Chronicles of a Jongleur

As we saturate ourselves with trying to blend in with a lifestyle we have only heard about, after credit cards have been scrutinized, applied for and rejected, after shower curtains and toilet paper have finally been figured out, and after Sun TV has finally been hooked up , the next major attraction is that all important trip back to our “beloved motherland.”

It’s not surprising really, for our lives revolve around that next trip to India, however far off it may be, and the Gantt charts start getting laid out to schedule that perfect itinerary. It’s always the same, from a brand new grad student to that sullen eyed F-1 spouse; the next trip is an event of extreme expectations, careful planning, fodder for conversations and probably the only subject that demands more research to be done than your average Joe’s Masters Degree ever called for.

Indeed I am no stranger to this party, and courtesy of one isolated trip I made across the Pacific when I first started out, I am now victim to the same disease that 70 million other Americans have fallen for- that colossal scam that goes by the wonderfully toned down sobriquet of Frequent Flyer Miles.

Yes, every time my fingers start itching about finding the best fares, I am sorry Sir, I have to fly SkyTeam. Please pick me any one of Aeroflot, Aeroméxico, Alitalia, Continental Airlines, CSA Czech Airlines(???), Delta Air Lines, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Korean Air and Northwest Airlines.

Whew.

The corollary- I refuse to fly anything that even remotely smells like Lufthansa or American Airlines; or any other airline affiliated to either Star Alliance or OneWorld.

Unfortunately, Madras is a relatively quiet spot when it comes to international airlines. Given that 60-70 percent of all flights into North America call for transit through European airports, Chennai offers surprisingly few choices. For a long while the only way you could get out of India, into Europe and beyond was only on Lufthansa. Either that or board the Indian Airlines flight to Bombay please. Apparently the poor student crowd was thoroughly cold shouldered until some smart dude figured out that lugging his Hawkins pressure cooker and Bedekar bottles of mango pickle from the domestic to international terminal in the wee hours of the morning wasn’t particularly amusing. Indeed, up until the late 90’s one HAD to wheel his baggage trolleys from Santa Cruz to Sahar in order to get into international airspace. Of course,the select few who had to get to more premium Ivy League stuff on the West Coast could always use Singapore as a transit point. But honestly, how many of us do get into Stanford or UC Berkeley?

Things have taken a turn for the better now; at least British Airways and Delta consider it worth their while to ply their monsters to Meenambakkam International Airport. As is expected, BA neatly deposits its produce into the murderous furnace of Heathrow, a significantly miniscule portion of 35 million or so international transit passengers who pass through one of the most important airports in the world. And Delta has chosen Charles-de-Gaulle airport at Paris (Inarguably the worst in the world for the way its staff treat non-French speaking passengers) as its snack/refuel/dumping point en-route to a more lucrative MAA-CDG-JFK route. And for obvious reasons, this is the only feasible alternative to earning that extra few thousand miles that will help me get my free ticket anywhere to anywhere within the States and Canada ; Alaska to JFK to Miami to LAX.

Its intriguing really why we are so short on options in terms of connections to transatlantic gateways. Indeed, when you observe closely, you will find that a sizeable portion of all traffic into North America and Europe came from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh as well, who invariably chose (until Infosys and Chandrababu Naidu came along) , Meenambakkam over CSIA to embark on their multi leg voyage across the seas. So, say a person traveling from Bangalore to Boston would first make his way to Chennai before hopping on a bigger bird.

So there you go- for a metropolis (sic) that supposedly is the second biggest contributor in the knowledge industry, epicenter of the Indian automotive revolution, and the ostensibly the first airport in India to be certified ISO 9001:2000, the Anna International terminal could certainly do with more than a miserly 3 destinations into Europe.

But hey, Frankfurt, Paris and London are the amongst the three biggest and best connected cities in the world, aren’t they? And we have a flight to each of them, every day, 5-7 days a week. Yahoo. Why would anyone care about Amsterdam or Vienna or Milan or Brussels?

I do. Alas, my 24677 miles are on annoyingly on Northwest-KLM.

UPDATE: As of November 1, Delta has announced that they shall be pulling out of the MAA-CDG route. While it further restricts options for outbound passengers, we should be glad that fewer amongst us will have to step into CDG and deal with most of its sorry personnel. Indeed service at CDG is a  parody of the romanticism that masquerades itself as the spirit of France.