I almost intuitively hate eating in a restaurant where there are not too many clients (imagine the food quality!) or being in a cinema accompanied only by a couple of phantom-looking heads in the darkness (that speaks volume on the movie!) or being in a plane that is half-empty (oh, the eeriness!). Hence, I maintain, be it for the sake of ambiance or company, any place full of people is a more desirable environment. Conversely, let me right away sound contradictory: I really enjoyed my recent flight from Paris to New Delhi even though the plane was half-empty, or half-full, if that implies positivism! ‘No one’ around me: the middle row comprising four seats had no passenger but me. The seat ‘frontiers’ were pliable and I soon made a cozy ‘bed’ out of the four seats, furnished with smooth as silk pillows and silky shawls. What a marvelous bed in the sky, said I to myself! Or an apartment! Is that a hyperbole? Not in the slightest! Good food and wine were served by beautiful ladies - one could thus simultaneously enjoy taste and beauty! There was an ample choice of blockbusters to fight boredom, if any. More important from an ‘urgency’ point of view: the plane was half-full, the toilets were nearly all the time empty! And a bathroom? That’s that last thing one should expect inside a plane. All the same, not all seem to deprive themselves of an in-flight bath. A passenger on a Nanning — Chongquing flight in China once had a bath…inside the toilet. When the water started spilling out of the toilets, the panicky flight attendants opened the door: a half-naked dripping wet man asked for a favor: may I have some shampoo please? Well, that’s a particularly exceptional case. Primarily, no one longs for a midair shower. One cannot be expected to. We human beings already waste enough water on earth; repeating the same in the sky will just imply madness. Meanwhile, in these times of so-called progress (or madness!) when even nudists have their own flights, let’s hope no one will come up with the crazy idea of hype: pioneer in in-flight shower services. If that comes up, don’t know the what the next one will be. — beegautam@gmail.com