As Air India updates its meal policy to vegetarian-only snacks, stand-up comic Sorabh Pant has a laugh
Dead lizards, air attendants who should be given seats instead of passengers, and broken food trays.
India's national carrier Air India is guaranteed to provide fodder for jokes. Recently, the airline may – or may not – have decided to serve only vegetarian food on slights below 90 minutes.
The idea, apparently, was to cut choice. A report in the Times of India quotes an Air India employee explaining the move: "During take-off and touch down, there is no scope for any service as the galley equipment has to remain fastened. In the time available for service, it is not possible for us to juggle passenger choices' of meals. As a non-vegetarian can have a vegetarian meal but not the other way round, the decision was logical."
But no sooner had this been flashed than the news agency ANI quoted Mahesh Sharma, minister of state for aviation to say that this was already the norm, and not new.
This is misinterpreted.Non-veg was earlier also not in that category of snacks-Mahesh Sharma,MoS,Civil Aviation pic.twitter.com/GbFMbWNeaD
— ANI (@ANI_news) December 26, 2015
It's a good time to revisit this routine (video above) by stand-up comic Sorabh Pant, who targets, among other things, the food that you get on an Air India flight.
In June this year a picture of dead lizard in an Air India meal tray was doing the rounds on social media. A report by the Wall Street Journal from November 2014 states that Air India is the most complained about airline and that "The complaints were mostly about the airline’s customer service, flight problems, and baggage-related issues, according to the DGCA (Directorate General Civil Aviation)."