Feeling Trapped

Back after a long break from writing. For some reason, every time i start to write i decide that i am going to do this on a regular basis to ease my stress, but it just doesn't seem to work out. The past few weeks might have been more stressful than i would have liked them to be but hey, this is life. You chose your path and then you stick to it. Which brings me to the current issue i have, which i am sure many of you have experienced, feeling trapped. 

There are different interpretations of "feeling trapped". Some say that they feel trapped in the relationship that they are in, others feel trapped in the life path they have chosen, and yet others feel trapped with their lifestyle. Doctors say that feeling trapped might lead to depression, but i don't think that is true. You might feel trapped inside and end up showing a happy front on the outside. 

Choices you make might not be the most calculated ones, but you try to risk it for once in your life. Boom. You fall flat on your face. Sometimes i feel like that. I have seen the difference in life of where i have been and where i am now. There are positives as well as negatives. Maybe now the negatives are taking over the positive vibes. I have always searched for a middle path to achieve acceptance from everyone, but over time i have learnt that you just can't please every one. Most of the time you will piss off people. 

Speaking from experience, most of us i think hold our inner most thoughts from our loved ones. We tend to not share what we are actually feeling because we might hurt their feelings or we might get them worried. We keep it within us and let it build. You enter a situation where you can't get out of. This is a life long path chosen. Or is there a way? Trying to make changes might seem difficult but i know it is possible, just need the guts to stand up and make a shaking change. 

A lot of the books i have read and most classes in college tend to tell us to evaluate ourselves, where we stand and what we ant from life. We need to evaluate what our priorities are and are those priorities meaningful. Do we achieve a work-life balance? Are the goals we want from life realistic and achievable? I am not trying to turn this post into a self-help book, but honestly i don't buy these tactics. Personally, i was never able to fit my life into these perimeters nor was i able to set goals for my life according to these perimeters.

Currently i feel trapped with no way out, but i know that there is a way out of it. There is a way to move away from this life experience and create another experience for myself. I think this whole, feeling stuck problem arises when life becomes mundane and not really adventurous. Sometimes its also about not being able to express your self, not having a ear who is willing to listen. Another gut arises when someone is in a financial difficulty and the need to stay stuck in mundane job because it pays well. 

Fear is another reason we tend to resist life. I, possibly resist my own expansion because i might be fearful of expanding. People want better lives but deep down they are afraid of leaving the present life and changing their lifestyle, despite the fact that the present life is miserable. Our mind is designed to cling to the familiar territories? Or have we not trained our mind to accept unfamiliar territories? Clinging on to familiar territories tends to create a life situation that resists the movement of life, hence the feeling of stagnancy.

Break out. Be free. One day i will achieve it. I will let you know how. 

“Those who speak of progression but are afraid of change are self-repressed and therefore unable to reach any further than their eyes can already see.” 
― Criss Jami

I won't accept failure until its mechanical.

Failures are not your definition

Humans are not perfect. We all have flaws in us. We have all made errors in life. We tend to think negatively far too quickly. Life gives us opportunities to learn from, we call them failures. Many of us, spend unnecessarily long amounts of time on contemplating over a risky venture. I say that we should sometimes just take the leap and jump head in. Yes this tactic can not be applied at all times but there are times that we need to do this in order to learn.

Over time, I have realized that we come down on ourselves or our loved ones over failures. Most of the time, there are children around, they will learn from this. Failure should be taken as an opportunity to learn from. Now, I don’t say that we should embrace failure in any way or form, but don’t be ashamed to accept your failure. Once you accept your failure, this is the first step towards helping you to pick up the shattered pieces and moving on with life. Failure is a simple learning lesson and common to the nature of mankind.

We don’t need to observe failure to the point that we use it to judge or blame others. People will may a times in their lives do the best job they can only to find that they are getting no co-operation in their efforts. You might fail in one area, but remember that there are so many other scopes of life that you might succeed in. No one person was ever born that excelled at everything in life. If you think that you have lived your life and have never failed at anything – then I think your in serious trouble.

I am no expert at raising children, but as I know from experience that under the watchful eye of our parents, we never fail. Then the time comes to go out into the real world and experience failure. We fall at our first attempt of “life”. We go downhill from there. We take everything so negatively from there on that we don’t realize other opportunities to grab and succeed in. Some of us might just get up and quit all together and accept that we “suck” at life. Here we should have had some learning where we were taught that failure is a part of life. Some schools and education systems have adopted a no lose no win policy in the classroom, where there are no winners or losers. I find it a bit strange because when these kids will be thrown into the real world, or even college, they might crumble, fall and fold-up.

I can accept failure, but i can't accept not trying.

The main thing to understand here is that if you fail at one thing in life, there is always another door knocking. That other door might be the opportunity to learn from your failure that you have just gone through. As long as you don’t start to use failure as an excuse to complain and blame. I firmly believe that accepting your failure will create success. I think I fail everyday, but I tend to continue. I tend to go ahead with what I want to achieve. Failure is just a minor setback that you can overcome only if you accept that you have failed, learn from the mistake and keep on running.

This is what I read somewhere and I believe in it - “To activate the Four Powers of the Sphinx – knowing, willing, daring, and keeping silence – requires us to let go of too much clinging to our ideas of success and failure. Activation is the place of opening, following, and knowing when and where to steer. To activate is the set things in motion. To do this, we need everything that has come before, every scrap of the fabric of our lives must be sewn into this. Nothing can hide from the fulfillment of the soul’s desire. Anything in our blind spots, or things we are avoiding, will still form the shape of our failure and success.”

Air India Restructuring

For the past few months,  Air India has been in the limelight for their performance, non-payment of dues, lack of proper service and a lot of other reasons. I think that billions of Dollars are just going to waste. The latest attempt to revive the ailing carrier by injecting $1.7 billion was another set back to the airline. 16 of its aircraft are now grounded, let alone keeping them in the air, the airline is unable to even refurbish them. They are unable to pay the parking fees to AAI (Airports Authority of India) for their aircraft  leading them to just being parked at the hangers.

The grounded planes have added to the already debt ridden airline, which amounts to about $8 billion, with straight 6 years of losses. Air India has also lost the market share as low cost airlines started to lure away the passengers from Air India a decade ago. What was Air India’s response, start Air India Express. Air India Express, which serves mainly from the south Indian states to the gulf and south East Asia. How has that helped the ailing carrier? It already used to serve these markets with its mainline fleet before. To add to the burden, Air India Express offers meals on-board unlike its competitors, Indigo and Spice Jet.

Air India’s fleet utilization is the lowest out of its competition. On average, Indigo operates its A320 aircraft for about 13.5 hours a day, Spice Jet operates at 13 hours a day (B737 aircraft), GoAir uses its A320 for about 12.9 hours a day, whilst Air India has a fleet utilization of just under 7.5 hours a day for its A320s. Bleeding money. Anyone can now point where its losing money. More time spend on the ground, the more these aircraft are losing money. Let’s take a case – the every popular Dubai to Mumbai route, which is well served by several carriers of India and of-course Emirates.

Departure Time	Arrival Time	Route	Airline
3:45 AM	8:10 AM	DXB-BOM	Emirates 504
9:35 AM	2:00 PM	DXB-BOM	Emirates 506
11:25 AM	3:55 PM	DXB-BOM	IndiGo 64
12:00 PM	4:35 PM	DXB-BOM	Jet Airways 541
12:50 PM	5:20 PM	DXB-BOM	SpiceJet 14
1:15 PM	5:35 PM	DXB-BOM	Emirates 502
3:20 PM	7:55 PM	DXB-BOM	Jet Airways 535
4:10 PM	8:35 PM	DXB-BOM	Emirates 508
6:45 PM	11:20 PM	DXB-BOM	Jet Airways 537
8:25 PM	1:00 AM	DXB-BOM	IndiGo 62
9:40 PM	2:15 AM	DXB-BOM	Jet Airways 543
10:30 PM	2:55 AM	DXB-BOM	Emirates 500
11:40 PM	4:05 AM	DXB-BOM	Air India 984

The table above shows that out of the 13 departures daily, Air India has only one flight a day to Mumbai from Dubai. That too at an ungodly hour of 11.40PM arriving into Mumbai at 4.05PM.  Most of the market is covered by Emirates, Jet Airways and Indigo Airlines. The Air India flight is operated on a singe isle A320 aircraft. Air India is the only airline on this route, and many of the other gulf routes that allows its cabin crew to overnight in Dubai before working the next flight back to Mumbai, because the “labor union” requires them the overnight after an international flight. Rest of the airlines use the cabin crew to do both sectors. Even Air India Express (being a low cost carrier) allows its crew to overnight in an international city. This is unheard of in the private carriers.

Emirates, by far, operates the most international flights in to all cities of India. It has 185 flights a week via 10 gateways to India. Emirates use its crew for both legs except for a few cities where they overnight because of the stage length of the flights. Speaking with one of the Jet Airways Purser’s (Senior flight attendant) while flying with them to Mumbai from Kuwait – they mentioned that the Kuwait to Mumbai and back is not the longest return flight that they have to work. FYI – Kuwait to Mumbai is about 3hrs and 45minutes and the return is 4hours 30minutes, plus the layover of 1hour 20minutes in Kuwait, so that makes for a close to 12 hour duty time, and they do it. Why can’t the AI Cabin Crew do it for the ailing national carrier. The job of a cabin crew is very demanding and they have a lot of things to know, but I do understand that most international carriers are squeezing their crew to the limits on short haul international flights. 

The low utilization and mobility of the crew adds to the low utilization of the airline’s aircraft, because without crew the flight isn’t going anywhere. Crew have been time and again blamed for their undesirable looks and attitude but I also blame the management for not having strict standards and training that Air India used to have during its glory days in the 80s. A lot of other things haven’t changed with the changing of the Civil Aviation ministers in India. Most of them don’t have an airline management background, they are just ex-pilots either in the civil aviation field or in the military.

Air India had the worst recorded on time flying performance in the aviation industry for India. According to the Directorate of Civil Aviation, Air India had a on-time performance rating of about 68% versus, Indigo which had 96% and Jet Airways had 86% on-time performance. Believe me when I say “on-time is a wonderful thing” – I mean it. So do the passengers. Traffic is gradually shifting from Air India to the new low cost competitors due to these factors and more.  

The troubles don’t end here. You have a population of over 1 billion people. You can run a very successful airlines, barring the politics involved. India also has one of the highest fees for airport usage in the world. If these were to reduce, the burden on airlines would also reduce. As more competition enters the market, the share of Air-India, Air-India Express and Air-India Regional will decline further.  Air Asia might start an airline with its partnership with an Indian giant. This will further intensify the completion for our ailing state run carrier.  Emirates has a share of 13.24 % of the passengers travelling to India. Which is much higher than Air India.

Air India needs to properly channel all the cash injections it gets from tax payers money to restructuring and refurbishing its aircraft and its routes. A successful hub with a high utilization of its aircraft should be the priority right now. Air India has so much potential and market to grab it is failing on realizing this, moreover the debts keep on adding . 

Kuwait MPs want monthly minimum wage raised | GulfNews.com

Kuwait MPs want monthly minimum wage raised | GulfNews.com

The minimum wage for Kuwaiti nationals to be raised to a whopping KD 1,500/- which translates to (conversions based on today's exchange rate) 19,400 AED or 286,069 Indian Rupees or 5291 US Dollars or 4000 Euros or 3495 GB Pounds - every month! Keeping in mind that Kuwait is a tax free haven, this amount seems to be a bit too much, according to me. Where i come from, the minimum wage act states that the minimum wage should be 6500 Indian Rupees (this is an average figure - it differs from state to state and skill level). I wonder what the Kuwaiti Nationals do with all that money.

As an expatriate, your obviously not entitled to the minimum wage, nor are you entitiled to the benifits that have been mentioned there after. You probably get paid on a very low scale (around 150 to 200 Kuwaiti Dinars) every month. This raise in the minimum wages is to protect the nationals from "financial challenges"

I am all for a government raising the minimum wages and benifits for its citizens, but they would also have to look into the benifits of the expatriates that are working to bring up their country. Most expatriates work as a labor force in the country, which actual fuel the development of its economy. They should also be taken care of. I do understand, that Kuwait is an oil rich state, and its nationals should benifit from that, but when your running a private company, why should i, as an expatriate, pay the nationals on such a high scale when my business level is not that high?