Flights of Fancy

Here I was going through the boarding gate, handing over my boarding card to the boarding inspector. I suppose that is what he must be called since boarding was what we  were doing, not like pirates and corsairs leaping from the rigging lines onto the merchant ship, for they scarcely sought permission, but here we were being polite and requesting permission to come on board.

Anyway from the corner of my eye I saw a poster mounted on a stand.This featured a pretty girl, perhaps 4 years or so, of that age when tooth fairies make frequent appearances. She held in one of her little hands a palette . She looked quite professional  and adept, and she well may have come from a long line of painters.  In the other hand, she held a brush which looked poised to turn the air vermillion or cerulean or magenta or one of those colors that only painters and women can identify.

The purpose of this very posed and poised picture was to tell us, the boardingers or boarders  that this was the entrance to gate 5 and 5 A. I was  impressed.

But what I found particularly interesting apart from this vital piece of information( god forbid that we had boarded the wrong ship), was that this girl was blond and blue eyed, possibly of Scandinavian stock, though at the moment I can’t remember the name of a really good Viking painter from whom she may have descended.

Given that I was in the south of India where Dravidians ancient occupants of this land were the predominant genetic strain, with nary a Caucasian chromosome to offer, I was struck by the anachronism of it all. Surely ebony would have worked as well as ivory, I thought.

And then it hit me. I winced.

In the airline business in India it seems that western dress, and western mores are better semoitic signals of efficiency and professionalism than than the vernacular, the home grown ethnicity of costume or  even face.

To that end we have an airline which features a very pretty model, not even a flight attendant giving you the flight safety instructions on a video screen. She is Czech I believe. She is as white as porcelain alabaster  and I would venture that she doesn’t know Hindi, though she has been well rehearsed and the dubbing and lip-sync are quite commendable. Of course I am not sure that featuring her gave me any more confidence  about the  procedures in the event of engine failure, de-pressurization, landing on water and the consequent fastening of life jackets and emergency whistles. But I must confess that she looked pretty in an orange vest.

Then there is the other airline which has each female fight attendant, ( I used to call them hostesses which was a lot more friendly than the functional attendant, someone who I expect to see mostly manning toilets, but be that as it may and it is not germane to this ramble at all) coiffured with a wig cut to resemble a model’s hair style from Paris. I am no connoisseur of women’ hair styles but they resembled to my untrained eye the cut of Audrey Hepburn’s hair in Roman Holiday.  Sort of a cross between a bouffant and a page boy, i would think. (Here  i am impressing you with these terms!)

They also wear dark suits and stockings . This airline has positioned itself on punctuality, and I suppose these replicas of women from Paris in Coco’s era help in that delivery of customer satisfaction.

On the other hand there is the so called national carrier. Stained by age and possibly indifferent neglect by bureaucrats  who have no business sailing any ship whatsoever, they have like many fat merchant galleons of yore been boarded again and again by privateers and so now languish, awaiting fair winds again.

Their  maids of delight are dressed in colourful Indian costume, wear their hair in an Indian coiled bun , if they have long hair, and are generally of a slightly older average age than the other airlines staff. 

The airline itself is not  particularly efficient, but when on board these fight attendants perform with better efficiency and courtesy and maturity. But that is  possibly my parochial point of view.

My actual point is why do we consciously or unconsciously seek the authority of the Caucasian to demonstrate our own ability to operate in the modern world.?  We are world class only if we dress European? 

The cheongsam of the Singapore Girl may argue against this notion.

But it may just be that dressed this way or that, we just can’t be as good when it comes to service, mass produced and delivered. So we compensate our imagined inadequacy with costume.

We are a truly exceptional people when we offer and proffer our individual hospitality in our houses and our homes.

We maybe don’t know how to make a business of it.

Written 2011: Today one of the airlines has vanished. And give the pandemic, we not have many flights at all!