Our world has come a long way in the past 20 to 30 years. Railways, metros and aviation have taken huge leaps in the realms of transportation. This advancement may be thanks to the human traffic that needs to get to places FAST and without any HULLABALOO. But,… mainly FAST. The problem is that the whole system hasn’t been perfected yet. There are still bad times when chaos and mayhem take control of centres such as airports and railway stations, where the crowd and crew go completely nuts. You would never to know why a flight delay would cause so much discomfort and distress unless you happen to be in such a scenario, also only proving to be making the place a lot more packed. Such bad times are extremely evident around times of worldwide celebrated holidays like Christmas and the time of the new year. And there is nothing more frustrating and sad than having to have missed a flight because of times just like these. And believe me, because that is exactly what had happened to me this Christmas.
It all started on the 21 of December. I was to take a flight from Cochin to Bangalore. As I had mentioned, it is one of the busiest times of the whole year. The airport was so crowded, that I’m pretty sure, that no one had seen it that jam-packed in the past two to three years. Well, I was sure to anticipate that it would be something like this at this time of year, and I had arrived at the airport way ahead of time. In fact, I was so early that I still had about two hours or so even after I had dropped all my luggage. I walked through security without any rush as if I had all the time in the world, and strolled through the duty-free and looked for something that I could gift my friends and family as if I had all the time in the world , and once it was time for the gates to open, I looked for a seat and sat by the gates.
Once the gates had opened, people rushed to the queue like an angry mob and I was pretty much left at the very end. At that point in time, it pretty much seemed like a good idea to stay seated until the queue got smaller because the queue looked a lot longer than the actual length of the plane itself. Well, I should have kept an eye on the queue at all times because when I did, I had no clue as to what had happened. There wasn’t a plane-sized queue any more. Nor were any flight officials at the gates. Was I dreaming? No, not really. Did I magically move to another gate? No, I didn’t. then where did the queue go? I was confused. There was no way that I could have missed a flight. Or so I thought. I asked a few people who were sitting next to me and they said the gate had closed three minutes ago.
The story after that has a lot of sad bitter feelings involved and wouldn’t have been the way I would have wanted that to have ended. But that’s not the important part. Its the thing that I learnt from such an experience, like on a day such as this, you must be alert and assess the situation properly. And it is ALWAYS a good idea to join a queue no matter how long it may be. And most important of all, now that it had happened, never let it happen again.
(… to be continued)
Little Banyan Tree Kids 