A memorable journey

[I am sure that in school, you wrote an essay on this topic. I did, more than once. Here is the last piece that I will ever write under the heading]

One of my most memorable journeys has happened just today. No, I didn’t go to see the sun rising on the Kanchenjunga, nor did I see any canyon, nor the Taj. I didn’t even drive through a quiet countryside in the mysterious twilight. I just took a flight from Kolkata and came to our second home in Bengaluru. 

Let me begin at the beginning. If you you’ve caught a flight at the Kolkata airport recently, you would know that their trolleys are physically challenged. So the first stroke of good luck was that I got one that had all the four wheels. 

As I was at the tail of a long queue for checking in, a young girl who was womanning the farthest of the Jet Airways counters—who no one seemed to have noticed—came out from behind her desk and asked me and a few others behind me to move to her counter. She didn’t have to. I felt she was not just doing a job in the service sector, she was actually serving people. If all the employees like her in airlines to banks to post-offices believed that they were in the business of service, life would be so much better! It is a shame that I didn’t read her name tag. 

There was no queue for security check, and unlike a few other times, I didn’t forget to collect my laptop on the other side. I bought a handful of magazines and newspapers and settled down in a comfortable chair near my departure gate. As I was debating with myself whether I should buy a coffee for a hundred bucks, I was stunned!

Deepika Padukone walked in casually pulling a leather trolley-bag and went past me. She was in a striped top, black jeans, with a light blue jacket casually thrown around her shoulders. She exuded charm and confidence, in fact, an aura of beauty, just as we have seen her on screen. She was being looked at from 360 degree around! As I watched her carefully and tried my best to look disinterested while my 65-year-old heart trembled, I felt something must have been wrong. Dipika Padukone wasn’t expected to take an all-economy flight with ordinary mortals like yours truly.

Slowly, the penny dropped. She was  actually not the diva. But she could have been Deepika’s twin sister lost in a fairground. Rarely do you come across two people so uncannily identical. 

After boarding the airplane, I took an aisle seat and forgot Dipika as I watched the Bengali mom seating next to me combing her twelve-year old son’s hair with the undivided attention of a neurosurgeon during brain surgery. As she was going through the procedure, she loudly complained that the boy hadn’t even learned to comb his hair. (How on earth would he, with such a loving mother? No wonder lots of Bong boys never grow up. They move from under their mother’s wings to their wife’s and thereafter, the two women fight over their possession till the cows come home.) And then Deepika Padukone boarded the aircraft! 

She walked straight towards me and smiled, ‘Sir, I think you are in my seat.’ I had noticed that my seat number was 16 D, but somehow, it had become 14 D in my pickled brain. I always mix up numbers and dates and names and faces—my students have some entertainment on the side as I often call Bipasha Vishakha and Jagtaar, Jagdeep. Anyway, for a change, I thanked my dysfunctional memory as I got to get a ten-million-dollar smile thanks to it. The flight took off before time.

The food was good. Jet Airways goes out of its way to cater to food preferences of their finicky customers. Besides the usual veg and non-veg fare, they had low-fat, gluten-free, and Jain meals. And the two stewards, Subhashish and Saif who served us were exceedingly polite and helpful, like their colleague at the check-in counter. 

It is common knowledge that the quality of service is inversely proportional to the size of an organisation. Of all the airlines I have flown, British Airways perhaps has the snootiest air-hostesses. At home, Indigo was super when they started. But as the airline grew bigger, the smile on the faces of their employees became shorter and shorter, until it vanished completely. Anyway, coming back to today, during the flight, Saif and Subhashish continuously moved up and down the aisle, bringing a paper to someone, a coke to another and so on, with a professional but genuine smile pasted on their faces all the time. And the pleasant experience didn’t end there. 

My bag was the first to come out on the conveyor belt. And as is usual at the Bengaluru Airport, I got a taxi without immediately. But the icing on the cake was the unjammed roads – I covered the distance of forty kilometres in an hour, something that you usually do in your dreams in Bengaluru.

My stars chose to shine brightly on me today. I ought to have bought a lottery ticket after reaching home.

Bengaluru / Tuesday, 08 August 2016