What is it about travelling Indians that the world hates? Are other nationalities exemplary passengers? Do the predominantly “white” flight crews of international airlines do a service industry proud? One that mints millions off populous and upwardly-mobile India? The Emirates Airlines crash last week sparked an acerbic and racist Twitter exchange between a former crew member and enraged NRIs. The subject was a video of the evacuation during which an Indian is heard urging another to grab his laptop. It also brought back more than three-decade-old memories of some flying years with a leading international airline to this writer and prompted a chat with contemporaries of the time from India and Pakistan, who used to work all flights passing through this region. We are advocates, journalists and entrepreneurs today and there’s a reason.
Back then, international airlines recruited only university graduates in India — ironically, to work alongside their native crews who mostly came with the barest education and tons of prejudice. For Indian undergrads looking for the equivalent of today’s “gap year” in the disastrously “socialist” 1970s and 1980s, flying offered both limitless travel and the pursuit of any advanced degree of their choice, even if on the bleary side of midnight in hotels around the world. Last week’s crash and the picture-perfect evacuation reminded us of a mandatory annual refresher in safety equipment procedures (SEP) at Heathrow. It included countless emergency evacuations in smoke-filled simulators, memorising all equipment on board: from portable oxygen to fire extinguishers to tool and emergency medical kits, desert and island survival gear, etc.
There was rigorous first aid, passenger psychology, etc. In short, everything aimed at saving other lives before your own. Indeed, its most stentorian lesson was the in-flight emergency. How do you evacuate 350 petrified people if an aircraft “ditches” (lands on water), or belly-lands, or lands either nose up or down? The course is compulsory even today. But, little has changed about the players involved in the drama of commercial flight: neither the “dreaded” — in this case Indian — passenger, nor many blatantly racist flight crews, nor airline policies. As MP Shashi Tharoor points out, airlines continue to operate their most run-down aircraft on the India routes, old crates they wouldn’t dream of using across the Atlantic. Indian travellers contribute the maximum revenue to aviation giants and yet, India arrivals and departures are timed to suit their own time zones.
Islamabad-based Jamila Aslam remembers telling a white stewardess off, for sneering at a passenger eating with his hands. This writer recalls sparring with another who refused an Indian a third drink and removed a beefsteak while “rearranging” peas and potatoes on the same tray, to serve it as a “vegetarian” meal. And a Bangladeshi Haj pilgrim who was sent by the same attendant to spread his namaz mat outside the toilets: this, on board a wide-bodied aircraft, when all cabin services were done and there were plenty of other secluded areas more appropriate for prayer.
“Sensitivity has never been the plus point of white cabin crew and I am sure that Arabs, Mexicans, Russians or Chinese would have behaved no differently about their laptops on that Emirates aircraft last week,” says Delhi-based Reena Mirchandani. But even if airlines were to change their attitude towards India overnight, would we shed our many annoying ways? Unlikely! And a lack of education, money or international exposure has nothing to do with it. If the adult literacy rate in India hovered at around 47 per cent in 1985, it is well over 90 per cent in 2016. If India’s per capita GDP was then about Rs 13,000, it is estimated at over Rs 1 lakh today (IMF). In 1991, a mere 1.94 lakh Indians travelled overseas. Last year, we nearly crossed the two crore mark. (Source: Bureau of Immigration)
Yet, from departure gate to luggage belt at arrivals, we are largely unbearable. A stampede for boarding, pushing aside wheelchair patients and mothers with infants. A scramble to occupy seats near friends, without booking them. Stony indifference to the all-crucial safety demo, usually in several Indian languages. A sudden demand for a vegetarian meal without ordering it ahead on board a long-haul flight, which must cater proportionate to all tastes. Brawls with the crew over closing the bar 20 minutes prior to landing, as per global customs regulations. Talking loudly and blaring music on cellphone speakers at 2 am on a “red-eye” flight. Meeting requests by food-serving cabin crew to spitters to clean up paan-soiled toilet seats with angry demands for a “complaint form”.
And today’s flight attendants say that “Ay, tch-tch” and clicking fingers remain the favoured way to call them. Is it any wonder then, that across the world, all friendly “customer service” ends at the gate of the next flight to or from India? One explanation is that flying still remains expensive and inspires a silly sense of “arrivisme”. Another, that “nationalistic politics” have successfully implanted the “we-are-like-this-only” message. Whatever the reason, we Indians believe it is our birthright to carry our quirks wherever we go, and that it’s up to the world, not us, to rush up in embrace.
Irrespective of origin, many passengers can be nightmares for flight crews in emergencies. Mirchandani recalls a decompression when several passengers who had earlier ignored safety briefings, clutched oxygen masks to their ears, while some young parents forgot to mask their infants. Today’s flights are non-smoking, but those days, there were angry refusals to stop smoking near the exits (where there are always clusters of highly inflammable portable oxygen cylinders). Many parents still adamantly refuse extension seat belts or bulkhead seats for infants as per global safety regulations. During our time, there was not much “poor country” India could do about racism or safety violations. But 30 years on, it is high time that India put its well-heeled foot down.
Airlines should stop focusing on mindless advertising about fine wines and flat beds and concentrate on far more imperative awareness campaigns about safety. At the cost of revenue and if need be in 27 languages, passengers must be drilled in and held accountable for aberrant behaviour in emergencies. Global cabin crews must be given compulsory training in indigenous cultures through intensive workshops in other countries. Our various ministries (but, please, not at the hands of DAVP) and the private sector must sensitise us to travel as responsible top-notes, not the dregs of a magnificent culture that deserves — but also gives — respect.
