The first question I had for eee was how long it had been flying around in planes. You see, I was justifiably peeved by the superior attitude flaunted by eee, even though I grudgingly conceded that I had provided ample reason for it to conclude that my IQ was somewhat comparable to that of a low-level plant. But using all my reserves, I was on a recovery mode and wanted to settle scores with eee quickly. I had extracted nuggets of knowledge from my seemingly random reading habits but as my wife despaired from time to time, none of these nuggets had ever been of any real use till then. I knew an eee had all of about 25 days to live. If this smart specimen of the species, assuming me to be a complete nincompoop, boasted of a few years' flying experience, I could gleefully nail the lie and retrieve a lost cause. When eee began what seemed an interminable exercise in clearing its throat (anxiety or what?), I let my knowing smirk linger long enough to deliberately accentuate its discomfiture. Eee evenly said "I wouldn't expect you to know that our lifespan is less than a month. This flying is a hereditary vocation handed down by my ancestors, who have been doing this for years. We observe humans when they are in near-captive state in flight and exchange notes weekly. We observe the sabbath strictly, don't fly on Sundays and have our assembly then. Actually, I have an apprentice too, somewhere around the 8th row in this flight - grooming the next generation, you know". I would have fallen off the seat but for the way aircraft seats are constructed, I must confess. I tucked my tail between my hind-legs and retreated - deciding to play it straight with this really intelligent eee.
How did eee select a flight which terminates back in Bombay at night, I was curious to know. "Easy, we are trained to attach ourselves to one hostess. We know all the stingy airlines prefer to get the cabin crew back to the place of origin for the night and if we keep an eye on one or two crew members, we would return to Bombay. We just have to be reasonably unobtrusive, otherwise might be swatted away". Simple but effective, I thought. Then eee said something which warmed the cockles of my heart and I felt a kindred soul instantly. It vehemently disapproved of people sleepwalking to catch pre-dawn flights as if a couple of hours' delay would mean an imminent collapse of their massive kingdoms! "I hate groggy people in various states of sleep deprivation in those earliest flights; it is almost like looking at zombies for two hours, not very entertaining and it inhibits our study. So I take later flights when the cabin tends to be a bit more lively, facilitating our task".
What did eee make of the Kingfisher airline debacle?? "The strategy was all wrong", eee said emphatically, as if it had hurriedly authored a couple of management bestsellers in the past two weeks! "Running one airline, tying itself into knots, trying to be more premium than necessary, was bad enough. But having another group airline pretending to be low-cost but forgetting its DNA, doing something different and providing near-normal services at that cost was a cumulative disaster. How could they have sustained it any longer?", eee rhetorically asked as if it was a visiting professor at the Indian Business School. I had read that Captain Gopinath, the founder of Deccan Airlines held that opinion and wondered how eee got hold of that. Obviously it must have engaged him in a pow-wow too. I recounted the time when I initially felt embarrassed, then almost felt scared, flying alone in business class from Bombay to Madras - occupying one of the twelve seats there. There were three hostesses to serve the cabin and they had a general paucity of people to take care of. They decided to focus their aggregated attention on me. They giggled and ceremoniously gave me a snack plate, heaped to the rafters with what four people could but should not eat and helpfully suggested replenishment was available. One took away my glasses to polish them clean, ignoring my violent protestation, thereby rendering me highly myopic for fifteen minutes. It is an entirely different matter that the remaining two appeared to merge into a single entity befitting the occupancy level, during my temporarily myopic existence. Another evinced keen interest in my life story, as if I was a celebrity and wanted to be supplied with all the information for a proposed documentary beginning at the beginning with my childhood, about 50 years ago! I am sure their standard operating procedure did not allow them to leave an already lonely passenger in that cabin class more alone, so someone stayed with me right through the descent! That flight also provided me the opportunity to pop the one burning question I was dying to ask a Kingfisher hostess but was always hesitant - `Did Vijay Mallaya personally interview and hire you'? Remember he boasted of this in the video they played on-board before take-off? All the three were clearly concerned that despite their best efforts I was showing a tendency to lapse into temporary insanity and wondered what I was blabbering about!
Then eee asked me if I had ever seen an absolutely petrified flier. It asked me to take a walk and observe the gentleman on 15C for a few minutes. I did and boy, was he nervous? His deathly pale face twitched frequently and he mopped his forehead continuously to get rid of the generous flow of sweat (inside the air-conditioned cabin). He was feverishly mumbling some prayer as his mouth frothed a bit on the edges and his wrist and knuckles were ashen as he held tightly to the armrests on both sides, as if he was on a roller coaster. I shuddered to imagine what his state would be if there was significant turbulence during the flight! Eee helpfully clarified that he usually retches and disgorges violently if the plane wobbles a bit, poor guy and added that he was a frequent flier!! I wondered what official incentive would make him fly so often with that kind of a morbid fear of flying and eee agreed sombrely. I prayed that man would always exit the aircraft on his own legs and never in a stretcher!
Eee then pointed out to a lady sitting in the previous row, cheerfully talking with her kid and said she made this pilgrimage of a trip every month on the same day, that is the 10th of the month, going by the inputs of eee's ancestors. Why? She was a single mom with a kid, having been divorced by a Bangalore based techie two years back. Ever since she had had to make this monthly sojourn just to collect her alimony because otherwise the techie delayed the payment inordinately. Eee wondered what kind of a man he was but then philosophically concluded that we did not know what the lady did to him during marriage! Very mature, I thought.
As we were descending into Bangalore airport, eee warned me to brace myself for a hard landing and explained that it knew the pilot and his landing ways. On that friendly note, it bade adios and flew towards the front galley. A very smarteee alright, I averred and smiled when the thought hit me that the flight had been an Eee-Class ride!! I hoped the Merc guys would make some marketing stuff of that to bolster their dwindling sales and stay ahead of BMW and Audi. But for that, they have to read the right blog, correct?
