Maybe India Needs Feminism After All

Culture, India, Philosophy, Women

This is in reflection to a previous post I made about feminism, a couple of months back. The last few days, I have been reading a few blogs written by middle class Indian feminists. There is a particular blog, Indian Homemaker that I have been browsing through, for the quality of posts and the views presented by the commenters. The more I read, the more I realised just how lax the expectations of these ‘feminists’ are, on what they expect from a ‘feminist’ man. Compared to the kind of self-serving upper class ‘westernised’ feminists that I have interacted with personally, these women were surreal, a world apart.

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A video that I found, which reflects the sorry state of how women are treated in India.

What they were asking for wasn’t the world at their feet, but merely just and fair treatment as human beings, a consideration I feel should be a marker of any decent person. But apparently for these women, it is too much to ask. Some of the stories are really sad. Here is a post written as a plea against Indians seemed to believe it is fair to beat ‘disobedient’ wives. Some of the other posts are equally disconcerting. Here is another post where a woman’s so called ‘liberal and progressive’ parents married her off to a software engineer who can’t stand up to his wife in a joint family scenario. Even if I ignore the woman’s naivette in going for an arranged marriage, her parents should have known better not to marry her off this young and at the very least, assess the man’s family beforehand. Her husband could have at least treated his wife as an equal human being. Here is another post on the Desi concept of Joru Ka Gulam (wife’s slave) for men who stand up for their wives against oppression. Some of the anecdotes given in the post makes me wonder if these women are so oppressed that what I’d see as normal decent human behaviour is something that think is glorious.

 

When you read things like this, it becomes pretty apparent that these women aren’t your typical run-of-the-mill women’s liberation activists who use the oppression of women in the lower class as a justification of their own self-serving skullduggery. Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal comes to mind, who has no qualms pandering blaming women victims for rapes. Perhaps I should reconsider my disillusionment with feminism and accept that this country really needs feminists. A feminism of middle class Indian women. Even though I don’t profess feminism personally and I don’t see eye-to-eye with a lot of feminist ideologies, the least I could do as an egalitarian humanist is to support the movements against oppression of human beings because of their gender. It seems the only way if the mainstream thinks women invite rape by their attitudes and dressing style or beating a wife for ‘disobedience’ is justified.

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Apr 27 2012 18 Responses so far

Wrong Reasons to Become a Pilot

Career, Education, India

In my last post, I talked about becoming a pilot in India – the motivations of being a pilot and how to assess them. In this post, I will reflect on the wrong motivations for a career choice as a pilot, which will work against you in the long run if a love of flying isn’t your primary motivation. Once someone like that gets into the industry, the pressures of the job gets to them and since flying isn’t something they enjoy for the sake of flying, things that were once ‘good’ reasons no longer seem so good. Note that all these reasons apply ONLY if you don’t fit 100% into the “You Love Flying” motivation I mentioned in the previous topic. If you already love flying, these reasons will come as an added bonus. One of the reasons I have given here is male centric, so for women reading this, don’t take it as an exclusion. If you have one of your own ‘wrong’ reasons and any queries, feel free to comment.

 

You love travelling and seeing new places: Becoming a pilot is the most cumbersome way to travel the world. It is like climbing down a pipe when you could have used the stairs or a lift. Apart from the huge amount of money spent, you also spend a lot of effort learning how to fly a plane – to do what? Unless you keep changing airlines (a bad career move, not to mention impractical), you will be flying only a handful of routes over and over again. Very soon, you’ll have seen all the places you fly to andit’ll start to get boring. You’d hate the job. If you have the money to take flying lessons but not the right reason, use that money to take a world trip instead. It is cheaper and much more convenient.

Catch me if you can

If you aren’t De Caprio, don’t count on this being your life as a pilot. Those days are over.

You want to date or sleep with air hostesses:  Spending more than Rs. 30 lakhs and a year of intensive training – to get laid? I salute you!  Contrary to pop-media, porn and the random stuff you read on the internet, flight stewardesses are not easy lays. At least, it is not like that in South Asia, no matter how much you wish or fantasize it is. Flight stewardesses know they are hired for their good looks and hospitable personalities. In India, they are a constant target for harassment by leching male passengers, not to mention high strung because of the pressures of the job. If you haven’t had good success getting women of that league without being a pilot, don’t count on getting to sleep with or date flight stewardesses after becoming a pilot. You WILL need good game – things like style, charm and good looks to seduce a woman. There is no short cut. Also, from a professional viewpoint, pilots sleeping with flight stewardesses of their own airline is rife with job related complications PLUS a breach of ethics (don’t get your meat where you get your bread). If you have the time and money, invest in a good dating coach, refine your style, fly first/business class. It is a better bargain in the long run than making a career choice as a pilot just to get laid.

 

Money: Yeah, I know how you read about pilots earning millions of rupees a month. But thats not what the reality is. To get to the stage where you earn mega bucks, you need a level of seniority which is very difficult to get to, given the current job climate and the demands on a pilot’s job. After spending a LOT of money training,  I spent years flying for charter airlines and commuter carriers abroad, because there weren’t much decent openings for fresh pilots in India. And no, I wasn’t flying in comfortable western countries like United States or Canada, but out-of-the-way countries in Eastern Europe and Central/South Asia. The pay in the beginning sucked, it was less than what I could have earned as a top tier MBA graduate in Delhi, given the pressures of the job (Flying planes in places like Pokhara or Almaty is no game). It was only after putting more than a thousand flying hours that my career stabilised a bit. So if money is you primary motivation, get a business degree instead or better, invest.

 

You love adventure and excitement: Being a pilot is adventurous and exciting ONLY when you love flying. The adventures as a civil pilot are usually aviational, not coventional. If you don’t love flying, you aren’t going to enjoy the challenge of flying in low visibility conditions, dealing with failures, bad weather, complex approaches, elaborate noise reduction procedures and the things like that. Apart from the odd case of sexual harassment, irate passengers or an unexpected layover (which gets very boring and run-down after a while), there isn’t much drama or adventure in an airline pilot’s job. If I didn’t love flying as much as I do, the most adventurous thing in my day would have been preparing my meals in the morning. Generally, most of the adventurous or holiday routes tend to be in high demand and hence, companies milk the best out of it. The routes I fly for instance, require a good bit of experience and seniority BUT they are don’t offer the top salaries in the industry.

 

Having said that, the situation isn’t so bleak in aviation if you are genuine about being a pilot. If you really love flying and can afford the training, go for it. Don’t let people scare you off the profession by citing second hand media reports and ‘I knew a pilot sitting at home’ anecdotes. These scare tactics are rather common in Indian societies, where venturing into unconventional territories is highly discouraged. Don’t be the typical Indian who is way too obsessed with making safe career, lifestyle and marriage choices rather than going where their potential lies; such an attitude is the reason Indians live a frustrated, boring and miserable life where the greatest pleasure is in making others miserable.

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Apr 25 2012 2 Responses so far

Becoming An Airline Pilot in India

Career, India, Mischallenous

Last week, I was at a friend’s wedding in a village in Western Uttar Pradesh. A lot of rural Indians think that a pilot is a glorified version of bus driver, so I decided to keep my profession under wraps. At this particular wedding, my ploy failed after my friend let it slip that I am a pilot and bust my lie of being a software engineer. Fortunately, the people of this village had a much better sense of etiquette than I expected and the questions were for the most part, pleasant – what I do, how flying a plane is like, how to become a pilot, the job prospects, etc. Except this little kid, who asked me very innocuously, “Bhaiyya, kabhi plane drive karte koi gira tha kya?”. (Brother, did anyone ever fell out of a plane you were driving?).

 

Small talks apart, some of the more serious queries and stereotypes made me realise that I could write something about career as a pilot in India. Most Indian youngsters in general, have a very glamorous image of being in the airline industry and in being a pilot in particular. For them, being a pilot entails flying to exotic locales, cohorting with pretty young things known as air hostesses and a life of glarmourous riches. This of course, is good for my image but is misleading to people looking for a career as a pilot. Most of the career information in the internet, unfortunately, does not address the lifestyle of the average pilot and the kind of aptitude required for someone to be a pilot. This is where a little knowledge proves a costly affair, since pilot training is very expensive and a bad call here can prove a drain on the resources of average Indians. So I have decided to start off by addressing the good and bad reasons to look for a career as a pilot PLUS the explanations of why they are so. Based on the response and queries, I’ll post more topics.

 

DISCLAIMER: Please note that this is not a conventional career guide – with details of eligibility, flying clubs, salary packages, etc. If you want to find out those details, use Google search. Also note that this article isn’t supposed to be ‘family friendly’ in the Indian context. What I am going to post is straight talk – honest and upfront, even if a little too uncomfortable for some sensibilities. If you are offended by it, don’t read it. If you are in the airline industry and think this doesn’t illustrate your situation, feel free to post your opinions and experiences. And please, don’t ask me what airline I work for – this is strictly personal info, for obvious reasons. If you already know who I am and which airline I work for, please do not divulge this information in a comment, for courtesy’s sake. Now to business.

A pilot’s life.

The most important reason to be a pilot is a love of flying. I’ll repeat, a love of flying. This is sole and only motivation that pretty much trumps up every other reasons to become a pilot and is also something very difficult to ‘put a pin on’, so to speak. Flight training is expensive, intensive and highly technical, especially if you want to be a career pilot. Unless you really take pleasure in flying, it is going to be a drain on your time and resources if flying a plane isn’t really what you really want to do.

 

So what does the love of flying mean? This is one question that doesn’t have an exact and precise answer; so I’ll give you a personal perspective instead, keeping it as jargon-free as I possibly can. For me, a love of flying translates to a love of airplanes. Even after being in the profession for years, I still get a rush when I watch airplanes fly. It is the most beautiful and miraculous sight ever. My favourite place in the world is my ‘office’: the flight deck of an Airbus A319. Right from the briefings to the pre-flight checks and procedures, I enjoy what I love the most about being an aviator: the sound of an APU (auxiliary power unit), starting up the engines, the musical whine of the CFM engines as I taxi to the departure runway, the thunderous take off ‘run’, the lift-off into the sky. I enjoy navigating thousands of feet above the ground, the cruise, the descent, the landing roll and then taxing to gate/ramp. The experience of handling this powerful jet is such a pleasure for me that all the pressures and stress the job thows at me is worth it. All the other perks that come as a pilot’s life are a bonus, not my motivation for being a pilot.

 

If the above twaddle didn’t bore you by now and you still aspire to be a pilot – pick a copy of some flight simulation software like X-plane or Flight Simulator. While they are not the perfect replication of flight and do away with most of what being a pilot entails, it is still good for picking up the basics of flying and to give you a very simple idea of what being a pilot is like. Please, don’t mistake flight simulators for  the real thing – the Microsoft slogan “As real as it gets” simply doesn’t cover it. If you fly a Boeing 747 in FSX, it doesn’t mean you could possibly fly one in real life. Real world planes are way more complex; operating a jet aircraft entails hundreds of checklists and standard procedures that have to be adhered to, religiously, even if they seem ‘boring’ to some people. Flight simulation is for all intents and purposes, a game without too many rules or complexities. Prepare yourself for the reality if you still want to fly after becoming an FS or X-plane pilot.

 

If you are already into flight simulation and want to experience what real flying is like, contact the nearest flying club and ask if they offer rides. A hour long ride in a Cessna piston aircraft would cost about Rs. 8000 and would give you a real experience of flying, before you decide whether you want to invest the price of a BMW in flying lessons. If you DO decide to get flying lessons, start one step at a time – pay for just a PPL in the beginning. Once you get the hang of flying and decide this is what you want to do, go for the goal – a CPL and subsequently, a type rating for the aircraft you want to fly as a career pilot. A type rating, in simple terms, trains and certifies you for the aircraft type you want to fly. For example, if you get a type rating for a Saab 340, you can get a job as a pilot for a Saab 340. Depending on the situation, an airline might sponsor you for  type rating or you’d have to pay for it yourself before you join an airline.

 

I have summed up the basics. In the next part of this topic, I will discuss the wrong reasons for becoming a pilot, with explanations why. I will also debunk some of the stereotypes and myths associated with being a pilot.

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Apr 24 2012 5 Responses so far

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