IndiGoing into the meltdown on a Sunday

‘Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.’
— Capt Benjamin L Willard, Apocalypse Now (1979)

Unlike Lt Col Bill Kilgore, commander of the helicopter-borne air assault unit of the elite 1st Cavalry Division of the US army in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, I do not love the smell of napalm in the morning. In fact, I have no clue how napalm smells. But like Kilgore, whose job it was to facilitate safe entry into the Mekong river mouth held by the Viet Cong, I am on a dangerous mission: to land in Mumbai from Kolkata, while IndiGo has imploded.


So, as I write this, after receiving an obscenely polite message from IndiGo about my flight 6E-115 — that was scheduled to take off in 10 hours — now cancelled, I may not smell napalm. But along with the faint smell of rumball pastries and coffee from multiple Flurys stalls at Kolkata airport, I can already get the animal smell of passenger fear and loathing I will smell in the wee hours tonight as I hope to board my 5.05 a.m. Akasa QP1143 flight.

If I’m Capt Willard, whose task in Coppola’s movie — based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella The Heart of Darkness — was to terminate Col Walter E Kurtz, who had gone insane by ‘the horror, the horror’ of the jungle war of Vietnam, Kurtz is my IndiGo. IndiGo is my Kurtz.

The airline has IndiGone totally bonkers after attaining its status, for all practical purposes, as a monopoly. Over the last few days, India’s fliers, frequent or infrequent, now suddenly find themselves in an interminable jungle war. Hopefully, I’m suitably prepared to encounter Stage 4 zombie hordes in the airport tonight. They must be wandering the airport gates now, praying for flight cancellations to put them out of the misery of being in the limbo of ‘Delayed’.

Since Thursday, the signs were there: cancellations that felt like a spanking new wave of cancel culture. Surging ticket prices that supply-demand economics are watching with relish from the front seats. My pre-GoI price-capped Akasa ticket — which I will keep and frame — could have gotten me a ticket to Helsinki.

Even with the looming doom — or is it because of it? — I can’t but harbour a sadomasochistic pleasure in tracking the pain of passengers who have shared their woes. A day before my scheduled mission up Viksit Creek, I read about Chaitali Dasgupta, resident of Beleghata, my old Kolkata neighbourhood:

‘My husband and I were to fly to Mumbai to meet our daughter arriving from Manchester, but IndiGo cancelled our flight and rescheduled it to Monday. Now her IndiGo Manchester–Mumbai flight on Friday is also uncertain. The chaos has left us helpless.’

I must say, with all the dread I’m trying to keep in check, I’m quietly pleased that younger folks are still making their way out of my old ilaka, to places like Manchester too.

IndiGo has shown what a private monopoly can do. Expose us to collective meltdown. Public monopolies lumber on, habituating people to sloth, incompetence, apathy — as folks of my vintage know from the days before the pixie dust of choice arrived in the form of liberalisation, along with the now-defunct MTV. The smugness of private monopolies comes without the state’s lip service — or even the semblance of accountability. If trains stop running, heads in Indian Railways will roll. And along with them, hopefully, ministerial noggins. But if Google or IndiGo goes down? Let’s just say you can make a king’s ransom by tightening the tap — with hardly any other taps available.

Will I reach Mumbai tomorrow morning? If you’re in that city on Monday, look up from your balcony as you have your morning cuppa for an Akasa flight descending around 7.45 a.m. Or even better, keep drinking the Kool Aid about India’s service industry being the toast of the world, instead of being toasted.

The horror, the horror.