When some are more equal than others

The Air India plane at Heathrow was on time and boarding had begun. As per my boarding pass I had occupied my seat in business class. The stewardess had served a welcome drink. As still about half an hour was left before takeoff, I did not expect anything specific to happen. However, I was to be proved wrong.

The head steward approached me with a polite request. I was being upgraded to first class and would have to vacate my seat and move to a new one. While having to get up after one has settled in one’s seat is a bother, it was more than compensated by the shift to a superior class. While I gathered my belongings and made my way to the first class section, I discovered I was not alone in being upgraded. Many others in the business class were also being upgraded. Why

The reason became clear quite soon, as the head steward explained the somewhat unusual background for our upgradation. The reason given to us was this: the England cricket team, on their way to India, was travelling on the flight. The team could not be accommodated entirely in first class as the number of seats available was less than the team’s total strength. The airline therefore had offered a mixed combination of first and business class seats to be distributed among team members as the captain (and perhaps the team manager) deemed fit.

However, the team’s captain did not agree to this offer, and insisted that the entire team should travel by the same class. He didn’t mind if all team members (including himself) travelled by business class as that class had an adequate number of seats. The airline agreed to this. To make so many seats available in business class, it had to get previously allotted seats (to other passengers) vacated by upgrading the occupants. That is why passengers like me were asked to shift to first class seats.

This episode brings out a moral, one for which I have high praise for the England captain. His stand was justified by his argument that all team members were equal and should enjoy similar benefits. Even the captain should identify himself as one among equals, although on the cricket field his authority is unquestionable. Psychologically too, such manifest actions nurture a feeling of camaraderie among team members, which in turn brings out the best in their performance.

Not all captains are, however, so democratic! On my travels to New Zealand a few years ago, I happened to talk to some local Indian residents who narrated the story of a visiting team, whose captain travelled with his wife. When the team landed from overseas, it was made known that there was a minibus waiting for them to take them to their hotel. The first to come out was the captain, who with his wife boarded the bus. Having no patience, he asked the minibus driver to go to the hotel. After he left, the rest of the team began trickling out through the arrivals exit, only to discover that their captain had commandeered the team bus for his own use! They had to wait till an alternative transport was provided. Action of this kind by the captain creates a wall between him and the rest of the team when there was no need for it to exist.

The Heathrow experience brought to my memory another incident which also questioned this doctrine of equality. I was serving on the Indo-US subcommission for education and culture. The subcommission had some “official” members, who were senior IAS officers, and a few of us who were “non-official”, appointed because of expertise in specific fields of interest to the subcommission. The US side had a similar composition, and each side had a leader. On the Indian side, the leader was the venerable G. Parthasarathy (GP in short). The subcommission met in alternate years in India and the US.

We, the non-official members, were issued tickets on Air India business class when the meeting was to be held in the US. All the members, official and non-official, were accommodated in prestigious hotels with per diem provided by the Government of India through the Indian embassy. However, I discovered that the official members were travelling by first class, and I wondered why there was such a difference In fact, if one looked at the issue dispassionately, one could see that the official members were there because of the position they held and not due to any special ability, while the non-official members like Girish Karnad were there due to their manifest achievements in the areas related to the subcommission. Indeed, I wrote a letter to GP bringing to his attention the apparent inconsistency of different classes of travel for members of the same delegation. I also marked a copy to the secretary of the relevant ministry.

GP replied, though the ministry, predictably, stayed silent. GP agreed with my point of view and said that in future he would take the stand that all delegation members should travel by the same class, whether first or business. I do not know what subsequently happened. But I do know my own membership of the subcommission was not continued after its initial period was over.

But as I travelled that day from Heathrow to Mumbai I could not help wondering whether the feeling of equality that guided the English captain was genuinely appreciated by our bureaucrats despite India claiming to be a democracy, where all men are born equal and stay equal. I think George Orwell got it right when he said although all men are equal, some are more equal than others.

The writer, a renowned astrophysicist, is professor emeritus at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune University Campus. He was Cambridge University’s Senior Wrangler in Maths in 1959.