The attitude of the ground staff manning the airlines counter at the airport makes all the difference to a traveller. Back from a visit to Bangalore, a colleague recounted how a staffer at the check-in counter ruined the day for a London-bound young lady, who was taking the domestic flight to transit in the Capital. On her way to pursue higher studies, the young lady had some extra baggage.

However, her hand luggage was light and she offered to transfer some luggage from the check-in baggage. However, the lady at the counter was very rude and caused more confusion by mixing up the luggage. In the end she forced the traveller, who was by now in desperate tears, to pay a substantial amount for the extra baggage.

As the young lady later sat in the waiting lounge, she calculated the amount she paid and realised she had been looted with her eyes wide open. The extra baggage, she reiterated, could easily have been avoided. Moreover, even the calculation for the additional load was wrongly done and she ended up paying a whopping Rs 16,000 extra! “I’ll never fly this airline again,” she stormily declared, feeling helpless but not wanting to create an ugly scene.

Look out!

An exclamation out of context can lead to hilarious situations, a colleague recalled. On a recent visit to a coffee plantation in Coorg, the colleague, part of a media team, was driving out when one of the journalists suddenly shouted, “Look, elephant!” Having been warned about wild elephants that occasionally pay a visit in and around the plantations, the others in the vehicle were startled and began furiously to look around for the pachyderm.

That’s when the scribe, who started it all, sheepishly said, “Not the animal itself, but I was pointing to the warning notice stuck on a tree that this was an elephant track we were crossing!” A mixture of relief and disappointment met this admission as the group soon dissolved into merry laughter.

Alter’s last wish?

An unfulfilled wish of actor Tom Alter was to recite at Bahadur Shah Zafar’s vacant grave in Mehrauli his poignant ghazal, “Lagta nahin hai jee mera/ Ujre dayar mein (My spirit is sore in this deserted garden, meaning which was once Delhi)” at the Phool Walon-ki-Sair. Or so one of the regular participants in the Sair claims. Tom Alter died a month before the annual flower sellers’ festival, which the last Mughal emperor enjoyed attending so much and whose poetry was often brought to life with great verve and emotion by Alter, as fluent in Urdu and Hindi as in English. Now poetry lovers will miss a rare treat from the mouth of a legendary raconteur.

Tailpiece

Overheard: Smog, stubble smoke and Diwali fireworks ~ Delhi’s bird and animal population certainly pays a heavy price for dwelling in the National Capital!

(Contributed by: RV Smith, Kunal Roy and Asha Ramachandran)