TK 1071

They say that an uneventful flight never stays in memory, and its the little anecdotes that make you remember them for ages. They also say that what becomes of your flying experience depends almost 90% on the person sitting next to you, and the remaining 10% I tend to believe is how accessible the loo is for you ;) Well if I were to go by what people say, I'd be in my grave right now, for 90% of my journey was a dusty old hag who would have done a better role than Jim Carrey in The Grinch who stole Christmas, and the remaining 10% seemed oddly inconvenient as both the loos were blocked with food trays! Anyways, lets not spoil the surprise by revealing tid-bits of the 'happy journey'.

Now I'm not one to judge immediately, well am not one anymore, but something odd seemed in the people lined up for the check-in counter for Turkish Airlines. Contrary to my expectation, the Indians didn't even spare this country, well at least that was what was apparent from the queue. Suddenly, during my contemplation on whether to pity or detest these souls, pop comes a girl with a bushy hairdo, as if the glue available in the sarkari post offices was used to stick them to her head, and walks up to me asking if I was a new addition. Well don't be surprised, those were the exact words used by her, and trust me I still do not know new addition to WHAT ?! I simply declined, for I could make out from her demeanour that she had one of those misplaced superiority complexes whereby you tend to think that because you're studying in a foreign university, India is proud of you! :P Time wailed by, crawling at a snail's pace, as I reached my turn in the queue when the eyes light up looking at the two only passengers in front of me before I check-in and get the overweight baggage hassle over with. Alas, did I say life's that simple ?! Well of course not, so in walk these two south Indian students with the very bush-hair witch, after what I can only imagine was concocting some potion to turn all the passengers into frogs! Apparently, these great minds of India who were spreading the good name abroad were not 1, not 2 but 35 kilograms overweight in baggage ! Yes I know, I sense it too, you're not really interested in what happened at the check-in counter, its the 90% flight journey that's keeping you interested ain't it ? ;) Okay will cut to the chase, but before I do, just one thing needs a special mention here. If I ever find that fat-ass-hairy-faced-chocolate-brown-muffin-munching-good-for-nothing nincompoop who left his hand baggage at the security checking, I'm gonna pulverise him into nothingness, for it was his negligence that delayed the flight by 1.5 hours!

Hey don't ask me what the negligence was, you're the one who's been pushing for the in-flight story! Anybody interested to know the details may do so by asking me after the story is over, till then shut your piehole and read .. err .. listen :) After a sleepless mosquito ridden bout at the waiting lounge, I finally board the plane. In the meantime I had spotted a very sweet and sultry Turkish girl, I had hoped would be in seat 16A, to finally have someone worthwhile to talk to! I slowly approached the economy class, business class bastards all sleeping in their cozy huge chairs ! Hoping not to have an Indian worse come to worse, I reached 16B - my seat, with my right eye closed, unable to bear the shock of discovering who it might be sitting beside me. With the left eye still open, I glanced around to see who all would form the focus of my annoyance aboard this flight. Nice crowd, I said to myself. The time of reckoning had come, the right eye had to do the honours of breaking the suspense as to who or rather what lay in store for me just a few centimetres away - would I be fighting for the shared armrest, or would I be wanting to share the armrest ? :P The revelation would have to be sudden, like ripping off a band-aid. *Poof* - there it lay, a big ball of blanket, shifting a little, trying to adjust underneath. Still no clue as to who it was I was sitting next to. So I let the ball be, leaving it up to fate to decide whether to bring out an ogre from underneath or Snow White. ;)

No, the break in paragraph does not mean an end to the story of the lump. This is just a small digression to give a short glimpse of my typical Indian brethren who fail to understand what the word co-operation means. I had a rucksack as cabin baggage, appeared huge, but just had my laptop bag inside. Unfortunately, I was the dumb one to have waited his turn to board the plane while the others had hogged all overhead bins. Swoooosh opens the overhead bin for 16A and 16B, a backpack and a laptop bag lie there, as if in a cozy hose with a bonfire lit to keep them warm - that's not how cabin baggage is supposed to be - its supposed to be crammed up in a barn full of pigs!! So I scooch the laptop bag over a little to make some space. A humming voice of a concerned Indian appears - "Woh mera hai" - to which I was gonna reply - "Maine kab kaha mera hai", but thought otherwise. I acknowledged his claim to possession and explained that I was just making space and that his bag would not have to suffer any undue pain. This explanation was given in the most polite vocabulary you can expect from a person who has been up all night and now had to make space in an airliner that would have made gliders in Indian Airlines look like jumbo jets ! The next move was for the backpack, and once the voice, which also had ears realised the bag was being shifted too, the pitch increased and the concern grew - and something of an argument to the following effect came out - "If you move my laptop, then since everyone has a unique laptop, mine will get lost" - do not ask me what it meant, do not ask me why that sentence ever came into existence, because I know not, and I want to believe that my sanity was intact that day! So the story of the painful whiner ends here, now let me get a sip of my Ice Tea before I go on writing further - I'd suggest you get hold of some popcorn too, just in case :)

Unwilling to slog it out with the pain in the ass moron, I shoved the rucksack into the next available empty bin, and cozied up into my seat, having lost track of trying to figure out who it was next to me. Now like all surprises, shocks also have the habit of coming to you when you're least ready. So I snuggle into the seat, fasten the seat belt, and scooch in under my blankey, hoping to fall asleep without further ado. Sleep, did I say I wanted to sleep? Probably gawd was in no mood to act the perfect angel, because by sheer force of pure evil there crept out from inside 16A, the cryptkeeper herself - shrewd hair, as if chewn on by rats from hell themselves, and a voice that would have brought on another mating season for frogs, she yelped out for water. There went my 90% bet on the lottery down the drain :( A determination to sleep through the entire journey grew in force, as the armrest no longer seemed worth fighting for either, lest the old hag cast a spell and turn me into one of her frogs!

I have a lot of things in life to complain about, but the actual plane and food have never featured on that list, well at least not till that fateful morning of the 26th. I've flown the lone plane in and out of Guyana, South America, but nothing compared to this aircraft - a 2X4X2 seater, a Boeing 737, I guess, with a TV screen on the dividing wall, the plane seemed too morose even for a local Indian domestic airliner. I made my peace with that, but if you can't even accommodate a lanky 52 kiloed (disclaimer: I had been ill for 3 days before the flight - hence the weight) guy in your seat, I can only wonder what lay in store for the chunk of meat dawdling next to me, and letting out an unsettling odour, I can only imagine was coming from her hair! Still doable, I compromised. Hungry, my eyes kept sifting through alleys, a little rise from the seat, a bobbing if the head sideways to check if the pantry trolley budged from its place, not to find out when the food was to arrive, but to pee. The eyes never stopped looking and the trolley never moved. So much for Paolo Coelho's verdict! :( A different trolley did, however, appear over the horizon of lost hope - to drown my tears, I'd expected to find solace in food. "I'll go for the vegetarian" - now why in gawd's friggin' name I went ahead and said that still remains an unsolved mystery to me - so there lay on my tray a sealed paper tray with the words "VEG ASW" stuck on top. ASW - hmm - I wonder. It wasn't until I opened up the tray that I realised what those initials meant - All the Shit in this World!! For how do you expect a normal person to gobble an entire serving of potatoes that seemed to have rotted their way to darkening, rice that seemed to have been a poor man's reject, and fruits that seemed to have been reborn from under Egyptian tombs for fruit mummies?!?! After slurping down two coffees to get rid of the shock series I had been training for all day, came the tantrum of the trip. "I did not get a bun! Where is my bun!" - if that were a 5 year old whining, I'd understand but if the dustball next to you croaks that out in a coarse voice that'd cause landslides half way across the world, and then accompanies it with what I imagine were profanities in Turkish "shlalom blachoi" or something like that, you kind of lose that little peace of mind you had stowed away in some corner of your head for emergencies like this ;) The drama ensues for another 5 minutes. Eyepads my ass, bring on the ear plugs I say - those are the need of the hour !! :( In the end, no grub turned up, no bun no fun she said, and shoved her plate into the hostess' hands.

You'd like to think that would be the end of the ordeal, wouldn't you? I have lived through things, done things over the past 3 days, people wouldn't imagine doing in an entire lifetime, but that all will have to wait for another post, for its getting late, and I have lectures tomorrow! On a closing note, here's what you do when flying Turkish Airlines - half an hour before landing start slapping yourself to warm up those cheeks and have a ringing sound in your ears, take a chewing gum, 2 would be better, and start chewing like a cow doing the entire jaw workout, ask for two bottles of water, one for drinking during the next half hour - make sure you finish it - its part of the flight ticket you paid for, and the second bottle is for the weak bowel sitting next to you in case she decides to hurl like the one next to me did ! :( For this is how the pilot apparently views a landing - you drop vertically 100 feet, then you go horizontal for another 100, and keep repeating till the cabin pressure is about to give way and the overhead oxygen masks about to drop. At this point if all the blood in your body has gone up to your head, it means you are alive, else you have most probably passed out and puked near your fellow passenger's feet. ;(

You know what the worst part of this entire story is? The fact that I have to go back with Turkish Airlines only! :(