The Real Cattle Class

Just when I was beginning to feel happy about the Air India turnaround, their guy at the check-in counter told me something that totally pissed me off. “Sir, you need to pay extra for the front row seats.” I wanted to ask him if I could pay him in kind. Like return the complimentary sandwich which they give in flights of duration less than 90 minutes. But I was sure that it wouldn’t work. Even he knew it was not worth even fifty bucks. I just asked him for any aisle seat other than the ones at the last row.  Those are the most terrible ones where everyone who is waiting to use the loo , and that is almost everybody on board on an early morning flight, leans on. Often the derriere of the person standing and the temples of the person sitting are on the same horizontal axis usually separated by a few nanometres. It appears that Indians have a special fascination for aircraft loos. Everybody checks-in atleast an hour before the take-off. But no one uses the washroom at the departure gates. The moment the safety belt sign is off half the plane rushes to the loo.  It is like a trial room in a mall on a Sunday at the peak of season’s sale. I could never understand the mass hysteria to relieve oneself in the claustrophobic confines whose suction mechanism is so embarrassingly loud that everyone on the plane knows when you are done.

 I was, mercifully, spared of the ordeal that day. I was given a seat on the emergency exit row. The ones that cannot be pushed back and you sit straight through the entire flight as if you were an infant fastened to the baby seat in the car. These seats come with a complimentary sermon from the most disinterested member of the cabin crew who explains how the emergency door should be operated. I once asked at the end of the special briefing if I could try it once. Unfortunately, the lady was not amused. It was just like the Indian education system. Only theory; No practice.

As I fastened my seatbelt, I started thinking about the meanness of the low-cost airlines. They set out with the idea that the passengers would pay less and get minimal services. Today, their fares match their full service counterparts, or at times even more, but the services are bare minimum. Even a zen monastery would appear luxurious in comparison. If you ask for water, they would serve you in shot glasses. Unless you are buying some of their tasteless over priced stuff, you don’t exist for them. When they found that people were not buying their food, they started selling the seats. As soon as the plane is airborne, a lady would announce that she is glad to offer the front row seats for an additional charge. Offer for an additional charge? Why can’t you cut the crap and say that you are selling. Corporate communications, I guess. After all, there should be some pretence of b-school education.  Who is going to pay for the extra measly 4 inches of leg space? Thanks, lady. You can keep the four inches for yourself. Strictly no pun intended. Whom are you trying to sell space. We Indians can squeeze in anywhere. An entire joint family panning three generations will comfortably live in a room measuring 10 feet by 10 feet in Mumbai. I am just waiting for the day when the begin charging for even looking out of the window. “Sir, 100 bucks for the city view and 50 bucks for the wing view”.

The pain of low cost airlines begins right at the check-in counters. They weigh your luggage like cocaine. Every gram matters. If they find you have exceeded the limit, even by a trifle, they cant contain their excitement at the prospect of billing you. They adhere to their rule book more sincerely than Pope adheres to the Bible. What amazes me more is that some smart women manage to break even these hardcore believers. I have seen women carry in their hand baggage, a hand bag, a laptop case and two carry bags (one with shoes and other with groceries and condiments). Their totes begin a little below their shoulders and, in most cases, easily reach their knees. Thet would easily take in three duffel bags like mine. My check-in baggage for a 15 day trip would be half their hand baggage for a day’s trip. Apparently, their handbags would have a world of things. Energy bars, hand towels, scarves, umbrellas and even gas masks that can withstand a nuclear biological chemical (NBC) situation. They actually carry food, cloth and shelter along with them and can survive for 24 hours in the event of a nuclear holocaust. On a usual day, these ladies freak me out. But I like them when they beat the crap out of the Shylocks sitting at the check-in counters.

After you land, the trauma continues in their buses that are used to ferry the passengers from the aircraft to the terminal. The buses wouldn’t budge till every inch of the bus is occupied. The last guy who gets in has his face plastered to the glass doors after it is shut. I strongly suspect that the drivers get some productivity linked incentive in transporting a planeload of passengers in the least number of trips. May be they get promoted as pilots. When I finally reach the terminal, I direly want to swear that I will never travel by a low-cost airline again. But for obvious reasons, I know that I cannot. So I silently exit the airport and take up my next challenge - Identify my vehicle among the scores of cars.

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The Physics of BP

Andhra Pradesh has a strange system of high school called as Junior Colleges. After 10th standard, students join these junior colleges where they do their 11th and 12th grades. In the summer of ‘97, I too joined one such Junior College. The Chairman looked scary and had a flair for expletives. He poached upon four lecturers from a nearby JC and used them to run his JC. BR and RP taught mathematics while BP and VK handled Physics and Chemistry respectively. In addition to teaching, each one was in-charge of a branch. Most JCs had many branches. All they needed was half-a-dozen rooms to start one.  

Among the four, BP was unforgettably bizarre. He wasn’t a great teacher. That was not a problem to us since good teachers, like good students, are a rare commodity. The problem was that he had an unshaken belief that he is an amazing teacher. He would announce his arrival mostly with his abdomen and sometimes with a raucous laughter. He looked as if Vikku Vinayakram buttoned up his shirt with his instrument. A tragicomedy in a state of perpetual motion, we often wondered why no external force was ever applied to disturb his inertia. He fancied himself to be a very engaging teacher and was convinced that his antics would etch the laws of motion forever in our memory. No one mustered courage to tell them that at his best he was plain irritating and at his worst he was self-derisive.

“When you throw a ball”, he would cry, enact and expect us turn our heads to follow the trajectory of the imaginary ball. Ninety percent of the class wouldn’t even bat an eyelid and look at him with a straight face. The rest threw themselves into slumber. Over the next two  years, with two hands, he threw projectiles, lifted weights, dropped masses, accelerated at 9.8 m/s²  , reflected light, refracted rays, heated rods, compressed gases, located centers of masses and gravity, propagated waves, transmitted electricity, inducted magnetism and his histrionics reached acme when he demonstrated dual nature of light. His pantomime had all the ingredients except silence. It was 1998. A good seven years before the Andhra Pradesh State Human Rights Commission would be constituted by the Government of Andhra Pradesh vide GO Ms No. 355, dated 11.08.2005 (General Administration (HRC) Dept.,) as per the provisions laid under Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993.  And BP took the maximum advantage of its absence.

His confidence never waned. His energy never sapped. His voice never mellowed. His jokes never improved. Some of us visited the adjacent Hospital for Mental Health at Erragadda to enquire if they had any preventive medicines / therapies to check mental degeneration amidst such daily doses of planned persecution. They did not meet with any success but one of them claimed to have seen BP’s name in the register that had list of escapees. Though, that increased our fears, we decided to dismiss it as a hallucination borne out of his constant remembrance.  

Those days, unable to bear the misery, I used to bunk the post-lunch classes. The modus operandi was simple. We would confidently walk out of the main gate pretending to get a refill for my pen. Once outside, we would walk to the end of the wall from where my friends would toss my bag over the wall. The rest of the afternoon would be spent at peace in some cinema theater.

During one such escapade, BP spotted us strolling at a street near our college. We got terribly scared. He made us walk back and took us to BR, who was in-charge of our branch. BP explained the whole incident with extreme dramatics.  He would roll his eyes to explain how he spotted us. He would clutch his palms to show how he caught us. He would oscillate his elbows in simple harmonic motion to demonstrate how we tried to run away. Then, there was an encore of the whole performance in every class he took in the post-lunch session that day. The rest of college was thankful to us for causing the only entertaining class of BP ever, while we suffered countless brutal blows with a broken branch of tree. BP continued to showcase the whole episode as an act of immense gallantry. To make the incident more dramatic and thereby raise his heroics, he began to report that we jumped over the wall and were running while he chased us in his car and caught us. That hurt us. We were honorable brats who walked out though the main gate and when caught respectfully walked back. But we couldn’t do much about our character besmirch. I later learnt that, year after year, BP continued to narrate his concocted heroics to every batch of students and finally stopped only when he learnt how the forest brigand Veerappan was nabbed.

Though we cursed him then, we now realize that his contribution to our lives was sizable. The continuous exposure to his daily melodrama had unconsciously strengthened our endurance levels. After those two years, be it university or workplace, India or abroad, none of us found any human being intolerable. Shailendra, who is now a senior software engineer, chuckles “In my very first meeting I laughed so approvingly at my boss’ PPJs (Pathetic PJs) that I got promoted thrice in the next two years. Thanks to BP, while my colleagues struggle to conceal their irritation, I spontaneously break into laughter which makes my boss feel that he is a reincarnation of Chaplain.”

Not just at work, BP’s classes have filled marital lives with pure bliss. Gokul, who is married over two years, chokes with gratitude when he remembers BP. “Thanks to his classes, these days I can effortlessly display poise when my wife animatedly describes for over two hours the saree of her choice. I can even pretend to be naturally excited when she describes the design as a mix of light periwinkle and peachy pink with prints of alternating strokes of honeydew green and cantaloupe orange.”

Hail BP!!!

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