Squadron Leader K M Daniel RAF

The picture above is a snap of the front page of yesterday's Sunday Supplement of  Malayala Manorama, the number one newspaper in India published both in print media as well as in digital online form. (Those who can read Malayalam language may click the image above to open the online page to read the content.)

I was surprised when I read the full page story with illustrative graphics and pictures because the hero depicted in the story is none other than my own great uncle who who left this world to his heavenly abode two decades ago.

As I started reading the story, my surprise and curiosity both began to rise. There were reasons for that.

I was reading some hitherto unknown things about a person whom we thought we knew well. I knew my late great uncle was a pilot of the Royal Air Force during the World War-2 and a commercial pilot with the erstwhile Tata Airlines which got nationalized as today's Air India later.

Besides, I was very close to Late Shri K M Daniel during the times when he was no more a serving pilot. He was younger brother of my grand mother late Mrs.K.M.Annamma . As a teenager, I was very fascinated with airplanes and the men who piloted those flying machines and obviously this uncle was my hero during those days. I remember spending several nights together listening to his adventure stories which he used to share with me.

But those were things of the past. Except we the old timers, hardly any one from the new generations had a chance to know about this pilot of the world war times. And the news paper now carried certain things which he never told me. Had I known those, he would have been a greater hero for me and perhaps I had known more interesting things of his life first hand!

For the benefit of my readers, let me briefly tell you his life history from the things I had known and also from what the newspaper now told:

K M Daniel was born and brought up in a village called Kumplampoika, few kilometers away from the present day Pathanamthitta city in Kerala. He was a couple of years younger to my grandmother who was born in 1902. They were a total of 11 siblings, sons and daughters of late Kulanjikombil Mathai, the founder head master of the present day CMS High School Kumplampoika.

My great uncle began his career as a teacher in the same school after his graduation. The family had plans to make him an ordained priest and hence he had attended some time in a seminary too.

But he was a sports enthusiast and aspired to serve the Royal Air Force and did not know the way by which he could do so. But he tried his luck by writing a plain letter to the Air Force Command that operated from Madras (present Chennai)

As luck turned in his favor, he was called for the selection process and selected. He got trained as a fighter pilot of the Royal Air Force. There were several times he saw death face to face, but escaped unscathed. 

One interesting episode is his solo flight of a single engine air craft with a cobra emerging in the cockpit, enough to make any one to loose his cool. But he took the plane to the base and landed safely and the incident made him to be known as 'Cobra Mathews' among his mates later.

There are several stories that he told me personally during the days of the war and later. I brevity, I am leaving those here.

After the world war, he retired from the RAF. He was in the rank of a Squadron Leader at that time, quite a senior position of those days. But he had never mentioned this to me. Perhaps, he thought this not so important.

Being a rare breed of experienced Indian pilot of those days, he was soon absorbed by the pioneering private airline company of India, the Tata Airlines which later became Air India.

He was the pioneering commercial pilot from India who got trained by Boeing company to fly Boeing jet planes. He had told me that it was he who took delivery of the first Boeing aircraft from USA and flew it to India way back in the 1960.

Being the pioneering international pilot from India in the Nineteen Fifties and early Sixties, he was the pilot of choice for Indian leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru. He had told me that it was he who flew the first non-stop Air India flight from Delhi to Moscow which took Smt. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit there as the first Indian envoy to USSR way back in 1947.

But he had never told me about his closeness to great leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru or Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India. I remember him referring these names casually during our talks. But only after reading yesterday's newspaper story, I knew how close he was with these great men of  the last century. He was one among the three who was invited from India to attend the marriage of the daughter of Lord Mount Batten in England!

Later in his life, he became a Christian preacher with several people flocking to listen to his preaching and prayers. It was a life quite contrary to his flamboyant previous life as an elite air force officer or an international VIP pilot. During that period, he hardly ever talked about it. I remember him writing letters to me when I joined Bhilai Steel Plant as an engineer. He was more concerned with spiritual aspects during that period. I remember him talking very detailed spiritual things with me when I became an young professional just as he had talked about his adventurous and glamorous past life as a pilot some years ago during my teenage days.

And to be very frank, I could hardly fathom the depth of his talks then, though I was a patient listener to him. As I was a novice in spiritual matters, I could hardly ask him any questions either. I lost a great opportunity!

I am glad that he left this worldly abode as a contented man, not in fame or wealth, but as one who was drawn to God transcending all ways of the world and the material glory!

I have now started understanding the difference!

Just a wishful thought. Had he been living now, he would have been one person with whom I could have discussed about my book of life guidance!

Indigo Airline Staff Manhandling Passenger: How to Avoid Such Shameful Acts?

Violence of all kinds, except for exceptional law enforcement, is deplorable and needs to be deplored by modern civilized society. And therefore such violence and violation of human dignity of similar kinds need to be taken seriously with an earnest objective for avoidance of such things in the future.

And my immediate provocation for writing this blog today is this  Youtube Video which is getting viral from yesterday onward in the social media.

The video shows a decently dressed man in his early late fifties or early sixties, apparently an airline passenger, visibly agitated by some thing, near an Indigo Airline Airport Transit Bus getting surrounded, isolated and mercilessly beaten in the most humiliating manner by some fellows in airline ground staff uniform.

I felt too bad and I felt as if my dignity getting violated by these young men who were otherwise supposed to be helping hands to people like me at the airports!

I couldn't believe such a thing, that too from the employees of an Indian airline I have all reasons to admire so far. Obviously I wanted to know more and got much from the following:

Times of India Online declared it as 'shocking'.

There were some coverage in other media as well.

The following is the gist of things I learnt:

The incident took place in New Delhi Airport apparently on 15th October 2017.

The manhandled passenger was travelling from Chennai to Delhi by Indigo flight.

The passenger was agitated by some kind of poor service (reason either not investigated fully and not yet made public!) The demanding passenger irked the wrath of some of the concerned airline ground staff who went berserk to teach the passenger a lesson! Obviously that was not something airline employees are supposed to be trained or briefed. No is taught to put a cockroach in the bread and butter they are supposed to eat! But here they preferred that way for reasons known to them.

Airline business is deemed  to be a polished and polite service to ladies and gentlemen. Their customers are generally not 'cattle class' though some may think otherwise sometimes.

Airlines which tolerate arrogance from the part of their employees are bound to get grounded very quickly. Airline business is indeed a delicate one with much issues affectin its survival and sustainability.

Indigo Airlines of India is one most Indians like me admired. They had a tremendous growth from inception. It has been a low cost carrier and even then, it proved to be a successful business model by appealing things like discipline, punctuality and the like.

It was employee indiscipline and arrogance coupled with corruption, incompetence and inefficiency that almost killed the national public sector airline. The management and staff of Indian airlines and Air India developed their self defeating culture from the days of airline monopoly.

But privatization paved the way for competition and opportunities for improvement.

Sustaining competence in management and leadership is a vital factor for sustaining competition and sustaining business success.

Often business success brings in complacency. And when that happens, both employees and management teams develop arrogance and a tendency to close eyes towards initial signs of future destruction.

In the news above, some things are obvious signs for Indigo for their future sustenance:

They can punish an employee or two for their unruly behavior or cover up the incident by some meaningless apologies in the public.

But if they are serious to sustain, they should honestly investigate to find out the reasons for the following:

1. What caused the passenger to lose his cool in the airport at his arrival?

2. What caused the ground staff to lose their cool when a passenger gets agitated?

3. Why did the higher supervisory management of the airline encouraged a cover up action initially by suspending their employee who took the viral video? In fact they should have encouraged free flow of information from within that exposed aberrations for self corrections!

4. Was it a minor issue or sign of something seriously fuming inside?  

There could be more.

I personally do not like any business to disintegrate for whatever reason. In the free trade capitalism, we may justify business ventures getting ruined due to overall incompetency. But any legally acceptable and successful business getting ruined is not a good thing for the country. It affects not only the shareholders, the employees the management, but others like the customers, the suppliers and all. And somewhere in the links me and you too exist.

And it pains.

Let us hope Indigo Airlines would not be a reason for that!

Remembering Two Deceased Great Uncles and Their Air India Connections!

An aircraft has been a real fascination to me right from my childhood. It remains so even now. Becoming a pilot was one of my childhood dreams. Unfortunately, it did not materialize. Sitting by the window seat of a commercial aircraft and viewing the aerial geography still remains as a fascination for me.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog in my mother tongue Malayalam that highlighted my fascination with air crafts and their adorable  pilots!

In continuation to what I wrote yesterday, I was thinking of writing something more elaborating our problems with good governance.

I changed that idea because a cousin sister of mine reminded me of a long forgotten tragic incident of an air crash  by sending a WhatsApp link to a blog that brought back much details of those things forgotten.

The blog described the details of the long forgotten Air India DC-3 Dakota Plane crash in the Nilgiri mountain ranges of South India that happened in December 1950. That was the first year of existence of the independent Indian Republic!

An Air India DC-3 Dakota Aircraft

Similar to the one which crashed in the Nilgiris in 1950

It was some information I had been seeking since my childhood, but couldn't. My cousin, Saro and the blog writer, Ms.Nina Varghese, deserved to be thanked for the unexpected help in this context. It helped me to brush up some past memories and to know more. Google helped to find another blog that provided some more info.

Now coming to the reasons of my interest in this. There are more than one reasons. Late, Mr.C.Luke, who happened to be last listed passenger of this ill-fated Air India DC-3 Dakota flight was my mother's uncle (husband of my grandmother's younger sister, whom we used to call as Kundara Ammachi.). During my childhood, it was usual for my mother and grandmother to take me with them to their home at Kundara . The photograph of the deceased young head of the family adored the front wall and the handsome face made a long imprint in my young mind. This widowed aunt used to be a qualified nurse who in those days earned a reputation as a trusted registered medical practitioner. I used to enjoy the visits to the Kundara home during those days because of the company I used to get from my mother's cousins who were all only a couple of years elder to me.

Late Mr C.Luke (Source: Family Photo Albums)

Whatever the little I had known about this uncle, Luke, was from my mother, late Mrs.Chinnamma Mathew. From her, I had learnt that this uncle of hers who met his untimely death in the air crash few years before my birth was a promising businessman and entrepreneur. The air mishap had ruined all those business and much of the family's fortunes!

In those days, there was not much of facilities for me to know more about airplanes, the flying machines about which I used to be in my childhood fantasies. In the late Fifties and the Sixties, I remember running after to scan the skies in search to have a glimpse of the aircraft that made much noise from up in the sky, only to be contented with the small silvery image that looked some thing like a small cross and disappeared as fast as it appeared.

As a child I had some rare opportunities to view some small airplanes including an opportunity to sit in the pilots seat inside a small flying club machine kept in the hangar at the small aerodrome of Trivandrum of Nineteen fifties. All these enhanced my curiosity to know more about airplanes and the fellows who flew these marvelous flying machines of modern times.

My fascination with the subject prompted my father, late Shri T.M.Mathew, to reveal a surprising truth to me. It was about his uncle (his mother's younger brother) late, Mr.K.M.Daniel (Kulanjikombil-Kumplampoika).I was much thrilled to learn that this uncle was then a serving pilot of Air India of those days. I remember my father once making a plan to take me to Kochi where he lived in those days and meet this uncle. Somehow this never happened and it remained as a disappointment for me.

A few years later, in the early years of the Nineteen sixties, some unfortunate incidents happened in the glamorous pilot life of my great uncle. He lost his job at the fag end of his flying career. A couple of years later, circumstances and fate played the cruel joke in his life that he became a resident of my own home for about three years.

Dani Appachan, we called him fondly so, became a close companion and an amazing well wisher of mine in those days when I was a high school student. Every night we used to spend hours together discussing about his past experiences first as a high school teacher, then as a World War-2 veteran of the Royal Air Force and later as a commercial pilot of Air India. I used to listen to his world trotting stories with eyes and ears fully opened!

Without actually seeing an big aircraft, I learnt much about those from this pilot uncle and in my fantasies I piloted those wonder machines! While I nursed the fantasies of flying, I also kept the hidden fear of air accidents which were not uncommon in those days. The guidance of my pilot uncle could have helped me to pursue a flying career. But to be honest, the hidden fear of air accidents prevented me from doing so! Perhaps the thoughts about the unfortunate fate of Luke uncle pulled me back!

It was Dani uncle who gave me much information about the unpredictable weather conditions that among various other things caused air accidents. I still remember him explaining how an air craft dropped like a stone when it happened to enter what is known as air pockets, the nightmares of pilots! ( Incidentally I experienced the horror of one my self some time in the Nineteen nineties while on board an Indian Airlines Boeing 720 from New Delhi to Raipur. Sitting by the window, I watched the plane losing height suddenly and then stopping  abruptly causing a few of the luggage doors getting opened to throw some of the luggage out!)

Air travel has improved much and the facilities both at the airports and the commercial air crafts have enhanced even in this country. Air travel is no more considered as a risky proposition! It is much safer than many other modes of transport, thanks to the advancement in technology.

Yet, the pilots deserves to be admired for their skills for smoothly maneuvering those huge machines with the help of some on board instruments and the instructions from the air traffic controllers. The skills and dedication of the air craft maintenance engineers and technicians also need to be honored. Modern air travel is possible due to the coordinated efforts of several people!

Luke uncle and Dani uncle are no more in this world. But they were pioneers of Independent India. 

Like wise we are all destined to fade out from the face of this world.

Do we have some destinies beyond that? 

My curiosity has now shifted to that! Perhaps I would find more information to satisfy my quests!

Condors, Fandors and the Story of the Huge Flying Bio-planes of Earth!

Do you know what I meant by bio-planes? Bio-planes are living airplanes or large birds that human beings could use for air transport. We do not have such useful birds at present. Perhaps, long, long ago, our ancestors made use of such birds which got extinct in some remote past.

In this blog, I would be discussing about the evidences we now have about such bio-planes of the past. 

We live in a century that has witnessed massive commercialization of scientific inventions and discoveries that had begun to scores of decades ago. Perhaps, the majority of humans still remain scientifically ignorant. Yet they are all beneficiaries of the progress science and technology brought out for the general benefit of all.

The desire of humans to fly and travel through air got fulfilled only in the past about 100 years time. Air travel has been becoming more and more common as the years pass.

But travel was not so easy in the past. Human beings in the known history have ventured in to international travel so frequently only in the recent past. Crossing the vast oceans was not an easy thing and it took months for those belonging to the era of our old parents and their parents. Earlier than that only those explorers with the blessings of their royal rulers ventured into the seas to explore, risking their lives.

In the recorded history of man kind as we know it today, there is no record of people making long distance travels using easier and efficient means of transport. Perhaps, the most they used were their horses, mules, their sailing ships, etc. Most people never ventured to travel beyond their villages. Those ventured never returned back, only exploring and settling down in the strange places that came in their way. Perhaps those traders and the more adventurous lots among people traveled to explore the unknown places. Some of their travelogues gave much insight to our present day historians to understand the lives from the past.

But even such information that we have do not cover a time period beyond say 5000 years. When human existence is scientifically postulated to be as old as a million years, this 5000 year old historical evidences in fractured pieces is nothing praise worthy for the human race as a whole.

Against this background, I often used to wonder how the descendants of  Adam and Eve could have covered all the continents of earth from their original land of origin somewhere in the south-west Asia!

I hoped for some scientist of modern day come up with some theories that is logical and satisfying the curiosity of mind. But, neither the scientists, nor the theologians could answer things properly.

When learnt about the many mysterious wonders of the world, such as the Pyramids of Egypt, the remnants of the Mayan civilization in South America, the Nazca Lines of Peru, etc my curiosity to know more about our past ancestors grew many fold. How could have they done all these?

The Nazca lines are specially of importance and curiosity because, these terrestrial arts that cover scores of square kilometers can only be appreciated from a high altitude in the air. In fact the Nazca lines and distinctive forms are made in an area of about 500 square kilometers. It is quite obvious that the ancient people of those regions have made it deliberately by making marked changes in the slopping desert surface. But how could they form those clear images which become so distinguishable only when one views it from a high altitude? Obviously those are made for some others who used to view it from high above in the air. [More such mysterious lines are getting noticed from other parts of the world such as China. Read this blog from the world-mysteries site.]

Perhaps they were flying in the air. They were travelling on some huge birds? It should be true, because one of the image is named the candor, the now existing huge bird of the America belonging to the vulture family. But candor cannot fly carrying people.

But the Nazca ancestors have drawn the image of a huge bird which possibly could have carried people who could view the image while in flight. Click this to watch the aerial photograph of the Nazca image now called the candor!

The Indian epic of Ramayana ( Read it online in English Here) gives some details about the transport bird called the Jatayu. Jatayu is believed to be the vehicle of the giant king of Sri Lanka during the time of Sri Ram, the hero of Ramayana. Ramayana also informs us that Jatayu was a bird that could talk with humans.

Incidentally, a sculptor named Mr Rajiv Anchal from my home state, Kerala, has been in the process of building a huge theme park on the top of a 1000 ft high rocky hill near Chadayamangalam near Trivandrum city. The main attraction is the huge sculpture of Jatayu, the mystical bird of Ramayana. Inside the huge sculpture of the bird is a 4-D theater. A theme park with many attractions for the travelers are also getting completed. (Read the news about this project here!)   

The Nazca image and the descriptions in the Ramayana are indications that the humans were in the company of intelligent birds that helped them to travel to great distances by flight. These birds were the bio-planes of the ancient past. They have some how become extinct.

Human beings unfortunately could not keep the records of their progress and advancements over the past many millenniums because they were so jealous and suspicious about others around them that they destroyed all evidences by mutual annihilation techniques. Remember, even we, the modern humans of the 21st century are also not free from such negative traits that hamper our progress!

My favorite book of life guidance, about which I had written many times in these columns, gives much insight about the transport birds ancient humans had been using. The authors named these birds as fandors, a name somewhat synonymous with the present day condors. Let me quote a few statements from this book:

"It was in these days that carrier pigeons were first used, being taken on long journeys for the purpose of sending messages or calls for help. Bon’s group were successful in training the great fandors as passenger birds, but they became extinct more than thirty thousand years ago."

"From the large passenger birds — the fandors — Adam and Eve looked down upon the vast stretches of the Garden while being carried through the air over this, the most beautiful spot on earth."

"These enormous birds were able to carry one or two average-sized men for a nonstop flight of over five hundred miles. These birds were of great service since they possessed a high order of intelligence, often being able to speak many words of the human languages. These birds were most intelligent, very obedient, and unbelievably affectionate. Such passenger birds have been long extinct on earth, but your early ancestors enjoyed their services."  

So, there was a time in the distant past when some of our ancestors took the help of huge, intelligent birds to travel long distances and to do aerial surveys of the vast lands.

The Ramayana of India and the Nazca images of South America gives us the clues regarding our lost history. Adding to those legacies is the present day revelation from reliable non human sources in the form of the Urantia Book (look out for its online reading link on the right panel bottom)

When we are able to link all these together, the great mystery of life would slowly unfold.

That is what I have learnt.

Those who have the time and money should visit Peru and Kerala.

Nazca lines of Peru would be a great thing to visit.

The Jatayu Rock Sculpture and the theme park of Kerala too!