When air rage drives us pee-nuts

(Opinion Column in Khaleej Times dated 16 January, 2023)

The infamous peegate involving Air India doesn’t seem to recede from the headlines. The case is taking a bizarre turn with the main accused Shankar Mishra claiming in court that the lady urinated on herself, and the Indian media and public are wasting no time to latch on to the sensational details that are trickling in.

A lot of mud has been slung at all parties involved—the accused, the victim, the crew, the airlines management—and the feeding frenzy is far from over. In the midst of it all, I stand slandered as a longtime air traveller whose scruples have been suddenly called into question.

Travelling hasn’t got any easier for us ever since security became paramount post 9/11. As passengers, we haven’t had the smoothest transits with rigorous scrutiny and burgeoning crowds at the airport terminals stretching our patience to the breaking point. We puff and pant, swallow mild expletives when called up to open our bags for a detailed inspection and by the time it is boarding time, we have turned into grumpy cats waiting to purr in defiance at the slightest provocation.

No one denies the terrible toll new age travelling norms take on us, but does that give us the liberty to break the codes of good manners? Should the byzantine modes of modern air travel convert us into perverted passengers, taking away from the joys of a journey that is often designed to make wholesome memories?

What makes us think that paying for the ticket gives us unlimited privileges and when we are in the sky, we are the lords of all that we survey?

I don’t suggest that misdemeanour is standard behaviour among all passengers, but there is a general air of self-importance that we demonstrate; we display a condescending attitude towards the flight attendants, and an unknown streak of arrogance creeps into our behaviour that makes us less considerate than we must ideally be towards fellow travellers. Once again, I must reiterate that it is not typical, but there are instances of aberrations that put the decent and civilized flyers to shame.

It would be presumptuous to conclude that Indian passengers are less sensitized to travel conduct, but for some reason, they have earned more disrepute than others, as observed from my own travel experience and the accounts from flight attendants who often bear the brunt of unruly passengers.

To begin with, we tend to scoff at rules, and when asked to comply, we challenge them by asserting our passenger rights and showcase our blatant disregard for the comfort of other people. Whether one agrees or not, guzzling alcohol that comes free has often to blame for our inflight behavioural lapses. Just because something comes free, we tend to make the most of it by adopting an attitude of ‘finding value for every penny paid’. I will not forget an old instance of a fellow passenger who had spent most of our flying time waxing eloquent about her opulent living in the Gulf, quickly tucking the airline blanket into her hand baggage before deplaning. How petty we can get despite our education is something I still can’t figure out.

The moment we step into the plane, we somehow tend to imagine that the flight attendants are there only to cater to our unending demands and their smallest faults are blown out of proportion just because we consider them obliged to service us for the money we have paid. No doubt, flight attendants are recruited to make our transits easy, but to imagine that they are servers in the sky to be at our beck call is outrageous. Often, it is this callous attitude that makes the attendants respond rudely to passengers who take them for granted and treat them contemptuously.

My inflight experiences have been most cordial because I smile, acknowledge and compliment the flight attendants generously for the services they offer. I make special efforts to address them by their name revealed in their badges. I accept their apologies for a special request as genuine inability to provide it because of constraints. In the end, it is all about being kind and considerate to people who are there to make a living by tending to us, no matter how exalted that job might be.

There is a difference between ignorance and arrogance. When passengers slip up and fail to measure up because of lack of air travel experience, people do cut them some slack. But if the ignorance becomes permanent, or if the impropriety in manners during a flight is initiated by heightened ego, a patronising mindset or downright apathy and inconsideration, then such passengers must be shown their rightful place—the asphalt of tarmac. If passengers must fly, then they must comply. For the sake of their comfort and for those who they accompany in the sky.

Let's pop less pills in 2023

(OPINION column published in Khaleej Times dated 4 January, 2023)

‘Wishing everyone health in the new year. Only health please. The rest will follow’. These words from Indian actress and danseuse, Shobana, on her instagram handle added a new dimension to my New Year outlook that has been a tad uninspiring. There were no personal goals set nor plans mapped out. Things seemed to cruise organically from one calendar year to the next with no prominent finish lines marked out.

The idea of ‘accomplishment’ has become so nebulous that it vexed me to think of setting aspirational targets. It was then that the celebrity post triggered a genuine interest to give myself a motive in the year ahead. Health.

When my husband lost his job in the wake of the pandemic in 2020, what hit us the hardest was the disappearance of medical benefits we used to avail as part of the pay package. As the period of joblessness prolonged, the absence of an insurance card that covered us for almost everything from a minor cold to a root canal became the biggest deprivation of all. We took no time to settle into a frugal living, but it took a long time to come to terms with the fact that we couldn’t afford to fall sick frequently; we couldn’t sashay into clinics to take casual medical advice; we couldn’t flash our insurance cards against prescriptions and get medicines that cost an arm and a leg.

Since health insurance is mandatory in this part of the world, post job-loss, we opted for a basic one that had the least drain on our purse. It met the stipulation of having an insurance card, but the provisions and privileges were only a fraction of what he had hitherto enjoyed. A lot of money had to be shelled out from the pocket if we felt under the weather. Thus we began to make informed decisions about health and illnesses. From popping pills randomly because they came free to being rational about whether we needed medicines, our pattern of health care changed drastically.

The focus shifted from darting to the doctor for minor ailments to making sure we did enough to maintain overall health. If home remedies could work, we tried them first before seeking a doctor’s advice. Aches that we amplified in the halcyon days were tended to at home until it became clear that outside intervention was inevitable. The value of exercising became pronounced, and we found ways to get around a patch of passing illness with our own resources. Gone were the days when a sneeze or a sprain would send us scurrying to do tests that were superfluous.

I have always wondered if the ease of access to medical assistance and support has turned us all into hypochondriacs, making us pay undue attention to small matters that may only be a part of aging, weather or undisciplined living. Do we elevate small discomforts to serious levels and pump our bloodstream with chemicals only because they are easily and almost freely available? Are we turning our insurance cards into a license to become compulsively indisposed?

From my experience of the past three years, I must conclude that we are falling victim to what I call ‘sickness syndrome’ and poisoning our body with potions we could well do without.

This is not to say that we must shrug off signs of ill health, especially if they persist, but it would be prudent to know when to load the body with medicines and when to just give it rest in order to restore the ebbing wellness. Merely because the company that has hired us pays the premium to protect our health, we need not be so preemptive and prescription crazy.

My dad says that a cold prolonged for 7 seven days if we took no medicine, but it would leave in a week if we took some tablets. The hidden wisdom in his words has stood me in good stead when most minor symptoms were cured with minimal intake of medicines that I fished out from the kit put together from India.

Falling sick is not a pleasant situation for anyone, regardless of what kind of protection we have from the insurance companies. However, if we become habituated to seeing doctors at the slightest instance just because the money doesn’t go from our pocket, then we are only slighting our body and giving its ability to fight a short shrift.

The last thing our system wants is to be abused by overdose of chemicals. In the new year let us pledge to give our bodies a respite from needless antibiotics by making general health a priority. Our health cards are our safeguards, not a ticket to becoming neurotic about our health and illnesses. Let us use the sentry wisely for our protection and not for mortal combat.

Let's allow our men to cry when they want to

A quick question to all football fanatics out there who will still be reeling under the hangover of a month of thrills and spills from Qatar.

What is common between Rudiger, Suarez, Neymar, Ronaldo and Muller (in 2018) besides being topnotch on the turf?

Tears.

They are men who we saw shedding copious quantities of brine from their eyes when their teams failed to make the cut. They were people who debunked the theory that men don’t cry, especially the chivalrous ones. They were warriors who we believed could take anything in their stride – the rough tackles, the stress of the battles, the high-octane crowds, the gargantuan expectations, and every other challenge that came their way. They were men made of steel, and they could withstand any hurricane.

However, none of this held true.

Whoever established the case that ‘men don’t cry’ in the name of masculinity and its attendant dogmas was a bona fide sadist. The theorist who laid down such a callous rider to human behaviour was perhaps a determined stoic or a man with zero emotional quotient. What they did by disallowing men to express veritable emotions was rob them of their innate tendencies to be essentially human. They deprived them the right to feel and give their feelings an open expression.

It is curious how we see a bawling boy and a girl as equals - children crying for a ‘reason’. But as they grow up, a wily set of rules gets ingrained into their brains. Men don’t cry. Rather, men shouldn’t cry. The disconnect between what the heart feels and what the face reflects becomes so deep set that eventually boys become men who spend a whole lifetime smothered by emotions they are not allowed to channelise. So where do our men go to vent their sorrows? How do they cleanse their system of the everyday frustrations and rinse their disappointments? Is it only in wine that they deposit their whines or is there a secret crying zone in their system that sheds tears unobtrusively and an invisible screen on their faces that hides their unspeakable sadness?

Let’s put the record straight. There is no disparity in the level of emotions that men and women feel. We have been fed with the fallacy of ‘unemotional men’ for far too long and our society has pandered to this doctrine with its strong patriarchal prescriptions.

Men have been trained to get a hold on their emotions. Crying is deemed inappropriate in their textbook of behaviour and social etiquettes. But then, when men feel their inner most core being ripped apart by an undigestible defeat or loss, how inhuman it is to expect them to swallow their sorrow and seem equanimous and composed! Why can’t pain and suffering be given its due outlet and let the men relieve themselves of its roiling aftermath?

To the men who we saw dropping to the ground in despair and baring their broken hearts at the end of a tournament lost, it was a moment of truth; a bitter moment that they had to come to terms with willy-nilly. And no social norm nor the echoes of their distraught fans could have stopped them from being what they are – feeling, pulsating, aching, suffering human beings. Nothing but an open, unabashed meltdown could have stanched their deep-cut wounds inflicted by the rout. That they let go of their sadness and acute misery unconcerned about the cameras that were zoomed on them without being cognizant of the fact that history will document their tears and make posterity remember them as men incapable of keeping emotional balance is a redeeming thing.

Death and defeat are ruthless in their capacity to break the human spirit, and no man has been created with enough will and fortitude to remain unfazed in the face of these afflictions. Those who remain so are either emotionally deficient, like cold-hearted criminals, or they are travestying poise in order to be seen as indomitable and heroic.

It is time we altered our evaluation of human emotions and the need to express it appropriately when required. Let men who want a good cry, cry. Composure is a virtuous thing to possess, but it has to be organic and hard-wired, and not foisted by norms. Like for instance, the man who took the cup home this time. Who would believe there wasn’t a twister of joy in his heart that could have swept him all the way to Buenos Aires when reality kicked in at the last whistle? The quietude he displayed wasn’t fake; it was his innate nature. He merely stood witness to the moment, not crying, not laughing excessively – just being as graceful as he is when he knocks the ball to the net.