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. Rajeev MoothedathJanuary 4, 2015 at 2:11 PM

    Thankful for the small mercies..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 4, 2015 at 7:55 PM

      Yes. Sometimes these small mercies come as a surprise.

      Delete
  2. UnknownJanuary 4, 2015 at 5:00 PM

    Small help, bit of smile do brings happiness around

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 4, 2015 at 7:56 PM

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

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
16 comments
Read more

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Chitrakoot: Antithesis of Ayodhya

Illustration by MS Copilot Designer Chitrakoot is all that Ayodhya is not. It is the land of serenity and spiritual bliss. Here there is no hankering after luxury and worldly delights. Memory and desire don’t intertwine here producing sorrow after sorrow. Situated in a dense forest, Chitrakoot is an abode of simplicity and austerity. Ayodhya’s composite hungers have no place here. Let Ayodhya keep its opulence and splendour, its ambitions and dreams. And its sorrows as well. Chitrakoot is a place for saints like Atri and Anasuya. Atri is one of the Saptarishis and a Manasputra of Brahma. Brahma created the Saptarishis through his mind to help maintain cosmic order and spread wisdom. Anasuya is his wife, one of the most chaste and virtuous women in Hindu mythology. Her virtues were so powerful that she could transmute the great Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva into infants when they came to test her chastity. Chitrakoot is the place where asceticism towers above even divinit...
22 comments
Read more