Simplifly !?

Day: 3 December 2005, Saturday - Hyderabad

There has been a lot of ink and print wasted on how India is growing and how infrastructure growth must keep up with things - i never had too much of a direct experience of how this is impacting things. (I travel 40ks on pot holed bullock cart tracks that barely pass as roads :) almost daily. But that somehow failed to capture my imagination until this incident)

While Captain Gopinath motto of taking flying to the masses is a noble ideal - so far he has been successful only to an extent - a lot of things need improvement.

On this particular day, we were scheduled on a 9 pm flight to chennai. Coincidentally, there were about 7 flights (3 deccans, 2 saharas, 1 jet and 1 IA) including our scheculed for the same boarding gate (incidentally Hyderabad has only 4 gates, of which 2 remained closed). Now, amongst the 7 schduled, there was one for Mumbai which was supposed to be at 6:40, which already had to be delayed by 2 hours because of some problem or the other.

At around 9:30, with 5 of the flights yet to leave we were asked to board the chennai flight, while the mumbai crowd were still kept waiting. Now, this triggered a major outburst from a bunch of old guys who cornered a deccan employee and made him weep.

Things got so hot that at one point the bakra's and subsequently captain Gopinath's parentage were questioned. The poor deccan guy got so worked up that he hit a passenger who called Capt. Gopinath a ha#$%i m#$@$#d. Security was called in to diffuse the situation and subsequently a bunch of passengers demanded that their money back, while we boarded the chennai flight thanking our stars.

Now, while Capt.Gopi and his gang have made air travel hugely more affordable for all of us, it is the Government who shud play along and provide these guys with the support in terms of sops and infrastructure support.

The next time i see some left spokesman crib when the airport privatization issue comes up, the nearest reporter must shove his mike up the guy's #$%.