This obituary is meant for Spice Jet, the self-proclaimed 4th largest budget carrier in Asia and largest in India. The company has as much integrity or conscience as an American lady of the flesh trade during the great depression; which enables it to ruthlessly prune its bottom lines with utter disregard to passenger comfort or convenience.
I had the unique privilege of flying for the first time (and hopefully the last time) with spice jet along with my wife and son, on a trip to meet my daughter and to celebrate Diwali with her at VIT Vellore; she now speaks fluent Tamil and can say ‘Anna’ to everything and everyone five times in one sentence without blinking her eyes.
We flew out to Chennai on Saturday. The airline was kind enough to delay the flight by only 3 hours, and reached us at destination without any detours or halts en route. It wasn’t so forgiving or kind on the way back though, and it decided to put all Delhi bound pax on Monday on a flight to Mumbai, after two agonizing hours’ delay , and then connect to Delhi, because it did not manage enough pax to operate a direct flight to Delhi. The flight staff did not have the words, ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you’ in their vocabulary and chose to offer no regrets, apologies or explanations for their whimsical decisions.
This is the first time it has happened to me, and I believe there should be some law against it; taking pax for granted and riding roughshod over them. We did manage to reach Delhi the next day, after all the shifting and enplaning-deplaning procedures. I believe they would have taken us to the moon and back if it suited them or their bottom lines.
The sluggish plane itself was a little reluctant to fly and seemed it would take off only after two to three takeoff attempts. Once in the air, the moth infested, mosquito-laden bird groaned and shuddered at the unwelcome prospects of the long haul home.
The shabbily dressed, flat and waxed-chested and mosquito-bitten-thin–armed staff who did the head-count of pax with ball point refills on their palms, and tried to outdo the pilot in wearing heavy perfume, did little to enthuse the pax or inspire any confidence in them.
The unshaven lady giving the safety demo refused to stop staring at her feet and could not extricate herself from the life jacket she put on, and had to be pulled out by the front row pax. She summed up by asking us to refer the aircraft manual, which read like an obituary, in case they chose to dump us in water. She made my day by making it a point to step on my bare toes with her 7” pointed heels and rack my knees with the food trolley every time she passed me by, since I happened to displease her by asking for free water and not buying anything on her menu.
It was indeed strange to note that Chennai International Airport has no soap in its toilets! My wife discovered this unfortunate fact once the call of nature summoned her, much against her feeble resistance. For all the glitter and huge malls, Chennai unfortunately keeps its toilets very dirty, which happen to be soap-less horrors of leaky faucets, used toilet paper, filthy men armed with Playboy magazines with fake covers of south Indian gods and goddesses, and slippery floors with puddles of drain-water.
It took me a prolonged battle with the CISF personnel and ground staff to manage to get out of the airport and buy soap at the chemist’s outside the airport.
The spice jet is much like the Delhi blue lines that drive at break neck speeds to gather waiting pax, but reaches last whereas the blue line reaches first. A Rajdhani train has better curtsied staff and commitment to their customers than this airline, which makes its cost-cutting-no-frills measures only too in-your-face.
I wonder why suffer so many losses and do this business of flying if your heart is not into it?