M.S. Dhoni And the Plane Ride from Hell

MS Dhoni is the last person to board the Indigo flight from Ahmedabad to Chennai (6E 348) on Monday night, sans a bodyguard. Cue: chaos.

I didn’t actually see him enter the commercial aircraft from my aisle-seat vantage of 39D, quite literally the last row on the carrier, but I doubt if anyone from the middle rows is able to catch a glimpse of the cricketer either, given that every able passenger is up on their feet and has promptly turned on the cameras on their phones. Great noise has erupted as well on Dhoni’s sighting – first applause, then chants of ‘Dhoni!’ and ‘Thala!’, followed by general cacophony – which simply refuses to subside even after the man takes his seat, 2A, the left window in the second row: the exact coordinates of Dhoni’s position passing into the farthest reaches of the aircraft with the ferocity of a fire during a gas leak.

Now begins the pushing and shoving in the aisle, as people of all genders and age groups attempt to surge forward, even as the cabin crew try – very much in vain – to contain them. A sixty-something Gujarati man, from the middle seat of the last row across from me, simply bulldozes his way through the lady seated beside him on the aisle seat, thanks to his size and enthusiasm, both large. This move inspires the thirty-something woman seated next to me on the middle seat – already standing with her phone out – to try the same, but I refuse to move. She screams first, but when it falls on deaf ears, the airhostess is summoned with the press of a button.

I know now that this is going to be a long flight. So do a sprinkle of other passengers, the cabin crew and ostensibly Dhoni himself. There is, however, the slenderest silver lining to the upcoming ordeal: at least the man seated by the window in the emergency exit, Washington Sundar, T20 World Cup winner from the day before, is certainly going to be left alone. He was.

An airhostess makes her way from the back of the aircraft and very politely asks my angry co-passenger to take her seat. She doesn’t, and neither do the majority of the rest. Some 15 minutes after the completion of boarding, the aisle is still crowded. When the aircraft begins taxiing, most are forcefully returned to their seats. But ‘most’ is a relative word, for some 7-8 passengers still believe that the law is for others, brazenly lingering in the aisle or jumping out of their seat, darting to the front of the aircraft with their phones and returning to their stations with a shaking head and a smile.

Word had spread that Dhoni had asked them to take their seats. I heard it from a geriatric Tamil-speaker in a saree, who had hobbled back to her seat at the back of the aircraft with a visible limp. One of the stewards would later tell me that she had availed the wheelchair-service to enter and exit the aircraft.

The short passage of time before, during and after take-off makes for an insane visual – the back of every head cranes well over the top of the plastic seats, all angled towards Dhoni’s seat. The lady beside me vents her frustration with the man seated by the window. “I don’t know why he didn’t get up. Just because he doesn’t want a picture of Dhoni. Lagta hai woh fan nahi hai (Perhaps he is not a fan),” she says, thumb pointing at me. “But simply moving out of the way was too much of an inconvenience for him.”

I really don’t want to engage, but of course I do. “Ma’am, it is an inconvenience to Dhoni too.” 

She rolls her eyes and snarls. “Please. He is very famous. Of course he is used to it. How can you not understand that celebrities like the attention.”

Something fundamental has seemingly shifted in the contract between celebrity and crowd in India’s smartphone age. Once, the cost of fame was the occasional polite interruption. An autograph here, a short conversation there. Now it means being endlessly available for proof of proximity. To be uploaded within seconds.

We now no longer simply meet the famous; we must capture them. In that scramble, civility has wholly disappeared. The logic is blunt and widely shared: it was us who placed you on a pedestal, so you owe us access. But must the price of being adored in India also be the surrender of one’s personal space? Or is even that modest expectation now too much to ask of the crowd?

It is. The ping announcing the end of the seatbelt sign is music to most ears. The scramble of feet is immediate, even the tired pleas of the air hostesses and the food trolleys barely being deterrents. A teenage boy wearing an India jersey, with ‘Abhishek 4’ plastered on his blue back, is the first to achieve success. When he returns to the middle of the plane with an autograph of Dhoni on his boarding pass, a passenger fishes out his phone and takes a photograph of the scribble. “Now my family will believe that Dhoni was on my plane. Otherwise, they will think I am lying,” he says, causing much laughter.

The boy spawns many more wannabes, all hungry now for their fifteen minutes of fame with their co-passengers. A young man wearing a purple sweatshirt with the word ‘COURAGE’ printed across the chest, rises suddenly from row 36 to queue up for the toilet by the cockpit. That queue is long, understandably, while the toilets directly behind me are stench-free and bear no visitors. None at all. COURAGE returns with a picture of Dhoni trying to sleep, his boarding pass void of ink marks. “He is not giving, he is not giving. But photo le sakte ho,” COURAGE tells all the passengers who stop him for information, even holding out his phone for proof. “See this.”

There’s another attempt by the stewardesses to control the situation, after which they return exhausted to their stations at the back. One airhostess, Chhime, a young woman from Bhutan, tells me: “Dhoni is very irritated. He told me to keep the passengers on their seats, but they are like school children. When we tell them, they go back. Then as soon as we are doing something else, they return. What can we even do now? I wish he had come with his bodyguards, like he had last time in one of my sectors. They made all his fans go away, immediately, and Dhoni could rest.”

With no one to usher “his fans” away tonight, Dhoni's attempt at rest resembles that of a caged animal – at least in the pictures that are making the rounds. He covers his face in some, closes his eyes in others. By divine luck, the captain turns on the seatbelt sign, expecting turbulence. It soon arrives in great bumps. But the Dhoni-spotting cannot and will not be stopped, come hell or highwater, even as the aircraft rocks gently from side to side.

Like the loner in the great dystopian novel, Lord of the Flies, I begin to question my own judgement, wondering if my profession as a sports journalist has numbed my passion for these public heroes, perhaps which is why I see them as human beings and not gods. But these thoughts are fleeting, for I distinctly remember sharing a Delhi-Mumbai Jet Airways flight in 2018, very much during the smartphone-Instagram era, with Shah Rukh Khan, who too is uber famous like Dhoni, and whose work too I am an admirer of. Still I recall an extremely civil in-flight experience, with not one passenger bothering the superstar. But it must be noted that he was seated beyond a flimsy curtain separating business class and economy, and perhaps that made all the difference.

There are no curtains on this Indigo carrier, but there is the promise of a landing, for which, much to their annoyance, the crowd by the front of the aisle is made to disperse back to their respective seats. When we touch-down in Chennai, the passengers are expectedly up on their feet despite being told not to – but, interestingly, very few of them open the overhead bin to collect their cabin baggage. “Please move right now,” says the lady next to me, stern in tone. “Dhoni bhaag jayega (he will run away), please move now.” 

So much for the stars enjoying our cameras.

They all return soon to their stowed bags, for, thankfully, Dhoni (and possibly Washy too, for I don’t see him later) is whisked away into a waiting car. And thus it ends, this spectacle, the shortest two-and-a-half hours for most of the men and women on this flight and the longest for some, like the crew. But not for Dhoni, apparently, for I was recently educated on how these celebrities live for attention.