That deadly concoction of motherly love!

One of the big, big things about living in desh (country) is that I am only one short, direct-flight away from baadi (home). Given the law of averages, this had to happen after 12 years of hopping trans-continental flights for 36 hours and going through multiple immigration and security checks. I have visited home about ten times in less than a year now, and every time, I come back with bags full of cooked food that lasts me a few weeks. If you ever want to know what you could and should not bring in an airplane, ask me! But more on that later.

This time, I came back from a crazy mom slaving in the kitchen for days to cook up a feast-to-go and running after me to take it all. My Aviation-IQ went up after a comically dark stint with the mango, and if there is one piece of advice I could give, it is to NEVER take aam pora’r shorbot concentrate (raw mango concentrate) in an airplane.

Amid a crazy morning after momma and grandma painstakingly packed me food for an army, she looked at me with puppy-eyes to take that raw mango concentrate that I was resisting, the one she had prepared with a lot of love and spices (pepper powder, mint, and a gazillion other things). I was arguing that I will not carry anything in a yellow water bottle with something she made to shield me from the 45 degree Celsius weather and prevent me from getting heat strokes. I have extremely low karma ratings as far as being a nice child is concerned, so I finally gave up.

I don’t know all the chemistry that went into whatever happened, but that bottle passed airport security miraculously. That same bottle would have led to a 3-hour long interrogation in a dark room in the US, leading up to them labeling me a budding terrorist and denying me entry for the rest of my life. But I digress here.

I boarded the plane and settled in with a rather steamy novel that I was going to read in the next few hours. As I was stuffing my backpack in the overhead bin, something prompted me to take that bottle out, lest it leaks. I imagined everything that could go wrong, and the worst circumstance that came to my rather unimaginative mind was a loose lid and spillage. I placed that bottle in between my feet while the airplane took off.

I knew there was a pop-sound as soon as we were airborne, but I thought it was someone goofing around and recklessly popping open a can of soda. Looking back at life in slow motion, most things often make perfect sense. Within the next 5 minutes, just when Jack was about to kiss Stella after 2 months of abstinence following a one-night stand, there was a louder pop-sound. This time, I looked below, and to my horror, the bottle had popped open with enough pressure to spit raw mango pulp all over my white clothes. An onlooker would have wondered how scared I was of flying that I could shit all over myself publicly in the middle of the day, the one of the semi-liquid kind, with telltale signs of the yellow spillage all over me.

I rushed to the restroom, the bottle in hand. It broke my heart to throw it in the trashcan, but I could not have salvaged it. I spent the next 20 minutes wiping the yellow goo off my clothes and sat through the rest of the plane ride shivering from wearing wet clothes as well as getting dirty, judgmental looks from the passengers. The swag with which I had entered the aircraft was all gone. I sat nervously like a mouse for the rest of the ride, praying that I do not hear another loud pop-sound from the restroom with some poor soul inside freaking out with their pants half-on and the pilot rerouting the airplane because there was yellow goo all over the ceiling.

Looking back, I can see why it was a bad idea to bring something that releases gas in a pressurized cabin. Mom does not fly, but I do. The rest of me and my food made it safe, and in case you are dying to know, it had chicken curry with posto, jhinge posto, potol posto, uchche bhaja, lau er torkari, lichu, jamrul, ruti, half-a-dozen gondhoraaj lebu, and even the bhaja jeere moshla for the mango drink. All this because I have a crazy mom who gets powered up listening to stories of people carrying things like ghee made out of barir gorur doodh (unadulterated milk from a cow someone keeps in their home), kilos of maach bhaja, and dhoka’r dalna, and tries to outshine them!

sunshine

A fin(garlic)king tale of crazy things I’d do for good food

Over the years, I've taken many things back home. Fancy chocolates. Interesting kitchen gadgets.

This time, I took home two pounds of unpeeled garlic! Yes, you heard me right.

My visits to Kolkata mean lots of good, rich food. I sometimes eat two breakfasts or two lunches on the same day. And all that food means my grandma chipping her nails while peeling a lot of garlic. If you have seen the almost two-dimensional, stick-thin garlic pods in India, you'd know how hard peeling garlic is. On the other hand, the garlic pods in the US are fatter than almonds and walnuts. The best thing I could bring home was garlic (my idea, completely).

Naturally, people at the US airport were not happy, although they should not care, since I was leaving, not entering the country. They eyed the garlic with a lot of suspicion. They ran it through scanners, tested with litmus lookalike papers. They might have wanted to ask me to chew some of them too. In their long experience of all the weird things they have seen people transport, the humble, innocuous garlic had never made the list. They did not ask me anything directly, but were holding up the line and had mobilized a tiny army of people to figure out what the hell was all this garlic doing here?

“I am attending the holy garlic festival in India this year. Have you heard about it?”

I got skeptical looks.

“You should look it up. Very pious festival. They ward off evil spirits.” As I said this, I held out my hands in front of my eyes to do a nomoshkaar.

And so, they let me go without any more questions, and off I flew thousands of miles with all the garlic.

The amount of good food I got to eat increased manifold as a result, and it might not be entirely my imagination. It did turn out to be a holy garlic festival in India after all. My own, holy garlic food festival at home.

sunshine

Country Rap

Have you noticed how Bengali expats who congregate with other Bengali expats at the airport and bond while bitching about how India will never improve usually share certain common attributes?

One, they usually wear GAP or Nike clothing.

Two, the farther they get from the US (or the closer they get to India), the louder their rants get. They might not be as vocal in Houston or Seattle but will be very loud in Dubai. Perhaps the humid Dubai air makes them realize that shit is about to get real in a few hours.

Three, the rants are always, always in English. Ninde korar belaye accent diye Ingriji.

Based on what people say, it is easy to predict who is who.

"Ayi saala suorer bachcha plane ta deri koralo" -- A Bengali from India.

"Can't believe nothing runs on time. It's always sooo hard to get things done in India. This country will never improve" -- naak oonchoo expat whose patriotism is confined to missing and discussing aam jaam lichu tyangra lyangra on Facebook but dreads every moment of their trip to India. 

A curious spectator (sunshine).

None of my business (class)!

I had my first ever business class upgrade recently while flying from Kolkata to Dubai. When the attendant at the gate called my name, I thought that the flight was full, and they would elbow me out and emotionally manipulate me into taking the next flight.

An upgrade meant that while there was a long line in gate 11, I got priority boarding and took gate 10 with a bunch of pretentious people from a certain demography as mine who documented, through selfies, their momentarily luxurious life every few minutes. The flight had a lot of blue-collar, daily-wage workers commuting, and it is no coincidence that none of them got upgraded.

I always wondered what first class looks like. Now, I know. It's a brilliant marketing move. While coach class walks by passing the business class (and wishing they were sitting in business class), business class walks by passing the first class.

All these years, I would enter the aircraft and stare down at the business class people before moving on to coach. Now, I was one of those people I would stare down at. I had befriended a few strangers in the baggage drop off line. Now, I felt guilty as they walked past my seat, nodding to me briefly and acknowledging my luck rather than stare me down. I shifted uncomfortably and almost mentally apologized to every person who walked by me to the back of the aircraft.

And then, there were switches and buttons. Lots of them. One, to pull my personal TV closer to me. One, to raise myself. One, to recline. One, to lie down like you would lie down on bed. One, to make my arse more comfortable. One, to find my foot rest. I experienced complete cognitive overload and felt out of place trying to figure everything out. The menu was a fat booklet I stole as a souvenir, since the chances of another upgrade or eating lasooni murgh (garlic chicken) for appetizers, braised lamb shank with borlotti beans for the main course, and carrot halwa with dried fruit compote and dark chocolate sauce for dessert 34,000 feet above ground in the next ten years is slim. The gourmet food was out of the world, mostly with long, esoteric French names that were better eaten than enunciated. No plastic, but heavy, high quality china. The headphones were noise cancelling. The pillow was softer, the blanket was a soft, silk comforter. The space was child-free; this is the first flight where I did not hear a single child wailing.

No food trolleys unceremoniously hit my knees. They took your food orders personally, and served you personally, appetizers first (clear table), then the main course (clear table), and then, dessert. They provided hot towels many times, assuming that I was getting tired without doing anything and hence needed to be periodically rejuvenated. The restrooms had fancy perfumes, toilet seat covers, and free dental kits. They cleaned the restrooms and swept the floor dry every now and then. They even gave me a shiny red card for priority visa through a fast gate channel. I was one of the first to deplane.

I have never experienced such opulence and attention to detail in an airplane before. All this, and I kept looking back at hundreds of people huddled like cattle and kept thinking, this business class is not my reality, that is my reality. I had no business taking up double the space and double the resources, eating gourmet food with obscure names, drinking champagne, and pretending that this is my real life. The real me actually walks out of the plane with huge bumps on the head every time after dozing off by the window and banging my head continuously against the window glass. The real me hugs the window during take-off and hungrily takes in the view of Kolkata for the last few moments, teary-eyed, before disappearing among the clouds. This time, I was in the middle of the aircraft and could not even bid a proper goodbye to Kolkata! I think these first-world problems become even more first-world in such opulent spaces.

sunshine

Why I am not likely to fly Qatar Airways again

There are mistakes. And there are expensive mistakes. 

The shortest life span of a US-India airplane ticket I bought was 4 hours. Things in my life changed in those 4 hours. I had to cancel my ticket.

Flights from the US usually come with a free cancellation clause for up to 24 hours of initial purchase. I have done that with Emirates and United. You just cancel your ticket online and get a full refund in a few days. No questions asked. This is the first time I was flying Qatar.

Apparently, Qatar Airways works on a different model. There is a button "Hold Ticket for 24 Hours" that I never saw. It could be that I was distracted, stressed, or maybe it was written strategically so that a first-timer who does not know will not notice it. Large business, after all, care about making money. They do not care about customers. Perhaps they design their websites accordingly.

When I cancelled the ticket after 4 hours, the system said that it will refund me the price of the ticket minus $305.00. It seemed odd. I called customer service. Apparently, Qatar Airways does not have a 24-hour customer service either. If you do not call within normal business hours for eastern time zone, congratulations, you have just been screwed. Again, the customer service is not really meant for serving the customer. 

By the time I could have talked to a human the next day, I might have crossed the 24-hour mark. I had to decide quickly. Note that I still had not realized that I have overlooked the "Hold Ticket for 24 Hours" button. How would I? When I had bought that ticket 4 hours ago, I had every intention of making that trip. I was doomed the moment I bought the ticket. Whether I was stuck to the plan or not, my money was stuck there.

If you watch air crash documentaries, it is never one thing gone wrong that brings down an airplane. It is usually a combination of different things, a chain of events gone wrong, often combined with human error. My situation was something like that. 

It took a couple of email exchanges and phone calls the next day to even understand what had happened. I admitted my mistake, told them that I am a first-timer with Qatar, it was a weekend and I could not talk to a customer service agent to understand what was going on. They train their staff well to maintain a robotic voice and keep apologizing for my inconvenience when they are far from being apologetic. For every line I said, they kept apologizing for any inconvenience. 

I wrote to the E-commerce support. I explained what had happened and said that it was my fault. I wrote about four emails in a week. In every email, I admitted to my mistake for not noticing that “Hold Ticket” button. Yet, after a week, I got a vague, impersonal, copy-paste email with words like “we regret to inform you,” “as per policy,” and “we look forward to welcoming you on-board on one of our flights soon.” I wonder if policy is meant for people, or people are meant for policy.

My final reply to them was short. I wrote that I hope this profit of $305.00 will supersede the loss of a customer, and hopefully, they never have to welcome me on-board.

Here was an opportunity for the airline to rise above their policies and make a lasting impression. I even told them that I was willing to buy a new ticket with the correct dates right away, a ticket that would cost me 5-6 times this $305.00 penalty. The math was simple. The intention to help was never there in the first place.

Sheryl Sandberg, in her convocation speech at MIT this year, said something that hit home. To quote her:

“They [the community leaders] understood that the most difficult problems and the greatest opportunities we have are not technical. They are human. In other words, it's not just about technology. It's about people.” [Link]

It’s about people only when the intention is to serve people. Technology forgets. Human beings don’t. My first impression of Qatar Airways will always be my lasting impression.

sunshine

(Py)airport Drama

Every time I land in Kolkata, something funny happens within the first 30 minutes. This time was no exception.

I had a seat at the very back of the aircraft. By the time I got off the airplane and stood in the long, serpentine immigration line, I realized that I was among the last few to stand in line. It didn't escape me that US or Kolkata, I always get to stand in the longer line. The line for immigrants like me is usually longer than those of US citizens and permanent residents, just like the line for Indian citizens is much longer in Kolkata. Anyway, I was tired, disoriented, and could not wait to be done. I had been traveling for the last 30 hours, mostly over the North Pole and parts of Russia, which meant that I had only seen daylight in those 30 hours. I could barely stand straight.

When my turn came, a young guy at the counter asked to see my passport. He barked, in a rather gruff and rude voice, "Passport dikhaiye." (Show me your passport, in Hindi).

One, I was a little put off by hearing Hindi (and not Bangla) in Kolkata, and two, I was a little confused about how to address him. In the US, one usually starts a conversation with a polite, "Hi, how is it going?"

Without thinking, I translated it and asked, "Bhalo achen to?" (Are you doing well?)

What happened next was unbelievable. You see, I had no interest in knowing how the guy was doing, I was merely being polite. But I had forgotten that cues of politeness vary across societies. In India, (usually) no girl smiles at a stranger and asks how he is doing. People get down to business without spending time on niceties.

Holy rangoli, the man actually blushed 50 shades of pink and purple. He avoided further eye contact, grinned like a monkey, and started shuffling uncomfortably in his seat and staring at his crotch while fiddling with my passport. He almost looked like I had married him recently and he was the coy bride. With utmost care, he stamped my passport and handed it back to me, nodding slightly, a nod that probably meant, "You stay well too!" He barely managed a whisper while asking me, "Aapni Dubai te thaken?" Do you live in Dubai?

"Na, US e," I replied, before taking back my passport and walking away. I have no idea why the gruff, Hindi-speaking guy was suddenly cooing and blushing and making small talk. My only explanation is, no stranger chick had ever asked him "Bhalo achen to?" (Are you doing well?) with a smile before. 

sunshine