Page 21 - Seniors Toady March 2020

synthetic aroma and the safest thing to eat
Our airports are great…
but what happens when you get on board?
own. Two of the boys said that they ate
the same food but Air India had now got a
dietitian who prescribed salt-less food so
that the staff should not put on weight. I
even tried a boiled spinach that was awful,
hospital-tasting, pathetically unappetising.
The vegetarian scam
My next trip was on Spice Jet. The airhostess
said she had run out of non-vegetarian and
could only offer me a paneer tikka shashlik;
there were four small pieces of paneer tikka,
three round cut potato slices stuffed with
paneer. There was also one tikki in which I
couldn’t tell whether there was more aloo or
bread. I suspect she was lying, because I once
sat on the front row and again the airhostess
said that they had run out of non-vegetarian
food. I asked her how that could be, when I
was the first passenger she was serving.
The Indigo food is not great either. The
cup noodles, biryani, poha etc have so
much preservative in it. The food has a very
21
is the little packet of cashews/almonds that
come in a tin called Nutcase. The airline
suggests that you can take the tin home and
reuse it. I wish they wouldn’t go through
this exercise of adding clutter to the planet
and simply give us cashews in a paper bag.
However, a Coke and a packet of cashews
can set you back by Rs 250. So who is
responsible for maintaining a food standard
on the domestic sector?
Unfortunately Jet Airways shut – it offered
very good quality food and service. At the
moment Vistara is the best in India. The food
is good, served piping hot, the staff and the
service are also very good and the aircraft is
spotlessly clean. Unfortunately our aviation
minister Hardeep Singh Puri is unaware of
the quality of services that airlines provide
in the domestic sector. Somebody ought
to tell him not to get bothered about one
clown heckling another – it’s a part of their
profession (yeh unka pesha hai) – but to look
at the ground reality on the quality of food
and customer satisfaction.
Finally, Kingfisher made a loss. They are
after Vijay Mallya. Jet Airways made a loss.
They are after the Goyals. Who should take
the blame for Air India’s huge losses?
Coming back to the gentleman whom I had
met at the Delhi airport, my advice would be
exactly what he said, that if you travel by Air
India, Spice Jet or Indigo it’s not a bad idea to
carry your food with you. Amen.
Cabin air and cramped space makes a bad food experience
even worse
SENIORS TODAY | Issue #9 | March 15, 2020