Please take your seat (away)

I wrote a few days ago about a plane that Air India did not know that they owned, which seems in line with what they normally don't know about things.  These things happen in November usually- the most puzzling news item of November 2023 was that a passenger on Indigo found her seat cushion missing and made a noise about it; puzzling because this is hardly any news, if you ask me (which, of course, you did not).   

Generally, what happens at Indigo is this:  the guys who run it get together every Saturday and ask just one question: What else can we charge for that will make Humanity squirm?  Since, as per some outdated, antiquated, subversive, unconstitutional, superfluous, seditious, pleonastic laws in India, they cannot charge for seat cushions, they have decided to not provide them, which, if you ask me (you did not, I know, I know), is a very sensible decision. 

This means that when the plane lands, everyone - after sitting on a plastic surface which has little hills and valleys and biodiversity and leftover upma from the earlier flight, all of which are designed to leave deep psychological imprints on a part of the anatomy that I shall refuse to describe - will jump up and out of the plane, enabling their acclaimed fifteen-minute turnaround time for the next flight.

This faultless logic was cleverly designed by a BCG-Mckenzie-Bain kind of frenzied consultant with gel in his hair, who travels eight days a week giving people advice to end the world prematurely (when he travels on Indigo, he carries extra gel for the above mentioned part of human anatomy).

The last time I booked a ticket on Indigo, everything had to be paid for separately; this included a neighbour who snored at 104 decibels and only woke up to explore his right nostril in the hope of finding lithium + a tin of cashew that had been plucked just after Tendulkar made his Test debut (no, no, the tin of cashew was not up his nose.  Will you please read carefully).

But I cannot complain: at the counter, they decided that my height, body mass index and shoe size were free and not chargeable, which is why I am forever grateful. 

And, when I entered the aircraft, I actually had a seat cushion, which they had forgotten to take away.  So, I whooped with delight until I sat down to discover that it was made of Ultratech cement with a premium barbed-wire finish, and any semblance to a cushion was unintentional and deeply regretted.   The leg space was designed in the fond hope of transporting penguins, but they are now forced to take in people instead, particularly people with unrealistic and stupid expectations like seat cushions.

As I am generally a sort of chap who looks at the sunny side of life, I noted that the wings were still there and the pilots weren’t in their underclothes and chappals (at least not when they came out of the cockpit).  There were two of them too – pilots, not wings, you ignoramus – so one must stop counting seat cushions and count pilots, sorry blessings, instead. 

ps: there were two wings too.