The Maharaja & Me

I had made my apologies before they were due.

The only option for us to get to Delhi from Bangalore was to fly Air India.

I had prepared my colleague for all sorts of eventualities: a delayed flight, missed bags, flowing toilets and rude flight attendants. I had even pointed to other airlines parked on the tarmac in Bangalore to show that there were other options available, albeit not for us.

We were destined to board the bad boy of the airline world—Air India.

Boarding was announced and everything seemed systematic. Fellow passengers made a curvy line as the attendant took the boarding pass from their hands, scanned it and welcomed them to walk through. One by one, like human tin cans on an assembly line, we moved in to what I anticipated would be a tropical swamp: a concoction of spices and sweat.

The welcome staff at the door was welcoming. The plane inside was bright red and cheerful. Unfriendly people sat in first class fiddling with their blackberries as we walked past in a scowl of envy.

Next we dropped the back of our heads on a clean foil of cloth on top of the seat, and fell asleep as the jet groaned upwards to the infinite sky painted with shades of orange, blue and grey, as an Indian August monsoon hue embraced us in its cotton folds.

On board, the service was outstanding. The food was mild and delicious. The flight attendants applied their smile with a purpose, only to move to the next aisle and do it all over again. The pilot announced descent in to the nation’s capital and we touched ground on what was warmer climate in comparison.

The bags came out intact. We were on our way to our hotel within minutes and soon were sipping a drink, vigorously shaken not discreetly stirred.

This was my first flight on Air India.

Regardless, the Maharaja and I go back ways. In the airy school benches of childhood, sandwiched between a chiseled temple on one end and human traffic beneath on the other, for one whole session, I had the Maharaja—Air India’s mascot to occupy me.

I had discovered a sticker of the Maharaja in a chewing gum packet and planted it on the inside cover of the notebook that was meant to take down the monotonous chants of the teacher, or so as I recollect now.

Right below where I wrote my name and class and across from the miniscule “Shri” that my parents urged me to write as the first scribble, was the Maharaja in full grandeur.

Standing on a green pedestal, his right arm folded across his chest in a bow, the head leaning and the mustache firmly twirled, long eyelids closed, was a companion full of empathy for my intractable condition.

To me, in spite of my affiliation to Sphinx like Hindu animal-gods: Ganesha and Hanuman, the Maharaja provided a more human symbol to spend time with, in the “pin-drop silence” of a classroom.

My sharpened pencil took him in, as it drew border lines around his periphery for days and as the summer months changed to bring the winter fog on the hills and dew on the lip of hardened grass.

But, the Maharaja has had a checkered history. Bobby Kooka and Umesh Rao, two men birthed the Maharaja (oh yes amazing things used to happen once in India).

It was 1946. The Maharaja was born in a backdrop of a country in anticipation of a time soon to come when it would be pleasantly orphaned, as the long time rulers would head back to the old country, albeit under fanfare.

Bobby Kooka was the airline’s commercial director and Umesh Rao a creative director with an advertising agency. The Maharaja was supposedly designed to depict high, plush living similar to India’s royals.

Air India’s archives tell about an original intent to have the mascot on memo pads that would be given to passengers. But, the portly Maharaja expanded his empire and spread across posters and hoardings, and pretty much everything to do with the airline. He became a symbol of India: Air India.

But times ahead were hard for the Maharaja, similar to his mortal brethren. In a country that was increasingly shunning hereditary wealth and stature, at times the Maharaja found himself facing the wrath of Indian bureaucrats who went through cycles of promoting him and then fading him out, back and forth.

In a strange irony, the Maharaja found himself being admired for his skills as a butler or the welcome guard of the new royals who could afford the small fortune to take airline flights.

In a rapidly extinct breed of blue blood royals, our Maharajah had found a job ushering folks in to seats of planes.

Regardless, like the country itself, he somehow survived in memo pads, airline folders, as an emblem outside the planes, in advertisements or as we just came to know as a “sticker” for kids to play with.

Whether my experience in Air India was an aberration or it happens to be how the airline is most of the time, is for others to discover. Unfortunately, one good trip is not enough to brush away my skepticism.

As far as the Maharajah goes, I am on the look out. An old poster in a bookstore perhaps, a memo pad or even a sticker and I will become its rightful owner, for old time’s sake.
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This article will first publish in India Abroad/Rediff.