Tag: middle east

A schoolboy fight in the Middle East

The ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in some ways, reminds me of my own childhood. And if I think about it, it relates to everyone’s childhoods, and to schoolboy fights in general.

A bit about myself – from early childhood I was mostly “topper types”. Yes, my school gave out “ranks” from the age of 6, and I had started topping then. This made me the teachers’ pet, and object of friends’ ire.

It didn’t help that I was the first person in class to wear spectacles, and was the slowest runner (and thus not very athletic), and had a stammer, and all this put together meant that I was an obvious target for other boys in the class to “tease” (I don’t know / remember why the girls didn’t participate in this. Maybe they had their own target).

Nowadays, I don’t have much patience for being troubled, and it was the same 35 years ago. After a little “teasing” (or bullying, if you might call it that), I would hit back. Literally. While I ran slow and was generally un-athletic, I was easily the tallest boy in the class. And so when I hit people, it hurt. On a physical 1-1 level, the fights were largely one-sided (I mostly remember whacking people, not getting whacked).

Soon this pattern emerged – someone would provoke me and in reply I would whack them. And then someone would complain to some teacher who would see that I had made a much bigger transgression than what the others had done, and then scold (or occasionally hit – my school allowed that) me, much to the joy of the others.

This kept happening, and there was seemingly no end to it. And then one day (or maybe over a period of time), ten years had gone behind us. We had grown up. We hit puberty. Our priorities in life changed. This wasn’t fun at all. We moved on. Nowadays I’m fairly good friends with many of the guys who used to tease me back then.

Thinking about it, there is nothing exclusive to me in this story. If you have siblings (I don’t), you might have seen this happen in your house. The smaller one provokes the bigger one, who hits back (mostly literally), causing a transgression much bigger than the provocation. This plays into the smaller one’s hands who then complains to the parent, who censures the bigger one, much to the joy of the smaller one. Again, this kind of stuff continues, until the kids grow up.

At some level (I know of the massive ongoing destruction and cruelty), the fight between Israel and terrorist groups such as Hamas can be thought of in a similar fashion. Israel is the “bigger kid” with an ability to whack the smaller kids to a level where they can’t hit back directly. Israel is also the kind of bigger kid who will just whack in retaliation without paying attention to “what people might think”. Hamas is like the mischievous little kid out to bug the bigger kid.

Over 75 years of fighting, the situation has now got to the point where the typical schoolboy fight gets played out, though at a much larger scale and with far far more damage. Hamas provokes Israel. Israel hits back with much greater force. It is clear that Hamas can’t whack back Israel with the same ferocity that Israel hit them. And so they go crying uncle. The “uncles” temporarily outrage. The situation (hopefully) comes back to some kind of an uneasy truce. And then it repeats.

Unfortunately, unlike schoolboys, countries (and terrorist groups) don’t grow up. I don’t know what the “puberty equivalent” for Israel and Hamas is, that will let them forget their mutual fight and unite for other common purposes. Until they find some such, the fighting will continue.

The curse of geography on Air India

International flights are regulated by a strange agreement, in which at least one end of the flight should be in the country that is the “home” of the airline. For example, Jet Airways runs flights along the Mumbai-Brussels-New York route, but is forbidden from carrying passengers solely from Brussels to New York (that market is a monopoly for airlines based in EU or USA). However, if Jet has flights from Mumbai to say Brussels and Singapore, it can carry passengers from Brussels to Singapore, since they’ll be touching the ground at Jet’s home country.

Secondly, airline ticketing is usually done on a “source-destination” basis, and not based on each leg. For example, the price of  a Brussels-Singapore ticket on Jet Airways has nothing to do with the price of Brussels-Mumbai and Mumbai-Singapore tickets. As far as the airline is concerned, all these are independent “markets”, and the price for Brussels-Singapore is set partly based on what other airlines charge for Brussels-Singapore (taking into account flying time, layover time and all that).

These two together give an undue advantage to airlines that are situated in countries that are “in the middle”. The best example for this is Emirates, which flies, on the one hand, to several destinations in Asia, and on the other to several destinations in Africa, Europe and the Americas. This allows Emirates to effectively aggregate demand from all these destinations and connect them up in the form of a hub.

For example, there may not be too many people who want to fly Bangalore-Venice. However, if you aggregate all destinations Emirates serves to the West of Dubai (in Europe, Africa, US, Middle East, etc.) there will be a lot of people who will want to fly from Bangalore to all these places put together. Similarly, if you aggregate all destinations in Asia, there will be enough people from Venice to fly to all these places put together and thus Emirates, by providing a hub, creates an effective market. This is what I mentioned earlier as the advantage of geography, of being situated “in the middle”.

Now, if Air India were to be profitable in the international sector, one way of doing so would be to create a “hub” in India, where Air India connects up passengers to the east to those in the West. While that sounds simple enough, what we need to see is if any place in India is situated conveniently enough to function as a hub. Now, look at the map of India, and see what is around.

To the north-east lies China. There is a lot of nothingness between India and the parts of China that generates high airline traffic (the coast). To the northwest, you have Pakistan, Afghanistan and barren republics of Central Asia. The “business parts” of Russia, again, are quite far away. To the South of India you have vast oceans, the south-east and west already have thriving hubs (Singapore, KL, Bangkok, Dubai, Doha, etc.) and India is again not well placed to compete effectively with any of them. I know this isn’t a rigorous analysis, but look in any direction, and you’ll find it hard to believe that there is reason enough for people living there to fly internationally using India as a hub.

This is the curse of geography that India suffers from, and there is nothing we can do about it, and this is something we need to accept. Given this scenario, the best airlines from India can do is to connect various places in India to places abroad where there exists a “direct market” (for example, Kochi-Dubai by itself is liquid enough so you can have Indian carriers operating that route). Thus, airlines from India can never aspire to achieve the scale and connectivity of an Emirates or a Malaysian. The sooner the airlines accept it, the better.

The moral of the story for Air India is that it should recognize this curse of geography and give up on its dreams of connecting the world. It should stick to connecting destinations within India, and “direct markets” from India  to destinations abroad.