Airport

DECEMBER 1999 - It is surely a miracle that Lahore airport has continued to function as one, given the recent news about the state of chaos and thieving that was going on there. Now the army has taken over its administration and perhaps it will at last start resembling what airports usually look like. It was always frustrating to see so many people doing nothing there other than mismanaging the place. Now, the obvious has simply become more obvious.

First there was the security check point which comprised of four listless cops who fluctuated between over-zealous checking of everything under your vehicle to everything inside it, or not even a second glance, depending what particular mood they were in. They had their peculiar system of grading each vehicle. If there was a woman seated, chances of being waved through were bright. Conclusion ? Nice girls don’t. Only men are terrorists. If there were three young men, they’d be checked thoroughly. Conclusion ? Terrorists are usually hoods and travel in trios. If you had an old car, you weren’t worthy of a second glance. If you had a Pajero, even your glove compartment was ransacked. Conclusion ? All terrorists drive Pajeros. Such breathtaking systems approach was on display throughout the year. I wonder just how many vehicles carrying terrorists did they ever detect ? One ? Two ?

The car park we now learn was a big money racket. It was being run (and how) by somebody who shouldn’t have been running it in the first place (which of course is why he was). A close associate of the Prime Minister, this lucrative contract was dished out to reward him and of course countless others elsewhere. These were the perks which the rulers could dispense without hesitation and symbolized how political power is misused with such regularity by politicians to gain leverage and support. Of course we paid throughout the year for just using the pathetic little parking lot. At every airport worth its name, the area where passengers are dropped off is the widest and most easily accessible. In Lahore, for reasons which were best known to its administrators, the thin lane which might have served some purpose as a taxi lane was the lane used to drop passengers. It was so narrow that hitting the pavement while opening doors was a very distinct possibility. One car could easily block the whole route and this was frequent. The wide and spacious road in front of the Concourse Hall was not in use, other than by civilian VIPs, Armed forces and other vehicles which not only used the road but even remained parked for as long as they wished. Denying revenue paying passengers a fundamental service was a thought that never crossed the mind of those who were administering the airport. The result was not unexpectedly, chaos and mayhem with no one answerable.

All Pakistan airports abound with men and women who have no other purpose in life other than to stamp your belongings with as many stamps as they can lay their hands on. From the time you are asked to show your ticket to the security staff (a useless exercise since they can’t tell Hebrew from English), you are prodded, pushed and probed for everything including pocket atomic bombs and nuclear reactors. Your baggage and whatever else you have goes through the baggage x-ray machines. While your baggage once checked in escapes further harassment, you are not so lucky. Your boarding card is stamped again and again, your cabin baggage rechecked and stamped and then stamped again. Whether one area or another, there are any amount of people continuing to check you and your baggage. Everything has to be tagged and each tag has to be stamped and punched. Passengers are constantly pirouetting doing their version of Swan Lake, as officials seek new places where they affix the silly security stamps they are waving about. You can’t leave the departures hall without being stamped and punched and the same thing happens before you get into the plane. This obsession with security of a mindless kind has been practised non stop on poor passengers who are neither planning to blow up the plane they are traveling on nor are they remotely interested in rocketing the airport, though in case of the Lahore airport it’s not such a bad idea. All the passengers want is to get on and get off the plane.

The irony of course is that when someone does wish to do something dreadful at the airport, the security goons will be the last to know. The recent revelations indicate that there were as many as 33 check points and I suppose just as many organizations manning these silly points. That there was happily absolutely no coordination between them means that there was perpetual confusion reigning at the airports. In addition, law-breaking unions and any amount of pass-pushers, (some who spends months obtaining access passes and pay any amount of cash to have a VIP pass), the civil aviation eagles, the ASF, the police, the immigration goof squads, PIA’s own brigades and well-connected civilians, brass and political big wigs and their uncles, these and others played out their silly dramas as passengers and visitors were pushed and shoved about. It is a wonder the flights ever took off or landed and indeed that we ever made it inside or came out in one piece. Hopefully this will be a thing of the past and the airport may start to look and behave like one.

Yet another ordeal passengers faced was the hordes of baggage-grabbing, passenger-pushing mafia of porters who openly ran their own tariff system and who were impossible to dodge. If passengers escaped them by some special trick, there were dozens of smelly taxi and rickshaw drivers who descended on them and would neither take no for an answer or give half an inch space. It was obvious that in their world view, everyone who descended from a plane had to take a taxi out of the airport. No amount of persuasion by passengers that such was sometimes not the case, had any effect on them. Passengers were always assaulted by outrageous fares and the spirit of competition in its vilest form. No, the Lahore airport (Karachi has been a happy exception for some time, though just barely) has been the pits and it’s about time it was cleaned up. It could do with a face lift and a thorough scrubbing. After that, it should have a minimal amount of staff and no looters so that passengers can come and go without feeling they have been through a wringer.