A Tail, a wing and an occupied loo....

I don’t know if you follow the real news as carefully as I do – I mean real news, not stuff like wars and elections and other needless distractions – because the notable news last week was that Air India found a Boeing 737 that it never knew it owned.  This aircraft, if you will pardon an utterly condemnable, entirely avoidable pun, was hiding in plane sight. 

I am not making this up, pinky promise.  The Dumdum guys in Kolkata apparently told the Air India guys to remove their vehicle from the parking lot and the Air India guys said, Which car?  And the Dumdum guys said, The plane.  And the Air India guys said, We generally don’t park our planes in the carpark but our pilots sometimes get late for dinner at home, so let us get back to you.  And the Dumdum guys said, You ignoramuses, the plane, the plane!  The one that hasn’t flown for years.  And the Air India guys said, Well, on a philosophical note, Air India itself hasn’t flown for years.  And the Dumdum guys (who don’t understand philosophy unless Marx had pronounced it) said, You dumb, inert, half-witted, moribund asses, this is a Boeing 737-200 that once took Gopakumar to Pune in the 2001 monsoon through nerve-wracking turbulence and is now parked near the golguppa stall beside the Control Tower. And the Air India guys said, Which golguppa stall?  And who is Gopakumar?  And the Dumdum guys said, The golguppa stall that uses last year’s left-over mustard oil (and they refused to answer the second question which dealt with an inconsequential human). 

And the Air India guys said, But we just counted all our planes using an Abacus and a scale and found a few missing engines and pilots and one plane with only one wing and one that had three because of an unfortunate exchange, but the planes are all there.  And the Dumdum guys were flummoxed and said, Why did you use the scale?  And the Air India guys said, Because we couldn’t find measuring tape.  And then everyone laughed though no one understood why (so, this sounded like the G20 Meet).  And then the Dumdum guys said, To repeat, this is the 737-200, you decrepit, fossilised, amorphous, inanimate piece of jelly.  And the Air India guys – regretfully ignoring the compliment of being elevated to the same species salad as jelly - said, We have no 737-200s, we crashed all of them long ago.  And the Dumdum guys said, Look, here is a photo of the plane with the old Air India logo and everything else missing, so it has to be yours.  And the Air India guys said, Gosh, it’s ours!  There’s even a weeping Maharaja in the loo who is refusing to come out.  And someone in the Air India office jumped up in joy and said, It’s got wings!  It’s got wings! 

And then they sold it.