Boston to Delhi

As usual, everything did not go smoothly.

The first hurdle was finding the Air India gates after I'd landed at New York's JFK. I'd done this before, but the first three Delta reps I asked sent me on wild goose chases without batting an eyelid, directing me to gates and staircases that didn't even exist. 30 minutes and 3 Delta reps later, I finally found one who wasn't so clueless and pointed me to the AirTrain to terminal 4.

Of course, the Air India experience wasn't trouble-free either. Somehow the ticket from New York's JFK airport to New Delhi on Air India was a Delta ticket, and the Air India folks weren't able to "open" it, whatever that means. This resulted in a 30 minute runaround. When I got back to the check-in counter, it was back to square one: they asked me to repeat the entire rigmarole of counter hopping. But when I pointed out that I'd already done the whole thing once, the manager took off and "took care" of everything. Impressive; 3-4 years ago, I think it would've been much harder to get them to do that. Finally, I had my boarding pass.

Interestingly, the demographic of the kids manning the check-in counters, and their attitude, dovetails nicely with the stories of the Indian new wave that you hear in books and reportage. You can literally feel the energy and enthusiasm in them, a big relief after the bored pot-bellied baboos that manned the counters till a year ago. These kids were all in their early 20s. Some of them, like the fashionably bespectacled chap who served me first, are from smaller towns, with a strong accent. The other one was from Bangladesh. There were some Americans in the team. Throughout, all of these kids joked -- and flirted -- with each other openly, with a kind of cocksure jauntiness.

I'm always a little put off by the Air India security check-in rush at JFK airport; it's a little too crowded and the lines are managed poorly with the result that you always have several people who are trying to get ahead by jumping the queue (and succeeding).

After boarding, the flight itself was quite pleasant. The on-board entertainment system was excellent for a change: you could choose from a long list of movies, even play games. Everything else went smoothly until I got to Delhi: even the flight's bathrooms were clean! Awesome.