Say Cheese!

Bombay was like a breath of fresh air, though admittedly tainted with the odour of rotting fish and a noxious cocktail of chemicals being spewed into the air. It was fresh for my young heart as the train breached the Western Ghats below Igatpuri station. I am a great fan of railway chai and in all my travels there are few places that can rival the vendors on the platforms of Igatpuri station for the invigorating brew! In 1977, the precious liquid was still sold in eco-friendly cups made of baked mud and flavoured with cardamom. Little did I foresee that for the next 28 years I would be brewing endless cups of tea and coffee in the confined spaces of aircraft galleys. But it would never come up to the high standards set by the Igatpuri chaiwallas..

I stood on the platform sipping my chai and glanced to my left, to the south. Rising in the distance through the morning haze I could make out the faint outline of Kalsubai - at 5400 feet this is the highest peak in Maharashtra. Jutting out like the prow of a great battleship into the plains of Kasara was the fort of Kulang, with its companion hill, Madangadh which looked like an elephant's head because of the massive gap in the rock below the summit which morphed into the eye of the beast as you looked. Of course, at that time I was clueless about the geography of the Sahyadri; but thanks to a wonderful invention by the Air India Cabin Crew Association called "Time Off Plus Twenty Four" I would have loads of free time to explore these hills over the next few decades! (For the uninitiated, the formula of Time Off Plus Twenty Four worked thus: if your flight pattern took you away from base for, say, ten days, you were entitled to a Time Off of five days plus 24 hours! Of course I am biased, but I think if all corporations followed this golden rule, their workers would achieve the perfect Work / Life balance that Human Resource Pundits pontificate about in their fancy seminars!)

The guard's whistle followed by the plaintive horn of the engine brought me back to earth. The train coasted down the grades to Kasara and picked up speed. The platforms of Khardi and Atgaon flashed past the windows in a blur. The train twisted like a serpent through the hillocks before Asangaon, the needle like pinnacles of the Mahuli range appeared like a phantasmagorical illustration from some novel by J.R.R.Tolkien and then a new smell wafted into the carriages as we slowed down past Shahad and trundled into Kalyan Junction. This was the quintessential smell of Bombay that would stay with me for the rest of my life : slightly fetid, laced with the odours of boiled eggs and drying fish stirred with a little sea salt. Every city in the world has a characteristic smell and this is the Scent of Bombay, if you discount the Scent of Money! This smell would later assail my senses as I rode the local trains between Bandra and Mahim Junction. For me, this smell spelt Bombay. Coming from Calcutta, a fresh water port where the Hooghly flowed for at least 40 km more before meeting the ocean at Diamond Harbour, the heavy sensation of the coastal air was new.

Clutching my precious appointment letter from Air India a few days later, I boarded the slow train at Churchgate station. My aunt at Navy Nagar had briefed me on how to negotiate the perils of Bombay local trains : "Make sure you are on the appropriate side of the carriage before the train slows down for its brief halt at Santa Cruz station!", she had cautioned. I was lucky: it was the morning commute for the hundreds of thousands of people streaming into south Bombay for their daily bread. Fortunately, I was headed in the opposite direction. Compared to fighting my way into the green and cream coloured Bandel - Howrah local at its penultimate stop at Liluah on the other side of the subcontinent, getting into the chocolate and cream coloured carriage of the Churchgate - Borivali train of the Western Railway was a breeze.

I made sure I was on the correct side of the platform as the train approached Santa Cruz. As opposed to the auto-eject facility that you can benefit from during the rush hours, I made a pretty soft landing on to the concrete. BEST bus # 311 took me to the gates of the huge Air India facility. There was a security checkpoint where I registered and asked directions to the Cabin Crew Training School. I was directed to what appeared to be an old aircraft hangar from World War II. Once inside this cavernous shed, I could be forgiven for thinking that I had entered the aircraft service bay of the Engineering Division instead of the hallowed portals of the In-flight Service Department : the bulbous nose of a Boeing 747 filled my vision! The only aircraft I had seen up close was an old DC-3 (the good old Dakota!) at Dum Dum airport in Calcutta when as a kid, an indulgent uncle who worked at the airport had sneaked me into the cockpit! It took me a few seconds to realise that the Boeing 747 towering above my head was only a mock-up. Inside this is where I would be trained in the finer points of In-flight Service. Inside this is where the newbies would have an opportunity to savour the Air India Maharaja's fine cuisine during what I learnt later were called "wet drills", which was like a full fledged dress rehearsal for First Class meal services conducted on board those fabled flights, with real food and real caviar and real Burgundy and Chardonnay! And exotic fruits like the Kiwi (remember this was 1977, and not many people in India would have had the luxury of laying their hands on such imports) which up till then I was not aware even existed.

But all this was later, first I had to get past the Keeper of the Castle! Mr.Noronha took one look at the letter I nervously handed over to him. He looked up at me as I happened to be slightly taller, his large eyes opened even wider in disbelief, he fixed me with an incredulous glare and then came the clincher. "Have you finished your medical check up as yet?" he barked, or at least that is how it sounded in the confines of his air conditioned office. "Come back when you are done with that."

I retreated to seek succour in the office of the friendly young lady who was the assistant. She had a great smile on her face and the twinkle in her eyes seemed to say,"He always does this to the new ones!" She directed me to the Medical Clinic where my troubles were just about to begin...

I have mentioned in my previous post that I was certainly young then, but positively not pretty. Well, the medical department was looking for perfection, perhaps an Adonis, so when the doctor discovered I had a couple of small warts on my neck, well concealed under the collar so the casual observer would never notice them, he decreed that I have them removed. "One more thing," he added, "your eosinophilia count is extremely high.....take these tablets three times a day and come back in ten days." He handed me a little prescription. Since technically I was still not an employee, I could not use the facilities at the company clinic nor did I have access to the free drugs...

Up until then, I did not know how to spell eosinophilia. Life is a learning curve and as I was to discover a couple of weeks later, I was still at the bottom, flat section of the graph.

I went looking for an affordable clinic in Santa Cruz west where I now moved to be closer to the centre of the Air India universe. The kind souls at the Ramakrishna Mission Hospital agreed to remove the offending flesh for a nominal fee. There was a hot glow as the doctor brought what looked like a welding iron to my untrained eye close to my neck. There was a sizzle like a hamburger frying, the smell of burning flesh filled that little room, and hey presto, the warts disappeared! I was whole again!

The eosinophilia took a little longer to reign in. The weeks went by, storm clouds gathered over the skies of Bombay, the humidity levels rose to unbearable levels. The bright turmeric-yellow blossoms of the copper pod trees that lined some of the avenues wilted and fell to the pavements and transformed them into carpets of gold. On other streets, the gulmohur trees sprang to life, their bright  flowers painting their canopies in myriad shades of dazzling orange and red. Then, one day, a high wind swung through the teeming city, dark rain bearing clouds scudded low and fast over the tops of the apartment buildings, rolling thunder boomed across the heavens, lightning flashed in the distance, and fat rain drops fell, the earth soaking up the first volley and releasing that heady, heavenly aroma that the first shower of the season invariably brings. The monsoon had arrived.

Wet and soaked to the skin I faced Mr.Noronha again. He looked at me, looked at the sheets of paper from the Medical Clinic and the Human Resources Department, and said, "Great timing, son. You just missed the batch that has started training already. I'm afraid we'll have to slot you in for the next one."

I let this information soak in, pardon the pun. I looked at him disbelievingly and finally manged to stutter,"When will that be, sir?"

"In about a month's time," he said. "I have to wait for the other candidates to show up to make up a decent number for a new batch."

What cannot be cured must be endured, I told myself. I am happy to record that I did not waste my time. I set forth to explore this new city with a vengeance. Bombay was to be my home for the foreseeable future so I might as well know a little more about its character, its little nooks and alleyways, its little enclaves, its suburban railway system, its water supply, its national park at Borivili, its ubiquitous little Udipi restaurants with their "Rice Plate is ready"  and Grade II signs handed out by the Brihanmumbai Mahanagar Palika, its Irani hotels where I could eat "baida gotala" for a song, the bhel puri and pau bhaji stalls on Juhu beach and outside VT station, the men who sold roasted corn on Marine Drive and which lovers chewed on with their feet dangling from the seawall over the rocky shoreline, watching the pale monsoon sun set over the Arabian Sea.

This was a city of entrepreneurs, from the rag pickers and panwallahs to the diamond merchants in Heera Panna building and the jewellers in Zaveri Bazaar. This was a city of the bold working class woman, the maid who swept and swabbed the floors and washed the dishes in at least ten houses a day; this was the city of the incredible dabbawalla network; this was the cricket crazy capital of the country, of multiple cricket pitches at Shivaji Park, the city that had nurtured the legendary talents of Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar. This was the city of the sophisticated urban woman, riding the local trains fearlessly in the late hours of the night when her sisters in Delhi and Calcutta feared to venture forth. This was the city where the early morning trains disgorged fresh vegetables at Dadar station and the rural folk squatted on Tulsi Pipe Road which ran parallel to the tracks outside the railway fencing and conducted brisk, "cash only" business, stuffing their income into well concealed folds in their saris and dhotis.

This was a happening city, all right. I was glad that I had left Calcutta when I did. At the risk of offending my childhood friends, I will say this : it is a sobering thought to remember that the Calcutta metro railway took almost 25 years to complete, and only a relatively short portion of it actually runs underground! I had grown up negotiating the potholes and craters of what appeared to be the work of enemy bomber fleets; the CMDA (Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority, known to the cognoscenti as the Calcutta Madmen's Digging Authority) had turned the urban landscape into that of an open cast mine.

Suketu Mehta  got it right when he called Bombay "Maximum City" : things happened here at breakneck speed.

There are always exceptions to the rule, of course. I waited patiently for my batch to "form", to coalesce into a bunch of eager flight attendants, garnered from various parts of the country. Alas, it was not to be.

In the end, there were only five of us : Jagdish from Jaipur, Narayanan from Trivandrum, Deepak and Chris from Bombay and I from the east : you could say that the country was well represented! There was one little problem, though. How can you justify training a batch of only five? The solution was delicious in its simplicity : throw these louts in with a batch of lovely ladies who were preparing, in the lexicon of Air India, to be Air Hostesses. Thus killing two birds with one stone; and please, no colloquial pun intended!

The five of us were to be trained as Assistant Flight Pursers. What this meant in lay terms was that we would be the galley slaves toiling away in the background, burning our fingers in the aircraft ovens, kicking and shoving recalcitrant equipment till they worked as designed, and generally maintaining a smooth flow of goods and services to the masses crammed into the hundred seat economy section of the venerable Boeing 707 jets. We would also occasionally work in the First Class section and pander to the needs of the rich and famous, forming the shadowy support team that ensured that the champagne being rolled into the cabin was appropriately chilled and the French labels which said "Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin" was placed at the optimum angle so that the discerning passenger in seat 1A did not damage his or her ocular muscles in an effort to read, in the dimmed cabin lights, the lineage of the contents while he or she lay slumped at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizontal in the luxurious seat.

If the truth be told, I struggled in class. My education had taught me to identify iambic pentameter and analyse the structure of Shakespeare's sonnets, but when it came to telling the difference between a canape fork and a pastry fork, I was at a total loss. I had been brought up to think that cheese consisted of only two types : one was Paneer, and the other one was called Amul, available from the store in little round tins; as far as exotic strains were concerned, I was only familiar with yak cheese which required a residence of about a week in my mouth to be fully assimilated by my body! Out here, in the sophisticated world of Air India First Class Cuisine, I was bombarded with the names of cheeses I could barely pronounce the names of : Rocquefort, Camembert, Gouda, Bel Paese, Beaufort, Gruyere, et al.

The wines were even more confusing. How can plain old grape juice have so many different names? I was convinced that this was a plot to bar peasants like me from the high life! Deepak and Chris, both with a background in catering, fared better than Jagdish, Narayanan and me. They helped us country bumpkins to negotiate the minefield laced with names like capers, caviar, cocktails and mocktails, hors d'oeuvres and champagne collation, appetisers and After Mints. Somehow, I survived.

While the girls were busy honing their skills with eyeliner and lipstick in the Grooming class, the five amigos had all the time in the world to shoot the breeze. We had a choice of locations : if our budgets were tight, we would while away the time in the staff canteen with cheap tea traded over the counter with coupons which were sold to us in handy little booklets. If we were in a more affluent mode, we would walk across to the privately run eatery near the hangars, where the blossoming bougainvillea would shield us from the roar of the reverse thrust of the big jets as they touched down and headed for the taxiway at the far end of the runway.

Three months later, in the middle of the monsoon, it was time to put on our uniforms and pose for the graduation photos with our instructors. For me, it had been a steep learning curve. I would remember these instructors for the rest of my life for the pursuit of perfection they tried to instill in the class. There were times when I questioned their fanatic obsession : will a cataclysmic catastrophe overtake the universe if the Centaur logo on the wine glasses arranged on the dessert trolley were misaligned by a fraction of a degree? But as the old adage admonishes: if something is worth doing, do it well.

One instructor I shall remember above all the rest and he had nothing to do with unravelling gastronomic mysteries. I shall never forget him because he made a subject as dreary as Flight Safety come to life with his humour and unusual perspective. His name? Group Captain Jayasingh, ex Indian Air Force. He had thick bushy eyebrows and eyes that twinkled constantly. His greatest talent, however, was his ability to remember the names of the hundreds of students that passed through his class briefly.

More than twenty years later, my wife and I were wheeling our baggage trolley out through the terminal building at Delhi airport. There was a short, stooped, nattily dressed oldish gentleman in front of me. He was pushing his trolley with a little help from a companion clad in a sari. I recognized Capt Jayasingh instantly. I rapidly overtook the couple, stood in front of him, and smiled at him without saying a word. He stopped, looked up, rubbed his eyes to clear the thin film of glaze that was forming, squinted a little, and then his face splintered into a thousand wrinkles and that lighthouse beam of a smile that I remembered so well erupted from his eyes. "Aloke," he said, "how are you? How have you been?". I laughed, shook his hand, gave him a hug and introduced my wife. Capt Jayasingh's phenomenal memory had not failed him.

I had not failed my courses either. The theory of Inflight Service was over. It was time to put it into practice. My passport was ready, my Crew Member Certificate had arrived from New Delhi, I had been inoculated against cholera and Yellow Fever : it was time to fly!



Photo Credit : Jimmy Wadia

Air Hostess or Air Host?

The postmark was smudged over Mahatma Gandhi's portrait printed on the top right hand corner of the Inland Letter Card. However, I could tell by the handwriting on the address field that this was another epistle from Mari Marcel. The year was 1976 and it cost two rupees and fifty paise to buy and mail one of these ubiquitous self seal blank letters. One had to be extremely careful when opening these: one careless slip while slitting open the gummed sides which held the whole thing together and you might inadvertently delete some key sentence or phrase and the whole meaning and intention of the letter might suddenly appear in a different light, and not always to the sender's advantage!

"Dear Alokianathan," she began. I have never been able to fathom why she ever called me that; my genes are as far removed from South India as that of any Gupta, Singh, or Malhotra. Mari had joined Air India a couple of years earlier and would occasionally write about her exotic travels as an air hostess with the airline. Her college friends in Calcutta, among whom I was counted, would read these letters and imagine a world far removed from the one we lived in. Our world revolved around scanning the newspapers for advertisements which offered job prospects. Yes, I had joined the ranks of what was then called the "educated unemployed", another drop in the vast ocean of graduates with an uncertain future.

After cycling through the "apply, apply, NO REPLY" syndrome, I began to think that I was not really "educated unemployed", but "educated and Unemployable". The frustration had begun to build up. I toyed with the idea of going off to Bhutan to teach, but dear old Professor Kapadia - my favourite teacher in college bar none - dissuaded me over a beer (he paid for it, I was penniless) in a cafe on Park Street. He told me that the salary was a fraction of what he had been offered about ten years earlier by the Bhutanese government when he had graduated; they had thrown in a paid annual overseas vacation as well! So you can see that the global trend by employers to get the same work (preferably more!) done for a lesser price has its origins way back! I had earlier rejected an opportunity to work with the Statesman newspaper as a trainee sub editor for the same economic reason: low salary. Those were the days before the magazine boom which catapulted journalists into the big league, especially if you were in the glamour reporting business. Shobha De and Stardust had not yet hit the big time. Scribes and reporters were typically overworked and underpaid. Instead I went to work briefly for the Voice of America Bengali services as a freelance radio stringer. It was more or less propaganda work for the Americans and it paid comparatively well. The bottom fell out of this short romance when Jimmy Carter became president. The overseas budget for the radio station was slashed and there was no more work.

I had graduated with English Literature as my main subject and perhaps this was the problem. Poetry might fill my soul, but it certainly wasn't going to fill my belly. Mari's letter arrived at the perfect time. "Why don't you join Air India as a Purser and see the world?" she wrote. I decided to investigate.

I was aware that there were young and pretty girls who were called "Air Hostesses". In the emancipated west (or so I thought then!) they were referred to as stewardesses. I knew there were some males in those flying metal tubes: they were called Pilots! But male flight attendants? Did such a beast really exist?My only knowledge of the life of cabin crew had been gleaned from the runaway 1967 bestseller "Coffee, Tea, or Me?" by Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones. As anyone who has ever read this book will agree, it offers a pretty skewed perspective of the life of flight attendants. I had absolutely no idea that males could also work in the cabin: this, sadly, was the level of my ignorance, growing up in the backwaters of Calcutta. Needless to say, I had never set foot inside an aircraft.

I was still young, though certainly not pretty! I decided that I had nothing to lose but my misconceptions. I began to read the classified section of the newspapers more carefully and one fine day the much anticipated ad appeared. I dashed off the application and waited. A couple of months later I wrote the test in a hall at the Great Eastern Hotel near Dalhousie Square. At the interview which followed immediately, Mr.Ramachandra quizzed me about the aircraft that Air India flew and my geographical knowledge was also put to the test. He seemed pleased that I did not confuse Burkina Faso with Burundi! I was happy at the outcome of the interview: at least the questions had been relevant, unlike the one put to the hapless protagonist of one of Mrinal Sen's classic films about unemployment where the hero is asked : "What is the circumference of the moon?". The job the young man had applied for had nothing to do with the Appollo project.

And then apparently Air India forgot about me completely. Months went by with no word from Bombay; yeah, it was still called Bombay then. Now it was my turn to spend two rupees and fifty paise for a Inland Letter Card. No, I did not write to Mari. I composed an anguished enquiry regarding the status of my application and mailed it to Air India. Another couple of weeks went by and I had almost resigned myself to perhaps spending the rest of my life as a bank clerk - provided I got that job - when, lo and behold, out of the blue, courtesy of the Indian Postal Service, I received a letter asking me to report to Air India at their Kalina office in Santa Cruz, Bombay.

There was jubilation amongst my friends. We went to our favourite Chinese eatery near the college and had a celebratory meal, constantly monitoring the budget to ensure that we did not end up embarrassing our slim wallets.

Not everyone was happy, though. One of my aunts shook her head and said, "So, you are going to be a waiter in the sky?" I could see that she was already feeling embarrassed. By this time, almost two years since graduating from university and still with no prospects in sight, I had had enough. I looked her directly in the eye and said, rather curtly,"Do you have a better idea, auntie?" She flinched at the intensity of my reaction and looked away. As I packed the few clothes that I would be travelling with, I thought of the whole lopsided attitude that I had unconsciously become a part of : those were the days when the middle class in that part of the country could somehow not bring itself to see the service industry, apart from Hotel Management, as a legitimate career choice. If you served people, you were a servant, and therefore some kind of a lower being. Was this the "bhadralok" syndrome which would rather have you work as a babu in some dingy government office tying red ribbons around musty old files all day, then discussing the burning political issues of the day over endless cups of tea; rather than putting your hands to work at whatever came your way. This same mindset viewed stewardesses as Glorified Ayahs. Obviously this attitude was nurtured by the class and caste stratification which is still the bane of Indian society, though slowly and thankfully becoming a thing of the past now.

I was itching to get away, away from a world where the only options presented to you was, in the following order of preference :

1. IAS officer
2. Engineer
3. Doctor
4. Management Trainee in a multinational corporation
5. Probationary Officer in a nationalised bank

Some people asked me,"Why don't you pursue Higher Studies?"  In my defence and in order to preempt any further discussion, I told them this true story: when my mark sheet from Calcutta University for the B.A. Part I Exam was not received by my college, Professor Kapadia and I went to investigate. What followed on College Street was straight out of the pages of a Kafka novel.  After negotiating a series of interminable desks with seemingly clueless clerks behind them, we were led into a dimly lit room with cobwebs dangling from the high ceiling, catching the faint light in gossamer threads. There were mark sheets lying scattered on the floor. Kapadia and I went down on our knees and began to carefully sift through pages and pages of paper with strange, unfamiliar names on them. It was nothing short of a miracle when I found my name. We both shouted out in relief and excitement and the cobwebs trembled...

That single incident had shattered any illusions I may have harboured about studying any further.
As if to cement my case the  3 year degree course that I had originally enrolled for had stretched to more than 4 years - not because I was dim witted, but because the administration of the university could not get their act together.

I was tired of discussing metaphysics and the dialogues of Plato with my erudite and intellectual friends. I had heard rumours that things were very different in Bombay. Bombay was the happening place, Bombay was the place where people who wanted more from life gravitated to. This was my opportunity! I must not allow the old ways of thinking to hold me back, to clip my wings even before I had taken flight.

Armed with a free railway pass from my father, the letter from Air India, the contact address of an uncle in Navy Nagar, Colaba, I boarded the Howrah - Bombay Express on a warm April day in 1977. I had  Rs.250/- in my pocket. But as wisdom teaches us, when you touch rock bottom, there is only one way to go : UP. And up above 30,000 feet is where I would be spending a lot of my life from now on. But there was some turbulence to deal with first...!

Storm over Teheran

The steady hum of the four Pratt & Whitney engines had lulled my senses to a state of pleasant reverie. The Boeing 707 named after one of the great peaks of the Himalaya was cruising effortlessly over the southern skies of Iran when suddenly there was a wild buffeting in the empty cabin and all hell seemed to break loose: the staccato tat-tat-tatta-tat ricocheted inside the pressurised cabin as if an army equipped with machine guns had surrounded us and opened fire. I have never experienced war firsthand, but I was brought up on a steady diet of World War II movies in the 1960s and early 70s like The Longest Day and Battle of the Bulge, so my mind jumped to a predetermined conclusion!

It was early 1979, Shah Pahlavi of Iran had fled the country, the Islamic Revolution masterminded by Ayatollah Khomeini was in full swing and this Air India flight had taken off from Dubai with the express purpose of evacuating Indian nationals holed up in the building terminal of Meharabad airport in Teheran. Within a few minutes, the sharp hammering on the metal fuselage stopped and I breathed a sigh of relief...the seasoned fliers inside the cockpit muttered something about having just flown through a hailstorm. My senior colleagues in the cabin laughed at my nervousness. I was a relative newcomer, having joined Air India in April 1977. I still had a long way to go!

The tone of the engines changed as we lost altitude and I secured the galley for the impact of landing and strapped on the harness style seat belt on the crew seat. I looked at the iconic picture of the famous Air India Maharajah (the beloved mascot of the airline conceived by Bobby Kooka) painted on the door above the porthole sized window, smiled at his curving whiskers, and waited for the roar and thud of touchdown. Nothing happened for a long time. It then dawned on me that we were not losing altitude as we should have by now, but merely going round in circles. No, there was no traffic congestion. The fact was there were no air traffic controllers in the tower! Everyone had joined the Revolution! Jets were stacked up in the sky above and below, and once they ran out of fuel, they would plummet like stones...

A pilot in one of the circling aircraft had a smart idea: since all of them were on the same radio wavelength, they would initiate a self regulated landing sequence. This was duly accomplished and we touched down safe and sound, before the engines roared in reverse thrust and we began to taxi to the terminal buildings. As soon as the door swung open, the Air India airport manager rushed in to brief the crew : the more than 100 passengers that were about to board had spent the last couple of days at the airport and were itching to get back home to India. He apologised that due to the prevalent circumstances, he was unable to load the galley with any food...all he could lay his hands on were some bread rolls and butter. This was duly stacked up in the small galley where I had been assigned to work.

No time was lost in boarding the passengers. As each of them entered the plane, their faces broke into smiles of relief. Eating a hot meal was obviously the last thing on their minds. They just wanted to get the hell out of the chaos that the city had descended into. We closed the doors soon after and roared out of Meharabad airport. The mountains behind Teheran receded below us as the pilot set a heading for Dubai. Those of us who had had layovers in Teheran were sad that operations to this city had stopped. We had fond memories of the rich Persian cuisine, the smartly dressed women, the very western feel of this city in the Middle East. Our pattern of operations would take us from Bombay to Teheran, give us a couple of days' break here, then we would fly on to London and back to Bombay via Cairo where we would stop for a few days again. Or we would do the loop in reverse. In Cairo, we would be lodged at the Mena House Oberoi within walking distance from the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx! I have clambered up to the top of one of the three pyramids - the pyramid of Khufu - and written my name on the log book at the top! Since the 1980s, the Egyptian authorities have rightly banned all ascents of any of the pyramids....the soles of millions of sweaty tourists might have eventually eroded the ancient wonder of the world!

Jasmine Dalal (middle) and Charmaine Fernandes (right) trying to solve the riddle of the Sphinx with a little help from Egyptian children!

What had I done to get so lucky? How did I happen to end up in Air India as an Assistant Flight Purser (as male flight attendants were designated by the company back then)? Aha! therein hangs a tale...I shall get to it in my next post.

For the moment, ponder this : if Air India had been a privately owned airline, would it have spent millions of rupees in evacuating thousands of Indian citizens in their time of dire need from places like Iran at the height of the revolution? Would a private airline consider it economically viable to rescue thousands who had fled to Amman in Jordan as Iraq invaded Kuwait in the first Gulf War?

Air India is a much maligned entity today. It seems to be fair game for the media to level their rocket launchers at and literally have a blast. And the cabin crew of Air India have suffered even more media damage. Over the course of the past few decades, their contributions to the national airline and the pride that the founder J.R.D. Tata showed in them has somehow been forgotten. It seems to be mired in a financial mess and always hits the media headlines for all the wrong reasons.

I am not a journalist with an agenda.  I merely hope to convey via my posts on this blog what it felt like to live and breathe as a flight attendant for 28 years in Air India. I have no axe to grind and nothing to prove. I often remind myself that those three decades in the airline gave me opportunities I would not have dreamt of otherwise:

• Because of Air India I have seen plays on Broadway. "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" was the first!
• Because of Air India I have seen Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" performed by the world famous Russian Ballet and seen the artistes of the Russian Circus execute jaw-dropping stunts.
• Because of Air India I have seen the inside of the Kremlin and gawked at Catherine the Great's carriage and the treasures of the Czars - from what I saw, they damn well deserved to be uprooted by the Russian Revolution!
• Because of Air India I have seen the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, Michaelangelo's paintings in the Vatican, Van Gogh's "Sunflower" and other paintings in Amsterdam, and cycled for miles in the Dutch countryside.
• Because of Air India I have marvelled at the exhibits in the British Museum, the National and Tate Galleries, and had the opportunity to rock climb in Wales and hike in the Lake District.
• Because of Air India I have been able to parachute in Perth and dive in the pellucid blue waters off the coast of Dar Es Salaam.
• Because of Air India I have been able to take the time off to climb and trek in the Himalaya and the Sahyadri.
• And finally, because of Air India I am writing this blog!

The above is by no means an exhaustive list of what I have done and could do because I worked as a Flight Attendant. I could go on and on....I made up the list just to give you an idea of the perks of the profession that I have enjoyed. This is not to say that the job is a perpetual honeymoon....it comes with a price! If I were to post an ad in the media for this job today, it would read something like this:

"The position is ideally suited for candidates who enjoy multi-tasking in a fast paced environment. Experience in nursing babies, attending to invalid geriatrics, unclogging toilets, scraping human feces off the carpet, and handling drunk, offensive and aggressive passengers without a flying kick to the solar plexus, unravelling the mysteries of seat duplication, the use of lateral thinking in stowing over sized cabin baggage - all these would be considered an asset. Grinning from ear to ear as if you meant it even though your body is trying to cope with sleep deprivation and a 12 hour time difference would be expected from the ideal candidate."

I hope to keep you amused and entertained as we journey back through time at 30,000 feet and above! 

Welcome aboard!