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CRANK'S CORNER

        There are any number of ways to drive away the tedium of everyday life. Travelling by a budget airline should certainly figure among the top in the list.

        When you choose a normal airlines to fly, the only fun maybe in figuring out whether any person can possibly completely chew within the period of travel what is offered as sandwiches. Generally, in-flight food is made with the ingenious intention of distracting your mind from the poor service. If the food is abysmal you will surely pass over the fact that it was dished out by a snarling and surly stewardess, who will push the tray as if she was asked to feed the next-door dog. Perhaps airline food by virtue of being in the air for long hours has contracted terminal jet lag that it eventually becomes a cross between blotting paper and leather. Whatever it is, you will grapple so hard with it that before you realise you will bump down to a typical landing and even swallow the food in the violent jerk.

        But with a budget airline, the amusement starts even before you take to the skies. 'The flight's departure is put off to 7.30 a.m. instead of the scheduled 5.30 a.m.' When you receive this message, if you are a normal person, you will perhaps delay your start from the house by two hours. But the budget airlines people expect you to be super-normal and deduce that the flight you are supposed to travel on is in reality put off by a day and two hours. The beauty here is that nobody will talk about the flight being cancelled for the day. The ground staff and the other personnel at the airline counter are programmed carefully to speak in sentences that don't contain even traces of truth. So, there have been occasions when the flights have been delayed by two days with the passengers being told every three hours that the delay is only for the next three hours. And occasionally, mind you only occasionally, as if to catch up for the all the lost time, some flights take-off ahead of schedule. But to just to keep the fun element in tact, most passengers are never told about the advancement in the time. A friend says that his flight was cancelled mid-air when the crew realised that the pilot was not informed about the change in the departure plans. When people say that they have spotted UFO or some such thing, I presume that they must have seen only a budget flight that had lost its way as it does not come fitted with costly compass and other way-showing devices.

        I think that passengers are put through such ordeals only as a preparation for tough tests that await them in-flight. The moment you step into a budget airline you are expected to stop breathing as anything you want to do inside the aircraft comes at a price. I swear I am not making this up. My co-passenger was billed ten rupees for sneezing. I didn't check notes with another passenger who fell into a fit of bilious burping after he made the cardinal mistake of tasting the in-flight idli (idlies are allowed into the aircraft only as an ammunition to take on hardened hijackers).

        As everyone knows budget airlines scrimp on most things to cut down the flying cost. So, the AC is never switched on and even the propellors are turned off as it was windy up there. And I am told that some of these airlines may charge extra for saying that the outside temperature is such and such degree Celsius (double charge for converting that in Fahrenheit) and the flight will (hopefully) land in three hours (if you are lucky). The male attendants are picked up from dismissed MTC conductors while the women are recruited outside tailoring shops.

        Budget airlines, I also strongly suspect, switch off the motors mid-air and just float and move ahead in the general momentum gained at the take-off. I was even prepared for the eventuality of being asked along with other passengers to take turns as the pilot or at least double up as the co-pilot, whose sole job, I think, is to find out what the knobs that abound in the cockpit are actually for. If he figures that out he graduates to the rank of pilot, the sole privilege of whose job is that he is never served the in-flight food and is allowed to carry home-made curd rice instead.

        It is only fair that I confess here that budget airlines allow for free use of the flight steps when you disembark. You can also smile at the airhostess. But if it results in a bigger expense outside then you cannot hold the airlines responsible for that.

        Having filled this column with budget flights, I am afraid that I may be levied entertainment charges by one of them. This surely is not a flight of fancy.