Rants & Roasts: Flight delayed. Expectations cancelled

Chala lo bhaiya… ya utaar do.

No, I wasn’t in a cab. Or a bus. I was on a plane. For two and a half hours. Both of us stationary.

Me – folded into an 18-inch seat, slowly discovering new joints in my spine.

The aircraft – parked with the confidence of something that had nowhere to be.

Air travel in India has quietly evolved into a test of character. Morning, midnight, red-eye, first flight – the timing is decorative. Delay is now a core feature. Fully inclusive. No discrimination.

These days, I find myself missing the chuk chuk gaadi. Do raat ki train bhi theek hai. Upper berth, side berth, near the toilet – sab chalega. At least trains commit to the journey.

“Sit back and relax. Enjoy your flight.”

A sentence that now belongs firmly in the oxymoron category.

Yes, flying remains the fastest mode of transport. In theory. In practice, it’s more of a philosophical idea – speed as a concept, not an outcome.

Earlier, all you needed was ₹10,000, an airport arrival three hours early, and the discipline to abandon your water bottle at security. Now the real requirement is patience. Industrial-grade patience. With no upper limit specified.

Perhaps it’s time airlines updated their booking details:

Cabin baggage: 7kg

Check-in baggage: 15kg

Patience: mandatory, self-supplied

Expectations: strictly prohibited

One hour is tolerable. Two, with snacks and mild dissociation. But uncertainty – that’s where things unravel. The repeated “We’ll be taking off in 5–10 minutes” – stretched across two and a half hours - stops being an update and starts feeling like gaslighting with a boarding pass.

Of course, it isn’t technically the airline’s fault that my plan to surprise my brother on his birthday dissolved somewhere between Gate 32 and a stationary aircraft. Or that my clever night-flight strategy - sleep on the plane, wake up fresh, be productive - ended with me puffy-eyed, sleep-deprived, and newly allergic to optimism.

Blaming myself, at least, is efficient. There are answers. Closure.

With the airline, the conversation is more minimalist:

“Ma’am, we are trying our best.”

“Ma’am, we also don’t know.”

And that’s fair. Why should passengers alone enjoy the thrill of uncertainty?

So dear Indian airlines, punctuality is clearly more of a vision statement than a deliverable – and we respect that. But one small request: if today’s plan is to simply exist on the runway, just tell us.

Let me stop checking the clock like it owes me something.

Let me stop interpreting every engine sound as progress.

Let me adjust my expectations to ground reality – quite literally.

– This rant comes from an exhausted air traveller Arushi Jain, who is still recovering from the trauma of spending almost as much time on a stationary plane as she did in the air