So I’ve arrived in Delhi, India, after a few too many hops through the Persian Gulf region. The only flight I could get between Cairo and Delhi took me overnight through Bahrain, Abu Dhabi (UAE), and Muscat (Oman), before heading up to Delhi. Each plane ride was only 1-2 hours long with 1-2 hour stops between each point — but all in the middle of the night.
So yes, I arrived exhausted, but was greeted at the airport and whisked to my guest house for a good long nap. The airline, Gulf Air, was quite nice and insisted on serving a hot meal for each of those short segments. There were plenty of Westerners about, in the terminals and on the planes. In fact, every stewardess was either European or Asian. The airport waiting areas seemed to be full of people ranging from Saudi Arabian sheikhs doing their duty-free shopping in the glitzy Bahrain airport to European hippies headed for India.
I got the impression that many of the Indians travelling on my last flight into Delhi were returning from performing manual labour jobs in the Middle East and had not flown in a while. When stewardesses came through the cabin to collect headsets, they would try to give them everything (pillows, blankets, magazines, etc). When my neighbour asked for a second helping of his Indian dinner, he got infuriated because he claimed the rest of his food got cold before they brought it—ruining his meal (as though he was in some fine restaurant). The second the plane touched the ground, long after it had even gotten off the landing runway, half the Indians were already on their feet grabbing all their stuff out of the overhead lockers. The stewardesses were screaming at them to get back in their seats and buckle up.
This behaviour seemed to continue after we got off the plane. When we all arrived to go through immigration and customs, many of the Indians looked around and tried to find ways to circumvent the long “Indian Citizens Only” line. They would try sneaking through the non-Indian tourist processing line as though it might be a shortcut, but the customs officers refused to serve them. I guess this behaviour all comes from having to deal with the competition you face for attention from the other billion people in this country. That and perhaps a poor understanding of the English language.
