The Terminal

Statutory Warning: The following post has nothing to do with Tom Hanks.

In my long and shockingly unvaried career as an air-traveler,I have learned that there is never a dearth of entertainment in the sterile confines of an airport. It is a widely believed myth that being stranded at the airport lounge with no reading material or music is slow death. On the contrary, one often finds oneself in the most interesting and memorable situations.The prospect of future air travel inspires the following insights into the airy life.

An airport is far from boring. In fact it can be quite hilarious-though you might not get the humour immediately. For example, the Kuwait International Airport delights in giving the travelers pre-flight exercise. The authorities would keep changing the gates- and somehow managed to make sure that no two selected gates are ever close together.This usually resulted in people running up and down the lounge lugging family and hand luggage. It's fun to watch, but not so much to participate. On one such run I ended up standing just behind a nice old man in the queue. He was very solicitous, and kept turning back to talk to me. During one of these short exchanges, I realised there was an awful stench coming from somewhere. The smell kept coming and going- making it very difficult for me to identify it or to concentrate on what the old man was saying. Which is when it hit me! (No, not just the smell) The stink rose whenever he opened his mouth!
Sigh.. it was a bad half an hour. Thankfully the authorities decided to change the gate again.

It's not just the activities of the airport that are engaging. The people populating it provide enough entertainment to form the cast for a mini sitcom. In any airport, on any flight, you are guaranteed to come across the following characters.

1)The Overdressed: There are some characters who feel the few claustrophobic hours spent in the lounge and in closed confines of a stinky airplane, should be made all the more painful by imprisoning themselves in excruciating finery. Tiny kids in a full wool suit in the peak of summer in fly-infested Karippur Airport, women weighed down with their weight's worth of jewelery at Kuwait International Airport, men sporting brocaded sherwanis at Chennai Airport,grandmothers sporting a ten inch thick layer of make up to go with their designer silk suits in Rajiv Gandhi Airport, Hyderabad... these are merely the tip of the extremely stuffy iceberg. One surmmises that the logic behind these illogical fashion statements is some misguided sense of penance. Or may be masochism..?

2) The Excess baggaged: There is always some poor family/person who's baggage turns into their cross. They enter the airport carefree, a smile(only slightly strained from lugging the luggage)wreathing their faces. Guilelessly they hoist their boxes onto the security check, and even get it bound in cellophane wrap to protect it from damage. And then they go in for check-in...
One is torn between pity, exasperation and irritation(the last especially when you are the person just behind the hapless over-weighter). The poor souls then end up pulling out half their stuff out and carrying it in innumerable plastic covers, or (worse)start asking fellow travelers with less baggage to check in the extra baggage for them. The irritation is there... but it's mostly pity... There are some enterprising souls who bring on the drama and begin to cry- which occasionally tug at some non-existent heart-strings and let them escape. Occasionally being the key phrase.
A similar species is that of the Security-victim. Take the aforementioned scenario and cut at security check post cellophane wrap. This is when the pot-bellied officer (surprisingly they are always pot-bellied- may be it's one of the job-requirements.)decides s/he saw something suspicious in the box. And then there follows the ripping of the cellophane, a stream of neatly packed items falling all around and a poor would-be passenger close to tears. Most often these baggage-rapes only yield something as dangerous as your general pappada-kol or a tiffin box. The hapless traveler picks up the scraps of his/her lovingly packed luggage and trudge away to try and put together the ravaged luggage.Ah the meaninglessness of it all...

3) The Brat(s): You can never escape them. Every airport has them. One is lucky if it's just one in a group. Often the entire family can be classified as brat. Those that haven't hit adolescence, usually communicate via something handy thrown in the direction of your cranium. And these are the well behaved ones. [For truly gruesome examples please refer to one of the previous posts entitled Parental Harassment.] The kid brats aren't as bad as the grown up ones. At least the former can be excused on account of age. And all they do is scream their head off and generally give you a migraine. The grown up ones do this and further court homicide by being complete asses and behaving like they are entitled to it when other human beings try to protest. Truly the bane of the airport experience. But a lot of fun to watch at couple of aisles distance.

4) The Babe/Hunk: At the outset, be warned that these species need be neither babes nor hunks. In fact most often they are the binary opposite. They derive their name from their steady belief that they are babes or hunks. They are focussed creatures who concentrate on their top priority- themselves. They usually station themselves near the nearest reflecting surface and engross themselves in themselves. Lots of hair primping, re-application of lipstick(in the case of the babe), studied messaging (all the better to survey the manicure with and to show off the phone)etc. form favored activities. Some even engage in long, exceptionally loud conversations on their phones. It can be safely surmised that this is mostly to show evidence of some unknown accent, given that most such conversations don't really go anywhere.

These are but a few of the creatures that inhabit the chrome jungle of the airport. The next time you sit in the airport lounge and your mp3 konks off- you know all you need to do is look around for entertainment. It's live!