When some are more equal than others

The Air India plane at Heathrow was on time and boarding had begun. As per my boarding pass I had occupied my seat in business class. The stewardess served a welcome drink. As half an hour was left for takeoff, I did not expect anything specific to happen. However, I was proved wrong. The head steward approached me with a polite request. I was being upgraded to first class and would have to vacate my seat and move to a new one. While having to get up after one has settled in one’s seat is a bother, it was more than compensated by the shift to a superior class. While I gathered my belongings and made my way to the first class section, I discovered I was not alone in being upgraded. Many others in the business class were also being upgraded. Why?

The reason became clear quite soon, as the head steward explained. The reason given to us was this: the England cricket team, on their way to India, was travelling on the flight. The team could not be accommodated entirely in first class as the number of seats available was less than the team’s strength. The airline had offered a combination of first and business class seats to be distributed among team members as the captain deemed fit.

However, the team’s captain did not agree to this offer, and insisted that the entire team should travel by the same class. He didn’t mind if all team members travelled by business class as that class had an adequate seats. The airline agreed to this. To make so many seats available in business class, it had to get previously allotted seats vacated. That is why passengers like me were asked to go to first class.

This episode brings out a moral, one for which I have praise for the England captain. His stand was justified by his argument that all team members should enjoy the same benefits. Psychologically too, such actions nurture a feeling of camaraderie among team members, which brings out the best in their performance. Not all captains are, however, so democratic! On my travels to New Zealand a few years ago, I happened to talk to some local Indians who narrated the story of a visiting team, whose captain travelled with his wife.

When the team landed, they were told that there was a minibus waiting for them to take them to their hotel. The first to come out was the captain, who with his wife boarded the bus. Having no patience, he asked the minibus driver to go to the hotel. After he left, the rest of the team began trickling out through the arrivals exit, only to discover that their captain had commandeered the team bus for his own use! They had to wait till another van was provided. Action of this kind by the captain creates a wall between him and the the team.

The Heathrow experience brought to my memory another incident which also questioned this doctrine of equality. I was serving on the Indo-US subcommission for education and culture. The subcommission had some “official” members, who were senior IAS officers, and a few of us who were “non-official”, appointed because of expertise in specific fields. The US side had a similar composition, and each side had a leader. On the Indian side, the leader was G. Parthasarathy. The subcommission met in alternate years in India and the US.

We, the non-official members, were issued tickets on Air India business class when the meeting was to be held in the US. All the members, official and non-official, were accommodated in prestigious hotels with per diem provided by the Government of India through the Indian embassy. However, I discovered that the official members were travelling by first class, and I wondered why there was such a difference? In fact, if one looked at the issue, one could see that the official members were there because of the position they held and not due to any ability, while the non-official members like Girish Karnad were there due to their achievements. Indeed, I wrote a letter to GP bringing to his attention the apparent inconsistency of different classes of travel for members of the same delegation. I also marked a copy to the secretary of the relevant ministry.

GP replied, though the ministry stayed silent. GP agreed with my view and said that in future he would take the stand that all delegation members should travel by the same class. I do not know what subsequently happened. But I do know my membership of the panel was not continued. But as I travelled that day from Heathrow to Mumbai I could not help wondering whether the equality that guided the English captain was appreciated by our bureaucrats. I think George Orwell got it right when he said although all men are equal, some are more equal than others.