Like most people, I was under the assumption that if you had a valid visa and flight tickets, you could fly to any country. Unless, you happened to be on the Interpol red-corner list or related to Al-Qaeda or some such terrorist outfit.
Infact, there are lucky souls, who just due to their nationality (EU, US etc) need not even have a visa to fly to many countries. Ofcourse this logic does not work with all countries, as a manager in an organisation I used to work in some 10 years ago learnt to his discomfort.
The said manager had to come to our Chennai office for a short business trip from his home base of Belgium. He books a ticket to Chennai and lands at Brussels airport on the day of travel, only to be told that he needs a visa to be able to travel to India. The guy is shocked, but left with no other option than to get back home. If my memory serves me right, I think he just abandoned travel plans and got the work done via email/video-conferencing.
But even if you have a valid visa & tickets, there is no guarantee that you can fly out, as I learnt late-evening yesterday. It is 9PM and I am still at work. A close friend from my college days is flying in from the US on a business-cum-personal trip and I have to pick him up from the airport and drop him at Park Sheraton where he would be staying.
The scheduled arrival time of the Lufthansa flight is 23:45 and adding atleast 30mins for him to finish immigration, customs etc and get his bags, it would be past midnight. So, if I leave from my office to the airport around 11PM, it should be OK. I send him an email telling that I would be at the airport, which I expect him to read when he switches on his phone after landing at Chennai.
I am in the midst of some work, when I see a popup indicating an email from him, which is surprising because he is supposed to be flying at this time and you are not supposed to use phones on the flight. I read the email, which simply says, "I am going to travel only today at 3.30PM so please pick me up tomorrow." I think I made a mistake reading his itinerary, but no - it clearly states an arrival time of 11:45PM on 24-May-2010. So what happened ?
It seems he went to the airport and through security check etc and is at the gate waiting for the plane. And that is when he fails a new test by the US Aviation authority as per which the captain / pilot does an eyeball-check of all the passengers and if he points out someone (in this case my friend, due to the brown skin?) with whom he is not comfortable travelling, that person cannot travel. As simple as that.
Can you believe this ? You are there waiting to fly out on business/pleasure, when the captain comes over, looks at you, does not like the color of your skin or your goatee or your outfit and guess what, you are driving back home to travel another day. And the funny thing is, my friend is an American citizen (of Indian origin), a Business Class traveller & works for a premier bank.
Understandably he was pissed off and his comment was, "My American passport does not get me the respect that I used to get with my Indian passport."
Anyway, I tell him to email me from Frankfurt so that I can be sure that he actually did fly out of the States. :-) Else, I would be waiting like a fool outside the Chennai airport, paying exhorbitant parking fees & drinking more exhorbitantly priced coffee from Coffee Day, while he is back home after failing another eyeball test.
This incident sort of proves my pet theory right. That the US/UK/AU citizenship that you worked hard to get, does not mean a thing, until you can somehow change your skin color too. India does have its flaws, but no one is going to offload me of a plane for which I have paid the fare, just because the pilot does not like the color of my skin.
