Indian Sahara

I was in Mumbai this weekend. As I reached the airport to board my flight, I prepared myself for an uncomfortable and cold journey as I was traveling by Indian Airlines, rechristened, Indian.

I am accustomed to the cold atmosphere of the hostesses, bad food, unclean old seats, no leg space, scary service and air pockets as my several previous visits had also been through IA.

The first thing that surprised me was the attitude of the Air Hostesses which was almost bordering on pleasant! Now that was a welcome surprise because more often than not, one is greeted by a plastic smile on a middle aged face plastered with every possible shade of any possible cosmetic product.

Not this time. The Hostesses were pleasant and were greeting with almost a genuine smile. But the one who really took the cake was the Captain, Sumanta Roychoudhary.

Due to air traffic our flight was getting delayed while landing and the captain proactively informed the passengers on board that we were not being able to land as our flight was the 7th in line waiting to land. Thus, by informing the passengers in advance, the captain ensured that the airlines was not blamed for reasons beyond its control.

After encircling a few times over Mumbai, the Captain seemed to get bored, and suddenly we heard his voice informing us that since the Air Traffic was not letting us land we get a chartered trip to Matheran, very close to Mumbai (So that certain sections of the population do not protest). And then he proceeded to point out important locational details when we were circling Matheran.

This incident is actually the reason why I am writing this post. It made me sit up and take notice on a regular mundane flight. The confidence, pro activeness and good humour of the Captain caught me unawares. And its not that he was wasting the over expensive aviation turbine fuel also, as it would have been anyways spent circling the super busy Mumbai airport waiting for the landing signal, as all aircrafts do.

Compare this with our very efficient private airlines - Sahara in this case. I was taking a return flight back. The flight was delayed while take off for over an hour on the runway itself for similar reasons.

And here, after the much delayed take off, after serving dinner and after all passengers on board were half way through their dinner, did the Captain have time for a round of Sahara Pranaams. Though he did go overboard in this and his brief welcome speech lasted at least 5 minutes in which only he knew what he spoke. One could make out that the Captain was speaking to us but what was he speaking was a big question mark which nobody bothered enough to answer.

One thing that I could make out in his welcome speech - he was informing us that " There are 5 cabin crew to serve you and to make your journey pleasant.Only one female and 4 male hosts will be serving you during the flight"

Need I say more? After this sexist remark, one can only sympathize with that one female who is at his beck and call.

Experiences on both the flights were quite opposite to the notions I had from my previous travels. Where one is moving ahead , shrugging the complacency and gearing up to fight the competition the other is donning on the complacency coat after a good initial round of applause.

If this is the new dawn for the Indian, then so be it. After the risk that the airline has taken in dropping the airlines and keeping only the Indian, it now has more responsibility and it better live upto its name and ours too.

As for Sahara, with the recent opening of the international routes to private airlines, if this is the sluggishness that the airline displays, then it wont be long before Sahara is lost in the Jet speed of a Kingfisher, Spice a Deccan or an Indian.