Bangalore Airport!

I stopped by Bangalore last month while I was coming from Australia to India. I went there to meet my good old school friend, Gaurav aka Ganja aka Bobo. He did show me around the place exceedingly well (whatever there is in the city) but he faltered to gauge the distance of Bangalore’s new airport. I barely managed to reach in time, which has nothing to do with my past track record. What makes things impossibly achievable this time is the location of the airport: it is far from Bangalore. No one seems to know just how far from Bangalore the Bangalore airport is. But everyone agrees that it is very far. Maybe it is even very, very far.

The million dollar question is: Exactly how much ahead of check-in time should one depart the city to reach the airport, bearing in mind the inevitability of the traffic jams that have become synonym to Bangalore? Some are of the opinion that a simple rule-of-thumb formula gives you a fairly good approximation of the journey time: shorter the time you have in hand, farther the airport is. Mathematically, multiply your flight number by the square root of your anxiety, to the power number of persons travelling with you, divided by the time you have in hand and you'll get a rough idea, in hours and minutes, of the time it'll take you to reach the airport. Some disagree, pointing out that watches are inadequate instruments with which to try and calculate journey time to the airport, which is best computed through the use of a calendar. For instance, if the flight that you are proposing to take is on Tuesday, you should go to the airport on Sunday, unless the numbers comprising the date of that day add up to the inauspicious number 7, in which case you'd best consult your personal astrologer, or an airline timetable, whichever is closer to hand. Needless to say, that’s personal astrologer. We still need to invent something called airline timetable in India.

The distance of the new Bangalore airport from Bangalore city raises questions of a philosophical nature as well. Getting there represents the how part of the question; the why part (as in 'Why it is where it is') gives rise to a different debate. According to critics, the location of the airport was chosen with a view to property speculation. Going by this logic, the airport was sited as far off from the city as possible so that insiders could buy up all the land between the city and the airport at dirt-cheap rates and then sit back and watch the prices soar. The closer the airport was to the city, the less the connecting land between the two, and the lesser the booty.

I disagree with the above explanation. It fails to see the real reason for the location of Bangalore airport, which is to revolutionize the entire concept of airports, and of flying. What is an airport? A place which facilitates flying. And what happens when people fly? They leave a carbon footprint, which gets Al Gore so furious that he starts flying all over the place telling people not to fly and thereby leaving an even bigger carbon footprint in his efforts. Placing airports as far from cities as possible not only deters people from flying but also makes for shorter flights between airports. The new Bangalore airport, for example, is halfway to Delhi. Now if Delhi airport were similarly to shift halfway to Bangalore, depending upon when they get their sense correct, Delhi and Bangalore would have an airport within a distance that can be covered through land. Or, they might as well have one airport. Similarly, other cities could follow suit so that the whole country will eventually have just one airport (should be located in the centre of India - Nagpur) which people travel over land to and from, thus get away with flying, and carbon footprinting, altogether. And we will have disinvented the Wright brothers.