Gratitude
09 Jan 2019 • By Ashish Golcha
Fog, horns and chaos. Here I stand at the airport at 6:00 am in the morning chill of New Delhi terminal 3, with no expressions on passengers faces as everybody is moving mechanically amidst a crowd of over hundreds on every counter. With kids leaning over parents, labour groups managing their rope tied bags, senior citizens aligning their medicine bags and small purses over the wheel chairs and the last minute passengers requesting to jump queues, everyone is just moving at their own pace.
Then I see only 3 set of people smiling and exchanging notes: the police on entry check point, airline staff on the counter and the security check team.
“Indian systems are like this”, “the infrastructure is so poor”, the people are so inefficient”
As a traveller as much as I sulk waiting in long queues of immigration, luggage screening, taking boarding passes and managing to squeeze-in the 99 ml, I took a step back to wonder the level of traffic, negativity and complains these people go through every day, every single day.
Mathematically they probably might be beating six sigma with the diligence at which they perform their job relentlessly every day with a smile with the sole objective of safety and speed; without any acknowledgement or credit, whatsoever.
With travellers like me, for whom such systems have been a blessing, the people who make the system smooth irrespective of the pouring traffic and lack of civic sense amongst us, politely telling every passenger to take out their laptops and power banks every minute and enable that nobody misses the flight.
The next time we see them we at least owe them a smile, a simple thanks you or a mere greeting to add some humane touch to their mundane thankless job, we never know that this spread of positivity might just change our own day making us feel proud of our people, country and fellow citizens.
