Spicejet

Flying for everyone - India is opening its skies to budget airlines

Tourism in India was up 25% in 2004 and, unless the conflict with Pakistan flares up again, foreigners will continue to rediscover the subcontinent. Budget airlines will do much to facilitate this.

Spicejet inaugurated its first routes last month and we are booked, for a measly 4000 Rs each on the 1700 km stretch from Goa to Delhi. That’s less than double the price of a train ticket.

Prior to this deregulation, domestic Indian flights were so prohibitively expensive that international flights usually worked out cheaper. But the old socialist traditions of state owned enterprise and economic control are quickly eroding in India – there are millions of semi-educated nouveau riche out there, busy overdrawing their credit-cards and consuming like there’s no tomorrow. After all, India has more people who could potentially afford to buy a Mercedes than Germany. It’s a scary thought. The divide between rich and poor will grow and grow until the poor, some half a billion or so, will fall off the map of Indian politics, culture and economics. While the tribals in the desert will continue archaic traditions like sati (bride burning) and the inductions of devadasi (temple dancers cum prostitutes), while millions of women in rural areas will continue to enjoy zero rights and zero literacy, the new found wealth amongst the middle classes – the IT jockeys and the manufacture entrepreneurs – will lead to more and more greed and division.
As Ajit Sukhuya, a wealthy hotelier in Goa recently told me, “Gated communities are the future.”

Goa International Airport is dirty and the terminal is infested with flies and machine gun-toting police. It’s off-season, so bikini-clad tourists swigging Coke are missing from the picture. Spicejet, India’s newest airline is offering a daily flight to Delhi. Along with Deccan Air and Kingfisher (yes, the beer), Spicejet are the first of, it is said, many more small carriers. The big airlines, Indian Airlines, Jet and Sahara have not lowered their prices yet, but they will. Whether air traffic control will be able to cope is anyone’s guess.

The security, as always in India is thorough but sloppy. My lighter ends up in a bin, each pocket is searched with great patience, but smuggling half a key of heroin onto this flight would not have taken a genius. There are no likely candidates amongst the passengers today.
In the waiting lounge at Gate 2, we are told that the flight from Mumbai is delayed. Strange route – Mumbai – Goa – Delhi.
Here we go, get the waiting head on, is the appropriate reaction, and though the runway is whipped by strong gusts of rain, the plane does land with less than 30 minutes behind schedule. It’s a new airbus, which is reassuring after watching Deccan Air’s propeller-boilers take off into a gray, stormy afternoon.

In the narrow doorway of the Departure Gate, three airline staff re-check our boarding slips for the third time. One by one, passengers disgorge onto the runway tarmac and fight the weather all the way to the plane. The man ahead of us manages to drop all his family’s precious boarding passes and airline staff now run madly around the plane, trying to catch the fast-moving white specs of paper, before they turn to mush. Adding to the confusion, most passengers seem to be part of enormous extended families. Despite the rain, most of the grown-ups and some of the older kids are on their mobiles, all the way from the Gate onto the aircraft. The Nouveau Riche of India are taking to the skies and just ahead of us in the queue is an incredibly unruly bunch of tiny Sikhs, herded on by their distracted parents. The patriarch is small and rotund – the shape of a ball. He wears a matching marine, Hawaiian style shirt and turban. On the gray runway, against the gray, darkening sky, it’s quite a sight, as he rolls across the tarmac, children screaming, women in ill-fitting western clothes, chattering, holding on to their multi-colored umbrellas that advertise international brands.

The runway itself is busy prior to take-off. Cyclists amble across the wet tarmac, a couple of cars that may or may not be part of the airport staff race past the plane. The runway is a single strip, leading a little-up hill, and we are gone. Below us giant breakers roll in from the Arabian Sea. The coast is lush and green and the old docks, stretching like rust-colored Victorian fingers into the dark ocean, are a last farewell gesture from Goa.
As soon as we are air-borne, virtually all the passengers are on their feet and are fighting for space in the aisle. The kids run riot, the women rush for the toilets and several men attempt to switch on their mobiles, despite several announcements that this is not allowed.

The stewardesses – all female - are attractive and dressed in tight-fitting skirts and blouses. Some look north-eastern. We speculate that there must be a high turnover – their job is extremely stressful. The first mission of an Indian stewardess is to get passengers back to their seats. It takes 15 minutes to achieve this, but the effort is futile - the seat belt sign comes off and the aisle is as crowded as Old Delhi railway-station again.

While the kids use the aisle as a run-way, pumping on flight adrenaline and screaming on the top of their lungs, we watch fat men open overhead lockers to remove enormous bags. Contents spill everywhere and get trampled on by the maddened urchins. By now the staff look utterly harassed, but following the ancient Hindi proverb that ‘the guest is God’, they remain demure.
After all, flying is for everyone.
This is modern India par excellence, development for a growing elite, nothing for the rest who won’t even be able to dream of taking to the skies, unless they have access to cheap solvents.

Throughout the two-hour flight, the seatbelt sign periodically flashes on. As the stewardess serve no food, their main mission is to herd the passengers back to their seats at these times – I suspect that the flashing signs are strategic measures to keep the chaos in check. Perhaps Indians are not really used to this new found wealth yet – their unruly behavior stems more from ignorance than rebellion or thugishness.
And old traditions die hard, even when you are air-borne – as the seat belt signs come off yet again, a pattern of movement in the cabin slowly emerges. Much of the walking about is because family members are homing in on the epicenter of their extended clan, clusters of relatives form here and there, while others, perhaps alone, wander about like lost sheep. The communication too is old-fashioned. Women exchange make-up tips, while their husbands extol the virtues of the aircraft and debate the technical aspects of the plane, as much as their blustering demeanor allows.

More than half-way through the flight, the intercoms switches on and one of the stewardesses serves up grave news, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we apologise for unnecessary warming of the cabin – we are now cooling the cabin.”
Seconds later we almost atrophy from the temperature drop. As we descend into Delhi, the kids become increasingly pesky and start crying in their dozens. We approach the capital in a great infantile infant wail and the stewardesses are out once more to coax passengers into returning to their seats, fastening their seatbelts and not moving until the aircraft has come to a standstill, a complete standstill. Another futile attempt to bring order to chaos.
As soon as the plane touches down, everyone is up on their feet. As the aircraft taxis along the runway, the overhead lockers come open and by the time the airbus grinds to a halt in front of the Indira Gandhi Domestic Terminal, everyone is pushing for the doors.

As quickly as we can, we escape into the humid Delhi night.

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