The SMS beeped at 8am: “My result is 78% (in the BCom final examinations)!”
Since the day we met in one of the classrooms in the just-opened Kingfisher Training Academy (KTA), 20-year-old Hiral Chauhan has chosen to give away more than you’d expect or want to know: What she wore for her first interview, why her aunt never got to be an air hostess, how she won a national gold medal in Thai boxing, why she’s good at economics.
Not all of that is related to why she should be a flight attendant. “It’s been my dream. But I haven’t ever been inside a plane, can you imagine? I love the idea of getting paid to fly. And the money is so great now,” she tells me, at her family home, the evening before she got her exam results. After attending a few classes, she’s also beginning to comprehend that “being paid to fly” isn’t without a price: “Look good, smile, talk good, and you don’t know how you’ll be treated by customers.”
The Chauhan family lives in a housing society in Marine Lines, close to Zhaveri Bazaar, Mumbai’s bustling jewellery market, where her father, Vasudev O. Chauhan, is a diamond broker. Her mother, Anjana Vasudev Chauhan, is a beautician, who, Hiral says, has egged her on. Amused that a journalist is in her house to quiz her about her daughter’s long cherished ambition, Mrs Chauhan says: “See, in a way, it’s a hi-fi bai’s job. But she’s so keen and determined that I’m supporting her.” Hiral’s father nods in agreement.
The BCom graduate from South Mumbai’s Jai Hind College has hectic months ahead: Wake up at 6am, spend an hour dressing up (wearing her new formals and getting the make-up just right), travel an hour from Marine Lines to Andheri to be in class by 9am, return by 3pm and spend another hour in the evening at the gym (she needs to gain six kilos, according to Kingfisher’s height-weight specs).
All the students in that class of 20 may not be as dogged as Hiral, but she could probably speak for many graduates and college-goers in their early 20s who consider an airline job a trendy and lucrative career option. In the mid-1990s, those who couldn’t make it to college or flunked college became flight attendants—a mindset that a TV serial called Air Hostess, with Kitu Gidwani in the articulate and attractive lead role, marginally managed to change, but not for long. Through most of the 1990s, a flight attendant in India was synonymous with the sari-clad, unsmiling Indian Airlines hostesses until the younger, trendier attendants of Jet Airways and Damania Airlines changed that perception.