STUART HESS | World Cup tour diary: Tight security, travel mayhem and allure of Indian players

Security

It is worth outlining the security procedure at Indian airports because they make little sense. Before a traveler even gets into a terminal there is scanning of your flight ticket, your passport/ID and your face.  

Depending on the airport, your ticket can be scanned up to three times before you’re even allowed into the terminal. You will be photographed twice and have a police officer scan your passport after he makes absolutely sure you are you.  

Then you can go and check-in. There is another part that makes no sense. When you take a flight, everything is taken out of the bag, not only a laptop, but cables, headphones, power banks, batteries, alles.  

If you have a connecting flight you will go through that entire process again, and depending on the airport it may be more rigorous than your first flight.  

Why?  

Who have you engaged with between disembarking and getting to the next gate? Has the air hostess from the flight you’re disembarking from put something in your bag?  

You’re in the airport, all the time. Sometimes it is literally 30 minutes between disembarking one flight and boarding the other, but still, security check. It keeps a lot of people employed in the police and army services, I suppose.  

Travel mayhem 

Perhaps there was a sign when colleague Neil Manthorp forgot his main luggage bag on a pavement outside the terminal at Kolkata airport. All the scans and security checks can cause forgetfulness.  

Harshly for Manners (Manthorp), his bag remains in Kolkata, three days after he arrived in Ahmedabad. He did check it in, as a very helpful email from the airline SpiceJet confirmed. 

It didn’t check through. The airline officials are none the wiser about how to assist him.

“The bag is in Kolkata,” said an employee.

“When will it get to Ahmedabad?” Manthorp asked.

“We don’t know, maybe tomorrow,” came the reply.

It’s been two days of “maybe tomorrow”.

Picture 

A cricketer in India is a celebrity. A proper one, not the pseudo celebs we have in South Africa, who hang around famous people or who jobs with titles like “influencer”.  

When the Indian team marched through Kolkata airport on Monday morning, hundreds of cellphones emerged from the pockets of other travellers wanting to get a snap of their heroes.  

While the crowd wasn’t as big as when the South African team went through the terminal later, it was a lot more than anything they get when they are at home.  

Even an ex-cricketer isn’t short of fame. Shaun Pollock sat patiently while dozens of people came up to him wanting a selfie. One even pretended to escort him through the terminal to his departure gate, doing a heck of a job by jostling people out of the way.  

When he couldn’t find the gate, he asked Pollock for a picture, which the former Proteas captain duly obliged. He left, leaving Pollock none the wiser about which gate his flight was departing from.    

Eden Gardens

It is special and try as the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) might to impress Prime Minister Narendra Modi by building the world’s biggest stadium and then naming it in his honour, the true home of Indian cricket will always be Eden Gardens.  

They may have, to put it mildly, over enthusiastic police officers, but the excitement among the populace for the sport and the Indian team is tangible. The entire city was gripped by last Sunday’s game between South Africa and host nation India, and the biggest star delivered, with Virat Kohli presented with a gold plated bat for his record-equalling hundred and the fact it was his birthday.  

Cake 

Sadly the media did not get to share Kohli’s birthday cake, though there was a slice of sponge cake consumed during the brief second innings.  

Nor were any of the 70,000 Kohli masks that were supposed to be dished out to patrons made available.