Excess Baggage

I was reading something the other day. All the airlines are now planning to charge overweight people which means extra money for tickets. In fact, some of the airlines in the US have already started implementing this cheap practice to earn money. It seemed unbelievable...and in some other ways, pure injustice and discrimination of a new kind, based on one's fitness levels. Discrimination comes naturally to most of us and fat people have always been discriminated against in some form or the other.

Even kids who know no better will instinctively pick on fat kids and make fun of them or discriminate against in some way. Anyway, with the airlines in the US set to implement this new rule, I foresee lawsuits and a lot of headlines about this particular issue. So, are they justified in doing so? Recently on a flight back from Cochin to Mumbai, I was seated next to an obese person who was halfway spilling onto my seat.

I could not even lower my armrest. It was a terribly uncomfortable flight. I remember requesting the flight attendant to organize another seat for me. Unfortunately, it was a full flight and I had to bear the brunt of my neighbour's obesity literally. The point I am trying to raise is--is this decision based on increasing passengers' comfort or another fallout of the economic recession with the airlines finding another way to increase their revenue?

I wonder what they will do next---charging people like me extra if they are unusually tall because they require extra legroom for their long legs? This thought really got me worried. I know that I would fit in perfectly along with Sushmita Sen since we are tall. What about pregnant women? But then I guess, the immediate thing to worry about while buying a ticket now would be one's weight. Perhaps, this will finally be a wake up for people like me to reduce weight...something that I desperately need, so that I could knock off those extra kilos.

As I read the reactions to this on the Internet, I gauge that a lot of people are extremely supportive of this decision (I am not, unfortunately). Perhaps, they suffered like me at sometime. But this new rule will open the Pandora's Box. Does this mean that people who are thin or underweight will have to pay less? The numerous questions that come up is mind-boggling in a strange way, because only charging fat people double is punitive.

I could go on this with this but I think I have made my point. An industry that is supposedly part of the hospitality industry is amazing at their measures to make profits. We see all these strange measures in place. First, the food and drinks being charged...and now this!! To put it in the lyrics of the famous song, "I wake up in the morning and I step outside...and take a deep breath and I get real high...and I scream at the top of my lungs, what's going on?" It is truly a mad, mad world.