WiFi at 40,000 Feet and Other Modern Tragedies

Somewhere over Athens, and very much online.

Many years ago — and I say this not with the smugness of an ageing tech evangelist, but the quiet trauma of someone who once had to borrow coins to make an STD call — incoming mobile calls in India were chargeable. Yes, you paid to be yelled at by your boss. The good old days, when guilt came with a per-minute tariff.

We had pagers then. Remember those? They were like polite SMSes that said, “You may now go find a landline, Sir.” We survived Y2K with more drama than disruption, bought calling cards that had expiry dates shorter than milk, and waited at STD booths hoping the person before us didn’t have relatives in three continents.

Now I’m aboard an Air India Dreamliner headed to Frankfurt — yes, the same airline whose flight recently met a tragic end in Ahmedabad — and somewhere over the Aegean, I make a horrifying discovery. No, not the lavatory. WiFi.

Free. Functional. Fatefully fast.

No announcement from the cockpit. No warning in the inflight magazine. Just a silent betrayal waiting in the network settings, like a ghost of productivity past.

And suddenly, my phone — once nobly in airplane mode — begins to twitch like Frankenstein’s monster reanimated.

WhatsApp lights up with the precision of German railways. The client from hell has sent three PDFs, four voice notes, and a thumbs-up emoji so sinister it should come with a trigger warning. A cousin texts “call when you land”, the passive-aggressive Indian family version of “We need to talk.”

This, my friends, is what we call progress.

Once upon a time, flight meant freedom. You were unreachable. Untouchable. A silhouette gliding above responsibility. Now, you’re just a flying node in a 5G matrix, doomed to be responsive at 900 km/h.

We used to vanish. Now we merely roam.

I blame the Germans. Not for the WiFi — let’s be clear, they do infrastructure too well to take the fall for this — but for the global myth that everything must be efficient. That we must respond, submit, update, even at 40,000 feet. Somewhere in Frankfurt, a man in a beige suit and Bluetooth earpiece probably once said, “Connectivity is not optional.” And that was that.

Air India, in its latest attempt to look modern while still serving frozen peas, embraced it. The same airline whose Dreamliner nearly clipped the edge of aviation news doom now makes sure your boss can see two blue ticks before your complimentary beverage arrives.

I look out the window. Beneath me, Europe sprawls elegantly like a Thomas Cook brochure from 1997. Inside, I’m in a pressurised metal tube with too many WhatsApp groups and too little legroom. The only thing soaring freely is my anxiety.

Would it really hurt to disconnect?

To be unreachable — gloriously, unapologetically, untaggable — for six hours?

Somewhere, a pager lies in a drawer, still holding its tiny breath. A landline waits patiently for a call that won’t come. And me? I ache for silence at 40,000 feet — a luxury we gave up for 5 bars and a delivery report.

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