I am old enough to remember what most of our airports in India looked like before fancy new peacock motifs, food courts, and the odd art gallery began cropping up within their premises. Bombay’s current airport, arguably the nicest in the country until a couple of years ago, appears determined to shed its good reputation and turn back the clock to that dark period of inefficiency we assumed was far behind us. For a while, waiting for a flight at this airport was almost a pleasure, but I fear that has passed. If nothing is done to arrest the slide, it will start to seem like a doctor’s waiting room not long from now.

We have a healthy respect for wasting time in this country. We treat it as some sort of blessing, which it very well might be, except that the time wasted rarely leads to any happiness. How else do we explain the lack of interest or intelligence that goes into the construction of spaces that require us to wait for something or someone? It isn’t the airport alone that prompted this melancholy thought to jump into my head. I thought of my youth, and waiting rooms at railway stations. Some of them were large and airy, others mere cubbyholes with a timetable tacked onto a wall. They were all dirty and depressing, easily sucking the joy of impending travel. All they offered was  disrespect for travellers, and a refusal to treat anyone on the premises as human beings deserving of comfort. They didn’t have to be that way, but they were and, as far as I know, a majority still are.