Dilli

Long Time Coming

24 years of my life so far, and I’ve never travelled north of the city of Bombay. I’ve lived in India for about 8 years now, and before that I lived in Qatar for 16, and I’ve travelled to a small number of cities I could probably count by hand. I’ve been wanting to travel, and explore authentically the various historied cities of the world, especially ones in my own national vicinity. But I never really put my foot on the gas and went ahead with it.

However, one day my parents said; they’re landing in Delhi due to some document work they had to do. They asked me if I’d come, and I said “sure yes, okay”. It wasn’t in my plans to visit a city so north, yet one I really wanted to visit, so early in my “travelling career”; which had barely begun. I wanted to authentically experience cities in closer vicinity first, ideally, like Hyderabad, maybe Mysore, maybe some other sultanate cities like Bijapur, Bidar, Aurangabad and what not.

The Big Day

Now here I am, on the flight sitting down. It was an interesting day though, I walk in casually to the airport at 8AM, ready to absolutely ball out my 9:25AM flight. I feel early, ready, and even lets say; excited, God forgive my positive emotions. Me and my friend Nabeel look at the screen, and Nabeel says he doesn’t see Delhi. The screen changes to Hindi text, and I cannot be bothered reading that script, so I just see a timing in the latin script that was close to 9~ AM, and so I tell him, there.. thats my flight. He laughs and says no it isn’t.

Huh.. weird, my flight should be there. I’m not worried at this point. I think, I mean its just not on the board, whats the big deal. But his reaction convinces me to ask the AirIndia staff outside the airport whatsup, and convinced she’ll say something like.. “oh we forgot to update the board, please enter the air port and proceed as normal”, I ask her where’s the Delhi flight. She says it’s taken off. What? When? Why? It says 9:25AM though here, I ask her. She says it was preponed, with a straight face.

AirIndia the absolute geniuses behind that airline pre-poned a 9AM flight to 5AM a month prior to the date of flight. This was not notified to me through any of the three channels I’ve provided them, a phone call, whatsapp message or my email. They claim to have emailed me, but coincidentally the email on the ticket isn’t mine. Don’t you just love that? The monkeys at Agoda Thailand office / EaseMyTrip decided to ignore the email I filled in my contact details form, and instead provide “admin@easemytrip.com” as the contact email to AirIndia. Well done geniuses. This is the apparent reason for me not “recieving” the critical notification of my flight being pre-poned by 4 hours.

For all the talk of efficiency, costing stakeholders, mission critical systems, and errors surfacing to the customer being absolutely unacceptable, and whole of corporate and business systems being devised just to avoid things like these, how on Earth do airlines, or their booking partners, or the aggregators, fail at the most basic task of informing the customer their flight has been rescheduled. This apparently happens quite regularly. How could the most basic function you’ve been created to perform, which is manage safe and regular flights for customers, have such a dysfunctionality in terms of reliability. You would think it would be the most straight-forward thing on the planet, to inform your customers of flight number X that their flight has been rescheduled, all the passenger information, their contact details, its all there. Its one flight, y number of passengers, its a DIRECT mapping. How can you possibly mess up notifiying them? Can’t wrap my head around that.

The Plan

No clue what the plan is really. We’d probably have to wrap up my fathers work, and then, its just “ghumneka” as my parents said.

I would like to just “experience” the city, since its a continously inhabited city in history. A city living on from the past maybe we could call it. I would like to probably experience that, of the city. The old monuments, the old streets and neighbourhoods.

Then we could probably explore nearby cities worth visiting like Agra, and what not. Not entirely sure what else there is to see, in very close proximity. I have lost a day already to these flight shenanigans, so lets see what can be done in 3 days. I’d like to revisit myself in the future, alone, or freely, to explore this in a more authentic and organic manner. I think I’ll just be a “tourist” for the next three days, and there’s not fun in that. But this could be the kick start I needed for my interest of travelling. I’ve been forced into this, and I was hesitant always into acutally putting one of these plans into action, but this could be the kick in the back I need. Lets see. Unless I get pulled to D*bai (goy slop).