Treated like cattle (in the western sense)

We get off the plane relieved that most of our journey is over. We land at 3:08am Indian Standard Time on Saturday, 14th January. At this point I’m thinking the flight wasn’t too bad, let’s just catch our connection and we’ll be home in a couple of hours.

As we walked down the hallway, we were asked if we had a connection to Bangalore, Hyderabad or Madras; they had some information for people connecting to those flights. When I asked a few air india personnel for Ahmedabad we were told “downstairs”. This is the same way you go to clear immigration and customs. I was surprised but no one was there to answer any questions. We just went along with rest of the people. My gut feeling was there was something wrong. We stood in line for the immigration, in a couple of minutes we were cleared through immigration and went towards baggage claim. We’re supposed to be doing this at our final destination and not in Bombay. At the baggage claim we found other passengers wondering the same thing.
We found one of the airport staff who explained that our connecting flight was cancelled or already taken off and we would be told what to do by the airline after we get out of customs.

So we stood at the baggage claim with about two hundred other tired passengers expecting that our baggage would arrive soon. There were only two or three belts and we were the only flight so it wasn’t like they had a lot to do. A few bags trickled in after a few minutes…every five minutes a few more would trickle in. it took us about an hour to get our bags. I checked to see if they had marked our bags with an “X”, this would mean that our bags were to be searched by hand at customs. I didn’t see any. During this hour my son was getting restless, he kept wanting to play with the luggage belt and almost got knocked down by a moving bag. We also met a couple of people from Chicago whom we knew, one of them was a professor at Harper college and another was an elderly lady.

At this point we don’t know how we would catch another plane to get home, we were among many people in a big heard trying to get our bags and clear customs. We were treated more like cattle than airline passengers.