BlogSat

The flight over and back allowed me to do something I hadn't done in a while: read a book! I finished two novels that I'd meant to get to for a while: R.K Narayan 's Bachelor of Arts and Oscar Wilde 's The Picture of Dorian Gray But first a thumbs up for the airline on which I did majority of the reading: Jet Airways is now my favorite way to fly to India: great service, great leg-space and seats, and a great entertainment system (caught like 3 movies + 1 TV show+ 4 parts of movies on the two flights.)   On to the books, Bachelor of Arts The last R.K. Narayan stories I'd read were quite a few years ago and most of my reading of his work was from when I was in school and this short stories were part of my English textbook. So I'd completely forgotten just how brilliant he really was, and was able to appreciate the novel in a very different way from when I read them as a child. Its hard for me to articulate, and perhaps its just me, but there's a di...

Most airlines (unlike Southwest / Jetblue ?) have assigned seating for their passengers. I travelled United when this I flew to Chicago (more on this later maybe),and something puzzled me. Maybe someone who reads this can help. Passengers along with their seat numbers are assigned a seat area (1-4) and seating areas are boarded in ascending order. Now, why people rush for their seats when they have assigned seating (assuming the baggage storage space isn't a big consideration) is another human psychology conundrum, but anyway... People do rush: they stand in line for the longest time, and when their seating area is announced ( "Section 1 may board now" ) they rush towards the gate, knocking children and old people on the way, knowing well they may have to wait again for quite a while, as people in front of them take their seats. Now, airlines make a big deal of optimizing their gate turnaround time . So why on earth would they have people board in an order that is bound ...