam starts will be shot on the leg (wounds will be tended to, after the exam is over).
iii) AK-47s and Automatic Grenade Launchers are not allowed in the exam hall and its considered bad manners to ask permission for the same.
I am told it was not all harsh though. There were some concessions too. The exam proctor announced to loud cheers that students could keep their personal items like daggers, grenades, revolvers and the bombs they were carrying, as long as they postponed their use till the exams got over!
There were about fifty students taking the exam. You could tell they were amongst the brightest - you could feel the warmth of a dazzle that had the promise to set alight a house even without a matchstick!
My friend was given a copy of the question paper as the bright young fellows set about their task. As he rummaged through the questions, there were a few facts that caught the eye.
The Dean came forward and gave some solid figures about the stats they were targeting. "We have tied up with a company named Albert Qeda Kidnapping & Endgame Bajao Private Limited. They have a good record of threatening 100000 people per month over Telephone. 10% of the people they threaten are cinema stars in Mumbai (this also includes stars that have retired after 1 film and are earning their pension in Malad), 30% are Israeli businessman settled across the world (of which 29.6% worked for Mossad at some time in their lives), 20% are American tourists (in which 1.9% voted for the winning candidate in the last elections), 0.3% are Danes (which constitutes the total population in that country, including cartoonists and expat Danes), 5% are Brits (4% of which are celebrities who are protesting against landmines), 15% are in the Pakistani government (4% of which have been photographed with the current President), the rest include ex-communists, Hollywood guys, Chennai shopkeepers, judges and innocents."
There were those ones that tested your knowledge of international relations. This one, for instance. Question: If Israeli installations are attacked, there’s a 5% chance of success. On top of it, there’s a 100% chance of Israeli retaliation on our bases. If US installations are attacked, there’s a 100% chance of success but then there’s a 100% chance of our base being accidentally retaliated upon. What were the figures for India? This question had the maximum marks. The examiner told the answer to my friend. If Indian installations are attacked, there’s a 60% chance of success, 40% chance of getting caught, 0% chance of our base being attacked but 100% chances of Indians arguing amongst themselves and writing books about what caused such a terrorist attack in the first place. And of course, 100% increase in prison maintenance costs for India if these terror professionals were ever caught, smiled the Dean.
(As imagined by the author)
Loins and Tigers
Have you ever noticed that we as a people, in the subcontinent, always seem to liken ourselves, in many metaphorical ways, to the family of big cats. Nothing less. There is the happy phenomenon of humans preferring to choose tigers as companions closer to themselves, more than with their predecessor monkeys, in a case of self-styled kinship.
History and the anthropological sciences have firmly established the connection between the simian family and the transformation to its current avatar. Therefore it is impossible to see what lies in common between a four-legged, roaring, 400 pound symbol of fearsome terror and a two legged, cringing, 120-plus pound, double-talking, social-climbing symbol of unpredictability! Perhaps, its a proud yearning to be compared to the big cat that prompts humans to convert a tiger or a lion into a facebook friend.
So, when Gurcharan Das proceeded to compare India with a giant, lumbering elephant than an aggressive, stalking tiger in his book –The Elephant Paradigm, he may have had hit the bull’s eye in terms of the right description but I have known people who didn’t quite seem impressed when told that India is like an elephant.
“Do you know India is not like a tiger”
“Yeah? Really? Whats India like, then?”
“Ëlephant …because it is big, moves slowly but surely.”
The expression that exploded on their faces was similar to the one big stars have when given a rear seat in an important cine awards ceremony.
What is this fetish for tigers that we are so quick to label people who we like as tigers or shers. I have often wondered why it can’t be horses or giraffes! Or, why not elephants, since we are trying to examine whether we, as a nation are more like elephants. Lets see this. You would sometimes pat your friend on the back praising his tough qualities (especially if you are from northern India) and exclaim, “ Oe ye toh sher hai.” Instead, try saying “Oe ye toh hathi hai,” and brace up for his response which I can assure you will be unsavoury at worst and unpleasant at best (depending upon his mood and body mass index), despite your well intentioned and creative praise! And to rub salt into your wounds, people will tell you how wrong you were in insulting a friend, despite your logic that you were merely replacing one regal species of the animal kingdom with another – an elephant at that, which is bigger, wiser and definitely more appropriate in this case.
I once noticed how a friend, who is gifted with a towering height, felt deeply offended when someone referred, in another such well meaning moment, to his young son as having the potential to be a giraffe like his father. Taking severe offence to such a reference to the spotted animal, he recounted how he pejoratively thought of the person making the remark as nothing short of a hippopotamus (given the similarity of physical frame). I fully appreciate the concerns of a father who wants the best of the animal world for his son, However, isn’t it strange how we feel for the big cat as if it was waiting to be compared to us.
Remember the none-too-pleasant comparisons we hear about people. An owl is said to be wise but ulloo ki tarah is not exactly how you would like your wisdom to be assessed. A dog is a man’s best friend but the phrase kutte jaisa doesn’t necessarily gift you with a certificate of a close pal. A donkey carries heavy load but let me know whether you found any tireless, hardworking homo sapien remotely willing to be associated with our braying hero. A lot has already been said about the monkey and the elephant. Bandar jaisa will mean you haven’t as yet graduated from your tree dwelling. But sher jaisa will almost certainly split your mouth wide open, as if you are too modest to be compared with our regal, carnivorous friend. Perhaps the reason lies in our overwhelming fondness for the majesty of kings and dynasties!
Surely its not something that we believe has come up overnight. What about our past? Remember the people whom we praised, admired and were enamoured of, ones we referred to as tigers or lions. Mansur Pataudi, the Indian cricket captain of the 60s with one eye and a brave heart was a rare tiger – an endangered species in the sport in India even today, Sheikh Abdullah, the lion of Kashmir was made out to be the only sher that survived the snow in the valley, in the days when tourists (later substituted by terrorists) trekked Gulmarg and AK47 was just an innocuous number plate on cars. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and Lala Lajpat Rai were all big cats who bearded the British lions in their den. Even the silver screen had a loin (never mind the mispronounced, ungainly, cringe worthy physiological reference)– Ajit , whose bristling dialogues were the stuff that inspires modern corporate lingo to this day – especially useful in issuing severe reprimands during performance assessment (Raabert , isko microprocessor me daal do, bit by bit pink-slip mil jayega) and tough takeover deals (Peter, yeh takeover nahi chahta toh ise overtake kar lo). Imagine this entire obsession with the big cats despite the warnings of one Jim Corbett in Man-eaters of Kumaon.
People and structures of all hues have received the epithet – be it terror types like the Tamil Tigers and Tiger Memon (of the Bombay blasts) or dhabas on way from Delhi to Chandigarh, most of them bearing that ubiquitous name - Shere e Punjab! This leads me to believe the word sher has a more imposing ring to it than the word tiger or lion (unless you pronounced it like Ajit). It is more daunting, commanding and has a directness to it.
A friend once told me a story of two Shers in a village near Lahore during the pre-partition era. The village had a direct battle to elect its chief and there were two contenders to it - Sher Singh and Sher Khan. When the debate ensued, Sher Singh sold the line to the villagers that he was mightier since he was blessed with two big cats in his name – sher and singh. Which meant he was equal to two shers! The people bought the line. He won and was duly elected the chief of the village - Sheron Wali Gali. And his grandson, who narrated the story to me, carries the mane. Shamsher Singh – that’s the name! Some Sher this!
History and the anthropological sciences have firmly established the connection between the simian family and the transformation to its current avatar. Therefore it is impossible to see what lies in common between a four-legged, roaring, 400 pound symbol of fearsome terror and a two legged, cringing, 120-plus pound, double-talking, social-climbing symbol of unpredictability! Perhaps, its a proud yearning to be compared to the big cat that prompts humans to convert a tiger or a lion into a facebook friend.
So, when Gurcharan Das proceeded to compare India with a giant, lumbering elephant than an aggressive, stalking tiger in his book –The Elephant Paradigm, he may have had hit the bull’s eye in terms of the right description but I have known people who didn’t quite seem impressed when told that India is like an elephant.
“Do you know India is not like a tiger”
“Yeah? Really? Whats India like, then?”
“Ëlephant …because it is big, moves slowly but surely.”
The expression that exploded on their faces was similar to the one big stars have when given a rear seat in an important cine awards ceremony.
What is this fetish for tigers that we are so quick to label people who we like as tigers or shers. I have often wondered why it can’t be horses or giraffes! Or, why not elephants, since we are trying to examine whether we, as a nation are more like elephants. Lets see this. You would sometimes pat your friend on the back praising his tough qualities (especially if you are from northern India) and exclaim, “ Oe ye toh sher hai.” Instead, try saying “Oe ye toh hathi hai,” and brace up for his response which I can assure you will be unsavoury at worst and unpleasant at best (depending upon his mood and body mass index), despite your well intentioned and creative praise! And to rub salt into your wounds, people will tell you how wrong you were in insulting a friend, despite your logic that you were merely replacing one regal species of the animal kingdom with another – an elephant at that, which is bigger, wiser and definitely more appropriate in this case.
I once noticed how a friend, who is gifted with a towering height, felt deeply offended when someone referred, in another such well meaning moment, to his young son as having the potential to be a giraffe like his father. Taking severe offence to such a reference to the spotted animal, he recounted how he pejoratively thought of the person making the remark as nothing short of a hippopotamus (given the similarity of physical frame). I fully appreciate the concerns of a father who wants the best of the animal world for his son, However, isn’t it strange how we feel for the big cat as if it was waiting to be compared to us.
Remember the none-too-pleasant comparisons we hear about people. An owl is said to be wise but ulloo ki tarah is not exactly how you would like your wisdom to be assessed. A dog is a man’s best friend but the phrase kutte jaisa doesn’t necessarily gift you with a certificate of a close pal. A donkey carries heavy load but let me know whether you found any tireless, hardworking homo sapien remotely willing to be associated with our braying hero. A lot has already been said about the monkey and the elephant. Bandar jaisa will mean you haven’t as yet graduated from your tree dwelling. But sher jaisa will almost certainly split your mouth wide open, as if you are too modest to be compared with our regal, carnivorous friend. Perhaps the reason lies in our overwhelming fondness for the majesty of kings and dynasties!
Surely its not something that we believe has come up overnight. What about our past? Remember the people whom we praised, admired and were enamoured of, ones we referred to as tigers or lions. Mansur Pataudi, the Indian cricket captain of the 60s with one eye and a brave heart was a rare tiger – an endangered species in the sport in India even today, Sheikh Abdullah, the lion of Kashmir was made out to be the only sher that survived the snow in the valley, in the days when tourists (later substituted by terrorists) trekked Gulmarg and AK47 was just an innocuous number plate on cars. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and Lala Lajpat Rai were all big cats who bearded the British lions in their den. Even the silver screen had a loin (never mind the mispronounced, ungainly, cringe worthy physiological reference)– Ajit , whose bristling dialogues were the stuff that inspires modern corporate lingo to this day – especially useful in issuing severe reprimands during performance assessment (Raabert , isko microprocessor me daal do, bit by bit pink-slip mil jayega) and tough takeover deals (Peter, yeh takeover nahi chahta toh ise overtake kar lo). Imagine this entire obsession with the big cats despite the warnings of one Jim Corbett in Man-eaters of Kumaon.
People and structures of all hues have received the epithet – be it terror types like the Tamil Tigers and Tiger Memon (of the Bombay blasts) or dhabas on way from Delhi to Chandigarh, most of them bearing that ubiquitous name - Shere e Punjab! This leads me to believe the word sher has a more imposing ring to it than the word tiger or lion (unless you pronounced it like Ajit). It is more daunting, commanding and has a directness to it.
A friend once told me a story of two Shers in a village near Lahore during the pre-partition era. The village had a direct battle to elect its chief and there were two contenders to it - Sher Singh and Sher Khan. When the debate ensued, Sher Singh sold the line to the villagers that he was mightier since he was blessed with two big cats in his name – sher and singh. Which meant he was equal to two shers! The people bought the line. He won and was duly elected the chief of the village - Sheron Wali Gali. And his grandson, who narrated the story to me, carries the mane. Shamsher Singh – that’s the name! Some Sher this!
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