Dear GMR Garu, Raju, and Kiran,
I am writing this open letter on WhatsApp as we have several mutual friends, and I am hoping one of them will share this with you.
Humans Looking Up at the Sky
The collective act of desperate human beings looking up at the sky—whether at aliens about to strike the earth or in hope of divine intervention—has been vividly captured by Hollywood in various movies. Closer to home, as per our Puranas, far into a dystopian future, the Kalki Avatar is said to descend from the heavens riding a white horse.
This morning, my experience at the GMR airport felt eerily similar. Every TV monitor displaying departures had passengers standing in front of it with anxious faces, straining their necks for long periods, looking up in anticipation of discovering their gate number. It almost felt like the famous scene from Independence Day.
A Pain in the Neck
While you have done a fantastic job building a world-class airport and, more recently, expanding it to its current scale, one small issue seems to have escaped your attention. The moment a passenger without check-in baggage completes their security check, they immediately start looking for a TV monitor to find out which gate their flight is departing from.
There are a couple of monitors near the security area, and after a long walk, the next one appears near the first gate. From there, monitors are placed near every gate. However, there is one issue: the current size of the monitor can only display 10 flights at a time. Given that there are at least 50–75 flights departing during peak hours, it takes a full minute of straining one’s neck to see the relevant flight details. One minute is a long time to strain your neck, process the mass of information on display, and correctly identify your flight and gate number!
This creates a proverbial “pain in the neck” experience for the passengers.
Please Add One More Monitor
I am writing to you with a request that may not cost more than Rs. 20–25 lakhs to implement, but doing so will significantly reduce the number of strained necks. Please consider adding one more TV monitor next to the existing ones, thereby displaying 20 flights at a time. This simple addition will cut the time passengers spend searching for their gate in half.
As the arrival of the Kalki Avatar is still some time away, this small intervention will spare us from looking up for divine assistance—at least at the airport.
Hari’s Curries A Buffet of Reflections