Simpli-fly !

I had a privilege to board an Air Deccan flight after a gap of 2.5 year. It has changed a lot. The air plane has got bigger and things like that. This time it started only 30 minutes late, practically on time and all the passengers looked happy and rushed to the plane to catch hold of their seats in the free seating arrangement, which near matched the rail-coach frenzy. The flight from Hyderabad to Ahmedabad ascended the air taking a mini India with it.

My interaction with co-passengers started in the boarding pass line itself where people with the printouts are shouting at Air Deccan staff for no apparent reason, its one of the ways to fight the heat outside and forget family tensions. Some young guys even chatted with the young girl at the Air Deccan counter, inquired about her working conditions and asked her to take a better job and gave some tips too. It was like flirting but not as effective. She smiled and smiled like a true girl. As usual, middle aged men cribbed how precious their time is and they have connecting flights, and older persons talked about how flights used to on time at their times and the whole bit about privatization, other have nothing to talk about so they talked about hot weather and how this time is even worse than last year and AC sales have gone up, they discussed more such unimportant things. The young ones were crying as usual. Its a good omen for flights because children sleep after a good cry. Some mother even slapped their children to make them sleep later but such practice are rapidly going extinct with the advent of over-protective super-moms.

The person behind me in the line was happy to the core, especially when he saw my print out and saw I bought the ticket for 2K+, he showed me his, it was a Rs 500 ticket. He was as happy as a lottery winner. Later I realized that he booked the ticket early this year and he is not alone but has a whole marriage party with him. It seemed that they fixed the marriage date depending on the tickets availability. Truly Indian. But the real fun was still to come. As our flight moved above clouds and people loosened their seat belts, party time began.

Flamboyant gujjus were every where. All relations and all friends. Pure delight and full fun. I was literally shocked when I saw three girls moving all over the plane with handycam photographing each passenger and even clouds outside, I even thought of taking out my SLR and flaunt, such was the passion on plane. The good smell of eatables and sound of munching was everywhere. Since Air Deccan doesn't offer anything except the good flying experience, so they have come loaded with all sorts of namkeens and beverages. They sang and if space were sufficient, no one in the world would have stopped them from dancing. Only kids danced in the narrow pathways. I was pleasantly surprised how the whole plane was hijacked with love and affection, song and dance.

Next was thing that my friend told me long time back and I never believed it. Where there are gujjus, there is antakshari. The whole aircraft was soon divided into two groups and antakshari started. As a customary for warm up, they did the 'Maine Pyar Kiya' version in chorus first. Its a satisfying experience to hear songs from the long forgotten films like 'Police Mujrim' and 'Dulha Dulhan', also they sang some of favorites. When it was announced that we are moving through the turbulent weather, they sang situational songs. The guy who is going to marry, was on the plane, his name was Mayur and girl's name was Mansi because they were replacing the original names in the songs with Mansi and Mayur. It bought back the memories of buses with stickers 'Mayur weds Mansi' or 'Mansi weds Mayur', from bus to airplane, 'Baaraat' is the same fun. They sounded like professional, singing full songs with dialogues in between (do you remember the dialogues from 'Ijazzat', they did, all of them). Air hostess were mesmerized and didn't even attempt to interrupt. They just stood near the toilets and heard the concert. Hope Bharjatiyas would have seen their impact on society and probably conceived a film on marriage in air, near god and heaven and then we can get such out-of-world experience more often, films mirroring life and vice versa.

With all this going on, I tried to read Kafka to keep the air-plane on balance (or balance on air-plane). I usually carry Kafka on flights, to fight the fear but this time there was no need of Kafka. The guy next to me didn't like the songs nor the Kafka. He cribbed and tried to sleep. Later he even asked the flight attendant that where can he fill the feedback form. God knows what he will complain - ban the families on board. As for me, I really loved the experience. These one hour and forty minutes were the best one can do to fight the altitude nausea and the relative disorders, its a therapy like a Bollywood movie.