It is a well-established fact of life that airlines and fine dining do not necessarily go together. One does not fly to eat, just as one does not eat to fly-unless one is oneself personally a fly in which case one flies while eating. Royal Nepal Airlines is our national fly carrier, and whatever else one may say about it confidentially in adult company at the Rox after a few drinks, culinary extravagance is not one of them.
There is something about the omelette served on the early morning RA205 shuttle to Delhi that defies description. Obviously, as the Great Helmsman himself instructed, an egg or two had to be broken to make that omelette, but which proportion of what Royal Nepal considers a "non-vegetarian breakfast" is actually the embryo of a fowl yet unborn and which proportion should rightfully belong in the cracker unit of an oil refinery is hard to tell.
In fact it was only after I had eaten halfway through the styrofoam tray while at cruising altitude Somewhere Over the Western Sector, that I suddenly realised I was gnawing no more at the said omelette but was wolfing down the plastic container. If I may be so bold as to say so, the receptacle actually tasted more like an egg than the omelette itself. And after swallowing the mushroom-and-onion-fluoro-biphenyl hexa-propylene tetrachloride it was hard to keep my tray table stowed and my seat in an uptight position for very long without having to make mad roundtrips up and down the aisle to the fore and aft lavatories. (This is no mean feat, try it sometime.)
Speaking of eggs, RA hasn't yet settled which came first-the egg or the omelette. But we have it on good authority, viz. the Chicken Rights Alliance of South Asia, that there is going to be strict monitoring of poultry farm conditions in the subcontinent to ensure that our two-legged feathered friends, (be they broilers or layers) enjoy the basic rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration before the time comes for them to be converted into airline food. And here we must also think of the rights of the unborn chicken, the egg.
Chicken rights activists are also rightfully up in arms about fowl language that employs poultry terms like "chicken" when we mean "coward"-this callously stereotypes the essence of chicken and gives them an unnecessarily negative image. Phrases like "chick" are ageist and are used derogatorily to describe vertically-challenged poultry and young girls. "Hen-pecked" is an insult to hendom in general and animal husbandry in particular. Even "cocks" get a raw deal when used to refer to twinkies. And what of "cockpits", the arenas where warlike roosters are made to fight by humans who gamble on the outcome?
It was when the plane had started making its descent into Indira Gandhi International Airport that the pilot came on the intercom: "Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking from the arena where warlike roosters are made to fight humans who gamble on the outcome. We hope you have enjoyed our inflight service today, we would like to ask you to stow your tray table for landing. That is, if you haven't eaten it already."
