Power shower

It’s a trick of the modern age, perhaps, that you don’t expect certain things to go backwards; that, once you’ve experienced a kind of ‘progress’, you’re really not geared to see that turn into a regression of sorts. I suspect this is especially true if you come from the so-called middle-class or a wealthier stratum, where the basting of education and the slathering of money have trained you to expect life to move forever forward and upward into constantly expanding zones of comfort and convenience. It can come as a shock, therefore, when you suddenly feel some of the assumed ‘basics’ slip-sliding back into a simulacra of an earlier time.

Take flying for instance. I was a child at a time when Indian Airlines (the only domestic airline in the country then) still depended on workhorses, dating back to the Second World War and just after. My first flight was on a Dakota, where you climbed in through the door and climbed again at a steep angle to reach your seat. When the Dak took to air it was a thing of wonder, and throughout the flight the aircraft retained a relationship with the ground — you could see its shadow leaping over hills and rivers. My second flight was in a creature called the Fokker Friendship and it sits even more strangely in my memory: the pilot was a neighbour of ours in Lake Gardens and I clearly remember standing in the cockpit as we approached Dum Dum and the navigator giving me his seat as we came in to land. After that I graduated to the four-pankha Vickers Viscount and then my first jet, a VC-10. The question of comfort or lack thereof didn’t at first enter the equation — just to be airborne was magical. It was only when I experienced the high altitude rattletraps of Aeroflot Illyushins, with their freezing cabins, awful food and crews of malevolent mashimas that I realized I was missing good old Indian Airlines.

What followed was years of IA trips in Boeings 727s and 737s, with the occasional international journey in the massive lap of a 747. Even having reached my full height, I don’t remember ever being cramped for space. Even with some growing discernment of food, I don’t actually remember ever hating the food — for many years I remained grateful for the fact that they’d managed to get warm khabaar upto an altitude of 35,000 feet, and I have yet to lose my fascination with those little slotted trays in which they used to serve the meals. At some point, flying — especially international flying — became downright luxurious: there was alcohol, there were movies and a choice of music, the serving of food was accompanied by quite pretty women smiling down at you as if they meant it. Without one realizing it, the whole idea of flying became a kind of mental space. You didn’t have the soot and gristle of trains and stations; if you missed a flight you could usually take the next one, or cancel and take one a few days later; Indian airports were not places to tarry but the Western ones were great, seemingly designed not just for comfort but downright pleasure; yes, there was jet-lag, yes, there was cabin-pressure exhaustion after a long flight, but generally speaking, flying was an activity to which one looked forward.

I’m sure people who flew frequently and under pressure of work did not share my warm attitude to air travel but even they would make appreciative noises about the executive or first class they had recently experienced. Flying was a Good Thing and, along with modern medicine, one of the great reasons to be happy with the time in which we were alive.

Of late, it’s becoming clear that all that is going. It takes a while to register that for every ‘advance’ in air travel (the banning of smoking, for example) there is an unequal retraction of comfort, of space, of peace of mind. Despite full planes, an airline will now charge you for missing a flight. You can get to an airport like Heathrow four hours in advance but the snaking queues still stretch for miles. You can be grateful for the security checks but they are full of whimsy (why, for instance, is the carrying on board of lighters and matches an issue only in India and nowhere in Europe? Why do they never check shoes separately at Indian airports? How safe are we, really?). Even before you take-off, you know you are entering a space highly crowded with fast-moving metal: from the queue on the ground you move into a queue of planes trundling to the runway; inside the cabin it’s all show and precious little substance: yes, you can get Guru Dutt or François Truffaut on your own little screen but you can’t actually see the damn film because the seat in front is now much closer to your face; there is still food but it’s dropped in quality and airlines will square every circle to give you as little of it as possible. Taking even the occasional flight has now become a stressful chore and, for everybody not ensconced in an extortionately priced first-class sleeperette, it looks like it’s going to get worse.

Then, trickling through your consciousness is the morality of flying. It is now undeniably clear that the burgeoning growth in air travel has had a massive, direct and adverse impact on global warming. You now fly with the knowledge that every flight you take helps strangle the planet. The plane you are on is releasing exhausted fuel at high volume and this is locking heat into the atmosphere; the extracting of the fuel itself has a price that goes way beyond the economics of it but the money it costs is soon going to crunch into your life like a huge fist. And so you feel the space being squeezed from several different directions: if the terrorists don’t get you, the airlines will and if they don’t get you, the nexus of business and government will provide the coup de grâce.

There is a common reluctance towards accepting a nasty fate and yet, as you sit on Air India’s latest wide-body jet, flying high above the arid Iranian desert, you realize that the barren landscape you see below is not a bad representation of the future. You realize that the flight you took circa 1991, flying club class for the first time, on a reputed international carrier, with the folded linen napkins, the three course meal and the choice of several decent wines all served in proper wine-glasses was, most likely, the peak of your flying pleasure. It was the last time you flew without tension and guilt and, no matter how fancy the flights get in the future, there will always be something being snatched away for every little widget and gadget and delicious morsel and superb drop and power shower. As the plane banks and your plastic glass of whisky shudders across the drop-down table towards the edge, you start to scribble a list of other lost hopes and assumptions and zones of sanctuary, and it doesn’t make for pretty reading.