Please take your seat (away)

 Now, I am not sure if you follow the most interesting news carefully, but the most puzzling news item of November is that a passenger on Indigo found her seat cushion missing. 

I am puzzled because this is hardly any news, if you ask me (which, of course, you did not).  If they actually had a seat cushion…now, that would have made Page 1 of The Times of India and Breaking News on Arnab Soft-in-the-head’s ghastly excrement of a channel. 

 

Generally, what happens at Indigo is this:  the guys who run it get together every Saturday to share a beedi 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  Since, as per some outdated, antiquated, subversive, unconstitutional, superfluous, seditious, pleonastic laws in India, they cannot charge for seat cushions, they have decided to not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 (ok, you did not.  Again), is a very sensible decision. 

This means no one will sleep and when people don’t sleep on flights, they eat what, under trying and extenuating circumstances, may be called food. 

Since nothing is free, they will spend. 

Since the food served is junk, they will eat more. 

So, they will spend more. 

 

You see the faultless logic (one hopes), cleverly designed by a BCG-Mckenzie-Bain kind of frenzied consultant with gel in his hair, who has a garlanded portrait of Shylock in his puja room.   

 

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 or that fellow with odd-looking eyes in Star Wars, 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.