To pee or not to pee? That is not the question

 

It is not long back that a video of a brawl between passengers on a Bangkok-Kolkata Thai Smile Airways flight went viral. Unable to get to the bottom of the matter by deciphering the media blitz, I was a great deal flustered. But my confoundment did not last long as, thankfully I could eavesdrop on a tête-à-tête between my great-uncle Shakespeare and the youngest uncle Ghālib on the issue. I shared the insightful dialogue between the two, which brought out many a deep and arcane aspects of the brouhaha in this blog:

 

http://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2023/01/flight-hai-ya-railway-ka-general-dabba.html

 

But Indian air carriers and our unexampled passengers are bent upon assailing my sensitivities with some bizarre incident or the other.  An inebriated passenger on the Air India NY-DEL flight urinated on an elderly woman co-passenger in Business Class in end November. Days later, another Air India passenger on CDG-DEL flight urinated on a co-passenger’s blanket. The airline sought to cover up and later downplay the incidents and acted only after there was a huge uproar in media. Came the new year and GoFirst chipped in with a ludicrous instance of its BLR-DEL flight leaving without 55 passengers who were stranded in an airport transit bus although they had valid boarding passes. Not to be outdone, SpiceJet left its DEL-BLR passengers suffocating in an aerobridge for close to an hour. Once again, like a typical Indian empathetic humanist, I enjoyed the news items vicariously until I was once again sobered by the private conversation between my uncles on the subject; they hardly cared to bend my ears about it but I did overhear all of it. All the behavioural and metaphysical aspects of the incidents dawned on me and I now reproduce verbatim those pearls of wisdom emanating from their blessed vocal chords:

 

Shakespeare: My dear Gaulib, unlike the indecisive Hamlet, to pee or not to pee is never the question. Pee one must but after drinking heavily! But where? In Macbeth, Porter advises Macduff, “Drink sir, is a great provoker of three things….nose-painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire but takes away the performance.” You see, the act of peeing requires great skill and purposeful performance to let the spirit of human endeavour flow freely but not aimlessly. This man was already soaked to the gills and then, do account for the constricted loo of an airplane. Can you blame him much given the situation? He is more to be pitied than censured as we English, the tops in drinking, taught many things to Indians but omitted to initiate them into the thousand nuances of tippling. I should have had Iago saying to Cassio in Othello, “I learned it in England where indeed they are most potent in potting. Your Dane, your German, swag-bellied Hollander and gremlin-like uncouth Indian —Drink, ho!—are nothing to your English.”

 

Ghālib: Wah bhai ShaKHs-e-Peer (Bravo brother, Old man), back to your habit of maligning Indians as a generic whole. What could your plundering angrez (Englishmen) successors teach us about drinking? For us Indians:

 

Phir dekhiye andāz-e-gul-afshānī-e-guftār

rakh de koī paimāna-e-sahbā mire aage

(gul-afshānī-e-guftār: flowery style of conversation, sahbā:wine. Let a cup of wine be placed in front of us and then watch how wax eloquent we become with a flowery style of speech)

 

Otherwise, I do think the airline did err massively. After all,

 

Girnī hi thī us ki pee aur ik ḳhātuun-e-bekhabar

dete haiñ baada zarf-e-qadah-ḳhvār dekh kar

(ḳhātuun-e-bekhabar: oblivious lady, baada: wine, zarf-e-qadah-ḳhvār: ability, capacity of the drinker. His pee was destined to descend on some graceful oblivious lady because wine is served only after assessing the capacity of the wine-drinker)

 

Shakespeare: My dervish friend, accept it. Like Cassio in Othello, “You Indians  have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking. I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment for you…”. Following the same Cassio, “Dear Iago, good wine may be a good familiar creature, if it be well used,  but you Indians, you just put an enemy in your mouths to steal away your bladders!" And yes, I agree, the crew of Air India goofed up. Kinking what Kinky Friedman said, “the only thing that really differentiates India from any other place in the world is the proclivity of its people to urinate outdoors and to attach a certain amount of importance to this popular pastime.”, obviously in the belief that while its passengers were earlier pissed off, with takeover by Tata they should now be pissed on. While Tatas want their crew to zip up their socks, all they did was to let their passengers zip down. Could they not simply ask the Urinator Mishra to vacate his seat for the lady and let him sit in her ‘pissed on’ seat?

 

Ghālib: Janab (Sir) Shekhu, yes, the crew were ahmaq and totaa-chashm (foolish and treacherous) of the first water. The solution?

 

Go haath ko jumbish nahīñ teri naak meñ dam hai

rahne do pee ka ye sagar-o-mīnā tire aage

(jumbish: movement, saagar-o-mīnā: sea and decanter. Although his hands are bereft of movement in drunkenness, his nose can smell so let him stay in the sea and decanter of his own discharge)

 

Shakespeare: You mean, like Trinculo, in my play The Tempest, he would “smell all man piss, at which his nose would be in great indignation.” Ha! But the birdbrained crew, If only they cared to have a lowdown on this Urinator, they would know that he was the VP of a big company but this bull’s pizzle thought his pizzle was a fountainhead and being a VP was actually a license to Wee pee, I pee and You pee. Be that as it may, I believe Air India will now regulate serving of drinks, forsaking the dilemma of two beer or not two beer.

 

Ghālib: Bakwas (Nonsense)! Even genuine well-mannered  musaafirīn (travellers) to be deprived of the elixir of life just because some air hostess did not play a good saaqī (wine-server)! I will have to stop travelling by air and take a train where one can drink one’s addha (half bottle) with impunity in a coupé.

 

Har-chand ho mushāhida-e-haq kī guftugū

bantī nahīñ hai bāda-o-sāġhar kahe baġhair

(Har-chand: although, how-so-ever, mushāhida-e-haq: witnessing truth, bāda-o-sāġhar: wine and glass. In whatever way one may hold a discourse on the eternal truth, it would not work without wine and goblet)

 

Shakespeare: Dear chappie Assed, that would be a good option, thank us for giving you Indian Railways. And, other airlines are no better. Look at GoFirst, it gives you a boarding card and then flies away, cocking a snook at you, leaving you stranded in a bus. I would think that if at all you travel by any airline in India, follow the advice of Laertes to Ophelia in Hamlet, albeit in a different context of him warning her not to sleep with Hamlet before they get married or she would be ruined, “...Be wary, then. Best safety lies in fear...”

 

Ghālib: Billy urf Barad ji (Billie the bard sir), you scare me. Look how my poetic mind has spoken on the fear of flying on an Indian carrier’s plane:

 

Thā zindagī meñ marg kā khaTkā lagā huā

uḌne se pesh-tar bhī mirā rañg zard thā

(marg: death, khaTkā: fear, anxiety, uḌne: flying, pesh-tar: earlier, even before, zard: pale. The very thought of flying induced in me such dread that even before flying, I had turned pale.)

 

Shakespeare: Buddy Gaulib, no surprise there. These guys can leave you in dire straits on ground itself, much before actual boarding. Did you not hear of SpiceJet cooping its passengers in a narrow aerobridge for so long that the poor passengers almost asphyxiated? Some pipsqueaks say that I wrote, "There is nothing so confining as the prisons of our own perceptions". What balderdash! If I did write on captivity and confinement, I would say, through Hamlet, mixing it a bit from the Prince in Richard III “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, except in a aerobridge leading to a Spicejet plane, which is worse than the Tower of London...but come my Lord, having purchased their ticket, with a heavy heart, go I unto this gangway.”

 

Ghālib: But mere pyaare firangī (my dear foreigner), we live and learn. Look at the offender in Peegate version II, he waited for the lady passenger to vacate her seat and then peed on her blanket. Some decency, in the light of the philosophy that:

 

Gurde meñ dauḌte phirne ke ham nahīñ qaa.il

jab seat pe hī na Tapkā to phir...aage aap hoshiaar ho

(Gurde: kidney, qaa.il: supportive. Mere dribbling in the kidney does not impress me, unless it drips on a seat...you are wise enough to know what follows.)

 

Shakespeare: Oh, so he should have twisted what Sir Andrew says in Twelfth Night, “I do it with a better grace but he does it more natural”. My desi (Indian) liar, I mean sha’iir (poet) friend, let me close with an incorporeal thought which Shylock had borrowed from me in The Merchant of Venice to tell the Duke, “...Some that are mad if they behold a cat, And others, when Air India hands out free booze, Cannot contain their urine...”

 

If you do not wish to be pissed on, take a train. Amen!

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