Till May 24, 2021, there was only one definition for The Mile High Club that most teen and adult readers already know. This was changed on May 24, 2021 by the foolhardy actions of a resourceful family in Tamil Nadu, India during the second wave of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Remember, the whole state was in an impending lockdown with restrictions looming for all gatherings including weddings. Families were scrambling around trying to rearrange weddings planned months earlier.
In this milieu, the parents of one betrothed couple in Kolipalayam in Madurai District got around the situation in a novel and expensive way. After getting the couple Rakesh and Deekshana married in their home in a starkly simple ceremony with no invitees, they arranged a wedding gala quite literally up in the air for the members of their extended family. They chartered a SpiceJet Boeing 737 plane from Madurai to Bangalore with over 150 of their relatives and videographers on board.
As the plane hovered over the famous Meenakshi Temple, Rakesh once again tied the holy thread of matrimony around Deekshana’s neck at ~8,000 feet up in the air with both standing in the aisle, with relatives reveling in the extravaganza. Mile high up on the chartered flight, Rakesh and Deekshana thus began their marital bliss spilling over. The news went viral.
Unknowingly, they thus started a new Prenuptial Mile High Club that earned for them notoriety and cost their parents a bundle. Chartering a Boeing 737 bites around INR 500,000/hour. One hour before departure and one hour after the landing are added to the actual to-and-fro flight times. With Madurai to Bangalore flight time around 45 minutes, SpiceJet would have billed the party for ~4 hours, or INR 2,000,000.
The wedding had all the Desi staples: extravaganza and show off, Desis’ natural instincts to circumvent rules and regulations in every conceivable way, and of course, insensitivity of doing this right in the middle of a pandemic. Naturally, with this news going viral, India’s aviation regulatory body ordered a customary enquiry. But a SpiceJet spokesperson said, the client was “clearly briefed on Covid guidelines to be followed and denied permission for any activity to be performed on board.”
Desis are ungovernable. They are genetically given to excesses and also programmed to flout every rule, even when the rules are promulgated for their own safety. END