Last day in India

In the end all that could go wrong did go wrong. My bags were over weight. My first flight was delayed but my connecting flight was on time. The flight was overbooked. My seat had been given to some one else. And when they finally found a seat there was no place to put my hand baggage. Damn !!

For most of last week I was busy catching up with friends, so owe a big thanks to my parents for taking care of my packing. They did all the shopping for me : from buying clothes, blankets, spices, utensils and other stuff  to packing all of them (near) optimally they took care of almost everything. However, packing everything optimally is not always desirable. Framing this as an instance of a modified bin-packing problem is not the most ideal abstraction :  in this case we also have a constraint on the weight of the suitcases. Oh well, theory apart, the point is we ended up with 1 suitcase around 2 kgs overweight and 1 suitcase 2 kg underweight. So we had to over-stuff the underweight suitcase and under-stuff overweight suitcase to even out things. That was easy. But things did not end there !

My flight, by Kingfisher Airlines, was supposed to depart to Mumbai at 7 pm. But as usual, the flight was delayed, initially upto 7:45 pm and later upto 8:20 pm. Thankfully I had a cell phone with me and I put it to good use. I started calling up friends : friends to whom I havent talked to for months and friends to whom I talk for hours everyday. Some were happy (that i was leaving). Some were happy for me. And some were crying.  Sometimes I used to think that I had the emotional capacity of a pea, but I was wrong …  I was in a state when I was going through all these emotions simultaneously.

The flight from Delhi to Mumbai was largely uneventful except for the 2 gentlemen with boisterous voices who were making plans to build a house somewhere in Mumbai. Apparently one of them cared two hoots about Vaastu and the other couldn’t careless either much to the dismay of their significant others. They were to arrange the requisite capital by selling some ancestral farmland somewhere in Maharashtra and blah blah blah …

My flight finally landed in Mumbai at 10:30 pm, a good 90 mins later than the scheduled arrival time ! So much for Kingfisher Airlines, ‘who take pride in on-time performance’. Unlike most of airports, the baggage processing in the Chatrapati Sivaji airport was pretty swift. I didnt have to wait more than a couple of minutes to collect my bags !! However my joy at getting hold of my bags was shortlived as the thought of having to rush to international aiport dawned on me. A wild 15 mins taxi ride later I found myself in the line for checking into Delta Airlines. A little over 11:45 pm I was again rushing, this time to the immigration counter. A couple of minutes later I again found myself in a long long queue for the security checks. After yet another uneventful anxiety filled 20 mins long wait, I was rushing yet again. I breathed a sigh of relief when i found that the airplane hadnt left without me (I reached there approximately 2 mins before the scheduled departure time).

I was as excited as a kid who is travelling to USA for the first time . I clutched my boarding pass and half ran to seat number 38F while dragging my suit case behind me. I was shell shocked when I found some one else already sitting on my seat. I was told that there was some mix up between the ground staff and the airline crew with the former having informed the latter that I would not be coming !!! Wtf were they thinking ? How could they think that a person who has checked in his baggage would not be boarding the plane ?? After an animated discussion between the cabin crew I was allotted seat # 35C. I was pretty damn sure that that seat belonged to some one else. And I was right. A few minutes later the person with the right to park his ass on #35C came along and  he was given the same treatment. aaah! God help Delta Airlines.

You think the adventure ended there ? Naah … Their inflight entertainment program system crashed ! Apparently it was running on a Red Hat; they were desperately trying out some hacks to get it running. But that will be another story … for a later day …