Oh Darling, Yeh Hai India!

These were the lines that came to my mind when I boarded the Jet Airways flight from Toronto yesterday afternoon after a 3 week stint in Canada. The good thing about a Jet Airways flight is that the moment you enter one, you feel you are home irrespective of which airport in the world you are in! There is lots of noise, people are here, there and everywhere, they sit everywhere other than the seat allotted to them, make unreasonable demands of the cabin crew and most importantly, you will have at least 20 families traveling with young kids who will do anything but sleep on the flight!

I have often wondered whether there will be any other set of people who make it a point to take that long flight home every 2 years for a vacation without even caring about how their infant kids will feel! There cannot be another set of kids in the world, who are as irritant and hyper active as Indian kids especially if they are in the middle of a crowd. Worse is when Indian families are traveling in groups- the men discuss the situation in Silicon Valley and the Indian economy; the women discuss almost everything under the sun and it is up to the fellow passengers and the Cabin Crew to take care of the kids who will be all around the place, crying, smiling at passers by or worse, even snatching stuff from others!

After a fairly sleep deprived night, this is the kind of chaos that I got into when I boarded the flight. The flight from Toronto to Brussels was unbearable to say the least. If all those 40 odd kids were not enough, the young girl sitting next to me was looking at me as though I was a professional rapist; the gentleman sitting behind me did not like the idea of me pushing back my seat and the gentleman sitting in front of me was getting disturbed because I was tapping my feet! Can it get any worse than that? The only reason I could survive the flight was the hot, fresh and tasty food and the excellent in flight entertainment!

I think it is high time we learn a thing or two about etiquette in public places. One can not really blame the kids when their parents itself forget the basic rules of etiquette. You might be interested in making use of every penny you spent in buying the tickets but what you need to remember is that others have also spent money on their tickets and they deserve as much of privacy and space as you do! I am hoping things will get better by the time I board my next international flight of Jet Airways…