My first IA Experience!

It was again one of those painful trips I had to take in order to satisfy the team needs and recruit more people into the forest! The office admin could not arrange for decent flights and we landed up with "Air India". I have personally never travelled in an Air India flight, I have of course heard a lot of people literally swearing on the service they provide but have never taken them seriously. I always thought, what can really go wrong in an airline? Even if it is government owned? It still needs customers and has to work for the customers in order to be in business right?? WRONG!
They don't give a damn, they have no "customer" obsession nor do they care about who fly with them and who don’t - they always get left over crowd and they are happy with that. We reached the airport 1.5 hours ahead of departure and stood in a long never-ending queue to check-in. We as a group gave 9 tickets to the lady at the counter. She kept staring at the screen for more than 10 mins. No response. She looked around went to the next door aunty, no expression on her face, when we asked what was going on. No response. She took all our tickets and walked off, don’t know where. After 10 mins she appeared and we still didn’t know what was going on and were losing patience. We had to board the flight by 4:00 and until 3:45 there was no sign of boarding passes! The lady then walks to another uncle at the counter and he tried to print the boarding pass. We were lucky to have gotten 1 out of 9 boarding pass and were relieved that we are finally checking-in. Guess what!? The printer got stuck!! We were moving from one counter to the other until uncle found a working printer. After he found, he issued boarding passes for everybody else in the queue except us!
This was getting highly irritating and we started bugging uncle and all he did was Nod and say "1 min" - he did that at least 10 times...We finally followed the lady to the back office and she said, 1 min. it was 4:10 (15 mins before take-off) and we were still standing there waiting to check in. She finally came out and handed over the tickets to the same lost uncle and disappeared. Uncle took print outs of our boarding passes at 4:20 and we rushed for security check! While we were standing in the queue the IA lady announced "This is the last call for all the passengers boarding the Bangalore flight on Indian Airlines". We broke the line and ran to the gates, the lady was pissed off and didn’t even smile (like we care, do hell with your smile).
We reached the flight to find out that my seat was already allocated to somebody else and the lady was kind enough to ask me to sit in Business class (somebody was finally kind I thought!). I was finally happy that we got compensated for the wait and got business class seats. I guess I got too carried away, the air hostess were no better. One lady - Who looked half pregnant, another one who looked deprived of food and the other who looked as if she hated being there! Totally 3 ladies to serve us "first class" and make us feel that we are the bad boys stealing away their life from them! There was no Smile on their face, no please in their vocabulary - you would simply wish they didn’t exist.
So much for a 45 mins flight to Bangalore - I would have rather taken the train!

The IPL disease

Well it’s that time of the year when everybody sees IPL, breathes IPL, eats IPL, sleeps IPL. Ever noticed the open mouths of people trying to eat and gaze at the TV at the same time? It’s a normal scene in Food court here these days. All of them (specifically men) care less about the flies on their plate and more about the sixer which was just hit by Sachin! What's in a Cricket? Or rather what’s in an IPL? There are 2 major things Indians are crazy about - Cricket and Movies! - What a good way to mix both of them and create money!! Shahrukh, Juhi, Shilpa and Preity had no other better work to do I guess - or maybe they just thought cricket would earn them more income than showing their skin! I used to follow cricket and would lose sleep when there was India-Pak match going on! I was crazy to the extent that I would keep offering 5 Rupee coins to the TV when I wanted Sachin to hit a four and if he did, the TV would get another 5! Those used to be fun and made me look as if the "Whole" of India was for the win! To me IPL looks like a civil war made popular! No? Then why does your blood pressure increase when Chennai Super Kings loses a match with 1 run? Or when Mumbai Indians win as if it was a practice session? I have hardly understood why would we split the states and fellow players, invite firangs to the teams and then play against each other so that all of the firangs whom you would play with later on will know about each Indian player in detail! Isn't it like "Aa bail mujhe maar"??
OK, may be I just don't understand it in the right way, but I also don't seem to understand the "hype" about it! First the media and the Ads- every radio station, every TV channel, every other hoarding is dedicated to the great IPL! Every product on earth is sold with a tag of IPL, from fairness cream to Digital TV subscription to chaddis! If thats not enough, they mix super singer competition with IPL and make them "IPL Rockstars". Aing? Where is this going? I wonder if this enthusiasm was ever shown during the hockey world cup! Actually, it was not!! People, there are more things in life than Just Cricket and IPL!

Do the Dune..

It was just yesterday where I had danced to 2010 and it’s already the 3rd month of the year. And to add to this, I also completed a year of wed-lock! Most of you know that this is not an arranged marriage and Vishnu and I have been hooked forever! So, 1 year of wed-lock was more of a wow-I-am-married-for-a-year feeling than wow-I-married-this-stranger-a-year-back! Never mind if you don’t understand the difference, but Feb was surely a special month for me but thanks to "Duty" that the most special month of the year (after September of course ;-) ) was spent alone!

My better half informed me in Jan that he will be "visiting" home during Feb aka he will be out of town for most of the month and my first reaction was - You better be here on the 20th OR I will KILL YOU!!!!! He simply gave one of his funniest-cutest-broadest-whitest smiles and said we both will not be here on the 20th! I didn’t know what he meant but later did I realize that besides his huge-hectic-horrible travel schedule he had planned a surprise trip for the anniversary :))))))))) Both of us have always wished to go to a quiet calm place and relax ourselves but we never got around to do that, thanks to our hectic work schedules. We finally got to do what we wanted (relax that is) at "The Dune" - Pondicherry.

We always have this image about Pondicherry - French Colonies, Auroville, Beach and Bacardi! And people mostly go there to either party or get drunk or do both! However, Pondicherry also hosts bunch of beautiful beach resorts and one of them being "The Dune" - The Dune is actually an eco-beach resort. It’s a town by itself, a place where you won't feel hot even though the sun is right on top of you, you hear the birds chirping and the sea splashing on the shore from your bedroom, you have mosquito nets but no mosquitoes (only bees), you drive a cycle instead of a car, you have a lotus pond in front of your veranda, you live on solar power, your roof is not made of concrete but of palm leaves, where sun light wakes you up instead of a tube light, where you eat organic and grow organic! This place was surely a wonder! The people there are friendly and caring, they made surprise arrangements for us and we enjoyed the limelight to the fullest! A room decorated with flowers, a dinner table specially decorated and booked for us, a beautiful candle lit dinner, a handmade card by the staff and a cute cake cutting ceremony with the staff made our stay and our anniversary so memorable!!!

I was so glad we went to the Dune - waiting to go there again :) And, thank you for taking me there :-)