When modern airports meet outdated rules

The CISF person said my massage ball, made of rubber with spikes, could be used as a weapon; I would have to check it in. I appealed to his supervisor. He gravely agreed with his colleague’s assessment. Rather than go back to the check-in counter, I suggested the supervisor and his team use it as a massage ball.

A fortnight ago, a security-check guard found a tennis ball in my backpack and examined it with a thoroughness that would have befitted a hand-grenade. After recording my tennis ball, flight details and seat number in the airport’s ‘pat down register,’ which sounded like it might double for #me-too complaints, he waved me through.

To paraphrase Jane Austen, even in the age of Digital India, it is a truth almost universally acknowledged that a functionary in possession of a good government job often yearns for a register and a rubber stamp.

The paradox is that some of our international terminals today look like Muskian-landing sites for travel to Mars. Physically and metaphysically, they belong to wealthier countries, but process reforms seem unable to catch up.

We have among the quickest immigration queues in the world and baggage-claim belts that are loaded efficiently in comparison with, say, Heathrow airport, but ever so often, the long arm of Indian bureaucracy pulls us back to the 20th century.

Bengaluru’s Terminal 2 is an anthropological laboratory of these contradictions. The ‘Dyson Airblade Wash and Dry short hand dryer,’ a one-stop handwashing and drying apparatus, is so high-tech that many passengers prefer to use paper towels rather than risk the ferocious blowback at the wash basin that can make one’s trousers look as if one is incontinent.

Airport seating includes plush leather furniture in such wild colours that it might be a WeWork space. There are palm chandeliers that could double as ecofriendly Christmas decorations. As with Mumbai airport, the range of contemporary art is bewildering. What I mistook to be a giant cockroach, embalmed in silver from the age of dinosaurs, turned out to be a misshapen tree.

Yet, even in a city famous as a global capability centre, necessitating backpacks full of electronic gadgets, the same diktats to ‘Remove chargers’ apply. In no other international airport that I transit through does this hold true. While our security-scan trays are world-beating in size, the rule that a laptop and its charging apparatus must go through a scanner in a tray separate from one’s bag is also confusing.

It is almost a quarter century since Richard Reid, a Briton, failed to detonate a bomb in his shoe, resulting in the quip that he was successful in robbing travellers and security personnel alike of millions of man-hours.

Our obsession with chargers in backpacks also amounts to a waste of time on par with the stamping of baggage tags in Indian airports years ago. In Delhi’s T3, meanwhile, CISF personnel seem to miss the old days so much that they insist you carry your boarding pass so they can stamp it (twice), a practice not followed by their colleagues in Mumbai or Bengaluru.

India’s Fast Track Immigration-Trusted Traveller Programme is emblematic of our ability to be in two centuries simultaneously. The digital form requires one’s Aadhaar number and every detail of one’s passport. OTPs requested and received, one uploads all this data, but it feels as if Digital India’s infrastructure is trying to subject us to an AI-generated aptitude test—or perhaps sarkari systems don’t speak to each other.

Once enrolled, one is warmly greeted at the e-gate, where “there is always someone to help,” says Kavita Vij, a former hospitality executive, who adds that her 33-year-old visually and fine-motor challenged son has always been helped empathetically by immigration officials.

It all works brilliantly—until it doesn’t. Fingerprint machines in India never recognize my fingers. Returning from Sri Lanka recently, I found myself trapped between glass panels for at least ten minutes while distressed officials rushed about getting keys to open the gates because the software had malfunctioned.

When I humble-bragged that my faint fingerprints might be the result of too many hours spent switching grips while playing tennis, I was told it was because I was “old.” A week later, the scanners at US immigration had no trouble, though, with my age.

Maybe airports don’t like my standing in queues playing management consultant, grandiosely devising schemes to reduce human intervention. On Tuesday, I briefly short-circuited the boarding process in Bangkok, which I had been silently critiquing because the airline staff were not using the boarding pass scanners properly and manually checking instead.

I had absent-mindedly handed them my (twice-stamped) boarding pass from Delhi’s T3 while I was glued to a riveting book on Apple. I may talk a good game, but I am not quite ready for the 21st century myself.

The author is a former Financial Times foreign correspondent