Airport security staff deserve idiot-handling allowance

Air travel is difficult business. The co-ordination required by several reluctant, disinterested employees of government, security and airlines is a bit like trying to get a delegation of warring generals to dance the Bhangra together.

So over the years, I have come to realise that there is simply no point in getting angry at anyone involved in the entire process of getting me from point A to point B.

It is quite a bitter pill to swallow actually. After all, we all pay a good amount of money for the privilege of travelling and it seems natural to expect some semblance of predictable sanity in the entire process, but have we ever stopped to consider that we may not, in fact, be paying enough? And I am not referring to the price of air tickets per se. Let me illustrate this with an example.

A little while back, I found myself at home. I am of course referring to the Anna International Airport at Chennai. I was standing in a long queue to get into the airport and as I got closer to the gentlemen who were responsible for checking our qualifications for airport entry, I noticed that they were taking passports and staring longer and harder at them than I had ever seen them do before. They were, of course, implementing a higher level of security by the cunning use of more elaborate visual scrutiny of travel documents, and I can assure you that it is quite a standard global practice. When the threat levels are yellow, passports are gazed at for three seconds. At orange, it’s 15 seconds. At red, they shine all manner of fancy forgery-detecting torches and also extract DNA from your spittle to match with the DNA in the skin cells deposited accidentally in your passport.

What was worse, some chap at the head of the line was arguing about his right to show his boarding pass on his Blackberry. The officers had quite politely expressed their preference for dead-tree versions but the angry man wasn’t having any of it. He was lecturing them on why China is more advanced because their security staff accept digital versions of tickets at airports. He was also bemoaning the state of the country and the impact that Mughal rule had on airport security tardiness. Worst of all, he threatened to have the lot arrested under the Lokpal bill for being corrupt. He then attempted to show a PDF version of his ticket on his iPad and eventually, the 10 inch 1024x768 resolution of the Apple device won them over. They let him through (this scene, incidentally, should be an advertisement for Apple products).

Think about it for a moment. How many such people does that security chap have to deal with everyday? Is your Rs2995 discount ticket paying for the brain damage that he undergoes as a result of dealing with such abominable specimens on a daily basis? So the next time you think you ‘deserve’ efficiency everywhere, ask your MP to support a ‘Pompous Idiot Handling Allowance’ for everybody who works in an airport.

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