Why I don't want to be a Sub and the Airport Diaries

I'm being told I'm good at desk work, that I should consider a career as a sub-editor. I like reporting. But today I'm going to explain what really puts me off working on the desk. I don't want to work a night-shift and it has everything to do with the time I served surveying passengers at Bombay's international airport between July and November 2010 and a few months last year.

My Maa works for the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI for dummies, thrill-seekers and acronym-loving Americans), the government's official stats-keeper. So the Ministry of Tourism tasked them with surveying foreigners, NRIs flying out of India and locals. The idea behind this was to gain valuable feedback from large-hearted travellers who didn't mind nosy surveyors to tell the ministry how it could improve and upgrade existing tourism infrastructure.

Noble idea I thought. And it is.

Lousy execution though. In Bombay at least. So my Maa's office needed kids to spend a few hours at the airport every day and talk to as many people as possible. Easy way to earn a quick buck you'd think. Wrong. I resisted. All summer. It was good money too. And a fairly simple job. You have separate questionnaires for foreigners and Indians. All you had to do was persuade tired fliers to spend 15 minutes answering about 30 questions. The target was about 20 questionnaires a day and Rs. 100 a pop. I don't need to tell you that's some very good money every month-end. only you'd have to put up receiving your earnings some five months late because the nutters heading ISI at Kolkata took that long to move their snail-ish limbs and write out a few cheques.

As far as I was concerned, I wasn't going to spend my summer loping around the airport breathing its artificial air and going round in circles staring at duty-free chocolate and fancy clothing like some cash-rich yuppie. Oh and it was the graveyard shift, 11 pm to 6 am. I'm used to sleeping between those hours, or at least playing fifa. Anything that cuts into those two activities was and remains a strict no-no. Plus, I spent the summer fighting to save SNIFF and the academic year helping out with Aahan. And, it was the final year of college. None of those arguments worked. Mothers have a better victory percentage than Barcelona will ever manage.

So I joined a rag-tag bunch of boys that included Malad's finest and few nobodies who headed to their coaching classes from the airport every morning. If you don't see room for mischief, you're not alone. I didn't either. Not at first. But it wasn't long before they told me how they worked. They checked into the departure terminal at around 10.30 pm, the official in-time and an hour before the rain swept me in. Then they'd roam around a bit, walking from one end of the terminal to the other is quite some exercise for middle-aged and those who seriously consider walking strenuous. Sure, there was a lot of eye-candy. So the first hour was spent checking out the goods at the stores and ones on two legs. I couldn't find a cruder or more sexist way to say this, but I can't think of any other way to describe how they ogled at white women like they could scarcely believe their eyes.

After this tiresome excursion, they would retreat to the comfort of the sleeping lounge at the far end of the terminal to catch up on their forty winks/wanks.

On my second day there, the self-appointed leader of the pack said to me, “Form bhar ley phir thodi der so jaate hain” (Fill up the forms and get some sleep). Fairly simple words. It was an invitation. To be one of them. To join the wolf-pack. To be a part of a scam. No thanks sucker.

I've got a diary of the whole thing because I wrote down most of everything I did there so I could curse my Maa about it one day. But I guess reading about it years from now will probably make it seem a lot better. Unfortunately the notebook is in Bombay and I won't be going anywhere near it till at least August. I've wanted to write about this for a long time but I kept putting it off for a long time. But I promise to publish word-for-word everything I noted down.

I hated the job because it was pointless and screwed up my digestion. That's pretty much why I'll never be a deskie or work a night-shift anywhere.