Air rage: the high and low of it

Unlike their popular pairing on a funny show rehearsed well to produce comedy, and some spontaneity spicing it up, last week Kapil Sharma ended high up in a plane yelling rowdily at Sunil Grover quite like that lowly lout who tends to get short-tempered when high on spirits. The high-spiritedness (lively and cheerful behaviour or mood) associated with the high flying (very successful) duo seemed to have been spirited away and their brand of comic timing flew out of the window, leading to a rather tragic fall out between them. In fact, this aerial baggage proved too heavy for Sunil. The boorish behaviour of the cork high and bottle deep (very drunk) Kapil bore such deep hurt in Sunil that no amount of pacifying could put the genie back in the bottle (to attempt to revert a situation to how it formerly existed but usually the impossibility of such an attempt).

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There are many instances of the air being thick with angst in the thin air of the atmosphere at high altitudes, with passengers increasingly showing attitude. Air travel has become quite common these days, and so have soared cases of air rage (sudden violent anger or aggressiveness provoked in a passenger on board an aircraft by the stress associated with air travel). 

The incident involving Shiv Sena MP Ravindra Gaikwad has to take the highest spot insofar as lowliness goes. The high muckamuck (an important and influential person, especially someone who is overbearingly or arrogantly so) boasted on TV that he had hit an airline staffer 25 times with his slipper when he was denied a business class seat — the flight did not have a business class. 

It reminds me of this gag: 

A blonde with an economy class ticket insisted on sitting in the first class cabin. To every crew member requesting her to go to her seat, she adamantly pouted: “I will go to Jamaica on this seat only.” Finally, the pilot had to be called in. He whispered something in her ear and she immediately got up and went to the economy class section. How? The pilot had told her: “This section of the plane is not going to Jamaica!”

Back to Gaikwad: in an unprecedented move, the jet-setting MP was grounded by the Indian Airlines and six other private airlines that banned him from flying in their planes. Since that day, he has been reportedly refused air ticket seven times. Perhaps, Gaikwad was emboldened by fellow parliamentarian Pappu Yadav, who two years back allegedly shoved and threatened to hit an airhostess with slippers when she asked him not to throw leftover food in the aisle on a flight. He had denied the allegation. It seems that the reason for Mr Yadav’s foul mood was something like this:

It was mealtime on a flight. 

“Would you like dinner?” the airhostess asked John. 

“What are my choices?” John asked.

“Yes or no,” she replied.

But jokes apart, with the phone cameras being ubiquitous today, the miles-high meltdowns are being captured and made to shame unruly passengers, leaving little room for denial. This hot-headed Colombian woman caused a stir on a journey to New York when she lost her cool when asked to speak softly by a co-passenger. The flight attendants failed to calm the hysterical lady. She apologised for her deed only after her video surfaced online. But she added that “it happens all the time” and she had “the bad luck of being recorded.”

Her “it happens all the time” remark would be endorsed by the airline crew who often find themselves willy-nilly caught in the crossfire. Even frequent flyers not only notch up miles (free travel) but also tales of air rage, how they had a tough time controlling themselves from throwing certain annoying people out of the plane! 

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