Eleven in the morning at the Cochin International Airport. It is unusually noisy here. I can hardly hear the flight announcements. The source of the disquiet is easy to spot -- some 200 people in the visitor's gallery, as excited as school kids on a picnic. Judicious eavesdropping confirm what I had suspected. They aren't here to see off anyone. No, they have come to see the airport. Each has spent Rs 10 for entry, and is now enjoying the magnificent interior of India's first public sector airport, which has 10,000-odd NRIs as shareholders. The airport, I must admit, is worth seeing. The glistening marble floor and the vitreous plush furniture are commendable. And the interior décor themes, drawn from traditional Kerala architecture, give a distinct ambience to the terminal that is every bit worth the entry fee. I pass the onlookers and check into the departure lounge. It is quiet in here. Some 400 expensive chairs stand beautifully arranged. The only noise is the toilet doors closing and opening. I glance around idly. There are the usual TOILET boards and... does that board say PRAYER ROOM? "Prayer room in an airport?" I murmur to myself as curiosity propels me in through the closed door. I find four passengers sitting on the carpet. Their eyes are closed. One is a Christian priest. It is a plain room with no statues and no religious symbols. There is no Bible, Bhagwat Gita or Koran. There are no pictures of god, any god, here. I walk out along with another. Mohammad Ali Koya is on the Jet Airways flight to Bombay. The 12.30 pm flight has been delayed by 20 minutes. I ask him why he chose to pray. "It is the best way to pass time, especially in an airport," he says. A pause. Then Koya adds: "I am always frightened of flights... it could be your last journey. So I thought I would better say my prayers before boarding the aircraft." The 52-year-old businessman from Cochin started dreading planes after he lost his brother and sister in India's worst air disaster at Haryana's Charki Dadri in November 1996. Thereafter, Koya has always prayed before he boarded a plane. "It is a good idea that this airport has a prayer room. It is a relief to people who want to pray," he tells me. The idea of the prayer room belongs to V J Kurien, an IAS officer and the airport managing director. Kurien, a devout Catholic, says that it was by god's grace that, though cash-starved, he was able to build a gigantic airport in a record five years. When he started in 1993, he had a small room for office and a peon. The Kerala government gave him the preliminary project report and complete freedom to execute it. Kurien advertised in newspapers inviting NRIs to invest. "The response was tremendous. Within a year, some 10,000 NRI Mayalalees from 30 countries sent me money liberally," he says. "It was this collective passion that made this a model airport in the country." Of course, there were hurdles. The trade unions of Kerala, which poke their noses into everything that happens here, took up cudgels against land acquisition. Environmentalists protested that an airport in a lush, green village would affect the locals. People moved courts against eviction. Kurien's response was swift and humanitarian. He rehabilitated the 822 families with complete protection and jobs. And that was the end of the agitation. The country's second largest airport, with an area of 24,000 square meters, was inaugurated on May 25, 1999. The bureaucrat's way of thanking god was to set up a prayer room in the domestic departure lounge. Soon, hundreds of letters poured in requesting him to construct a similar one in the international terminal. Now, work is on there. "We Indians are very religious," says Kurien, "So it is ideal that there are prayer rooms in airports." George Iype moved to the South recently.
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