Cabin Crew Training: Sky-High Dreams by the Sea

A few months back, we were interviewing candidates for a secretarial position and young girls came in hordes from an aviation training institute. Most of them were 18-20, still pursuing their Bachelor degrees and had paid a hundred thousand or more and had never been inside an aircraft. Instead, they were sent to contract jobs in beach hotels at a salary not much higher than that of your maids’. We had high expectations but were thoroughly disappointed when they started behaving like robots during the interviews. Basically, they were trained to greet the interviewer, answer a few expected questions and if ever you asked anything out of the way, they would stammer. Most of them were not even fluent in the English language.

Being the age they were, ignorant and from poor families in small rural towns,  having studied in Malayalam-medium schools and dressed like your pretty airline stewardess but speaking in mono-syllables and in deep debt trying to repay the money they spent on learning to wear business-wear, lipsticks and to speak like robots...