Skip to main content

Spice and Jet


Much before the skies turned turbulent for Spicejet, I had booked my return ticket from Kerala on one of their flights.  A week before the journey to Kerala I logged on to their website just to ensure that the flight was not caught in the turbulence only to be disappointed.  My flight was cancelled.  I tried to contact the customer care using all the numbers available and no one answered the calls.  Nor did my email elicit any response.  Finally I got my flight rescheduled from the Spicejet counter in Delhi airport.  It was a Kochi-Pune-Delhi flight.

When we reached Pune my wife and I were asked by a Spicejet staff who was checking the boarding passes of the seated passengers, “Why didn’t you de-board?  Your flight ends here.”  I protested and showed my ticket to Delhi.  “But your boarding pass is only up to here,” and she pointed at the boarding pass.  True, I had failed to notice that.  The man in Kochi airport who issued us the boarding passes had made a mistake.  Our checked-in bag was already unloaded, the staff informed me.

The young woman in the aggressively red uniform turned out to be extremely cordial.  She took our boarding passes and the ticket and said, “Wait till I come back.”  And she was back in ten minutes with our boarding passes to Delhi.  “Your bag has been put back in its place,” she reassured us with a beaming smile. 

The New Year has begun on the right note, I told my wife as we moved back to take out new seats in the last but one row of the plane.  An obstacle and a sweet victory.  The charming smile of the Spicejet staff in the red uniform was one of the many New Year gifts. 

Comments

  1. Replies
    1. Yes. Sometimes these small mercies come as a surprise.

      Delete
  2. Small help, bit of smile do brings happiness around

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A smile can work wonders. I have seen it again and again.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Solzhenitsyn’s Many Disillusionments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died a sad and disillusioned man. Solzhenitsyn was a genuine socialist in the beginning. He fought for the Red Army in WWII. He was a committed Soviet patriot. Equality, justice, and dignity of the workers were his ideals, his dreams. However, Stalin became a brutal dictator and Solzhenitsyn became his vocal critic. As a result, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag: a network of inhuman labour camps. Hundreds of Russians were tortured and killed in those camps and Solzhenitsyn was disillusioned with socialism. The Russian Revolution was supposed to have liberated the common citizens from imperial oppressions. However, the new government under Stalin was far more ruthless, unjust, and oppressive than the empire. The socialist ideology became a kind of deity for which everything else was sacrificed, including truth. Writing the story of his life in the camp in The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn warned that such systems coul...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Blasphemy in Brahma Muhurta

Dr T S Shyam Kumar: courtesy Pachakuthira At Brahma muhurta this morning, I was reading something profane if not blasphemous. Well, I didn’t even know until I was reading it that Brahma muhurta was the most auspicious time of the day and that it lay in the fourth yama of the night – that is, from 3 am to 6 am approx. Sleep eludes me these days in this period of the night. I wake up in the Brahma muhurta and then I am unable to go to sleep, for some reason beyond me. So I pick up my mobile phone and go to Magzter App. The magazine I chose to read this morning happened to be a Malayalam literary periodical, Pachakuthira . An interview with Dr T S Syamkumar, Sanskrit scholar and teacher as well as author of many books and recipient of some notable awards, caught my attention. This interview was something unique for me and one of the many things I learnt from it is that Brahma muhurta is the auspicious period that begins roughly 1 hour 36 minutes before sunrise and lasts for about...