This article is written by Seema Goswami
A week ago, I landed at London’s Heathrow Airport, bleary-eyed and beleaguered after a long, sleepless flight. As I wheeled my trolley out of baggage claim and walked into a sea of expectant faces looking out for their loved ones to emerge, I was struck by a thought. I could just as well have landed in India, for all the visual clues I got about my destination.
The airport was run over with Asians, you had to search far and wide to catch even a momentary glimpse of a white face. And amid the cacophony of languages being bandied about – Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, Punjabi, even Tamil – it was difficult to catch a word of English.
But hang on, I told myself, maybe I was being a bit quick off the draw. Perhaps this was because a flight from India had just landed. And in keeping with sub-continental tradition, every member of the extended family had turned up to greet the new arrival.
But that didn’t explain why so many of them were holding up name tags and looking suspiciously like limo drivers. Or why all the service professionals had brown faces.