Middle class in wheelchair

Saba Naqvi

Indian international travellers could be among the greatest users of the wheelchair service now offered by airlines. Not because we are disabled or old travellers, but because we are culturally and socially attuned to getting others to do our heavy lifting. We have servants in India (unlike the West and most other developing societies outside Africa), so we think it’s just fine to get others to wheel us. I mean, why walk if you can be wheeled; why lift a finger if someone else can lift the bags for you.

The wheelchairs crept up on me when I made a journey to China. The attendants at New Delhi’s international airport kept instructing me to get out of the way, as a wheelchair-bound passenger had to be swiftly taken on to the aircraft. One after the other they came, the passengers in wheelchairs, with the attendant at hand to put the baggage in the overhead locker.

And then a miracle happened. As soon as the Air China aircraft was airborne and the seat belt sign was switched off, one by one the wheelchair-bound passengers began to stand up, open the lockers, take out bags, walk in the aircraft, push me on the way to the lavatory, and generally give an overall impression of being hale and hearty.

When the 747 aircraft arrived in Beijing, six-and-a-half hours after take-off, I was one of the early passengers to disembark. The Chinese stewardess had in fact gone from seat to seat of the wheelchair-bound passengers to request them not to push and nudge on landing, to let the other passengers get off after which the attendants will come to them.

And so when I got off the aircraft at Beijing, the first thing I noted was the row of lean and fit-looking Chinese men waiting to receive the passengers who would be disgorged from this aircraft arriving from India. A 747 is not a particularly large aircraft, so there seemed to me to be an extraordinary number of wheelchairs waiting. Most intrigued, I did a head-count of attendants: 22 wheelchairs awaited the Indian passengers.

It would be understandable if all the passengers were very old or disabled; they were not although I noted that many Indian women seemed to have problems with their knees and others were overweight and just did not want to carry bags. The next day in China, a local resident drove us outside Beijing and we went to a village where my daughter plucked peaches off a tree. The woman running the farm was 70 and more agile than us. She stood up on a chair and reached up a high branch to get her hands across some fruit.

I watched her, watched people cycle across the streets, saw my Chinese friend’s home where they do all the chores themselves and just concluded that China is a fitter nation as compared to the Indian middle class (in the countryside, people do back-breaking work, be it India or China). I felt quite overwhelmed when we went to the Olympic stadium they had built in Beijing, actually with a Chinese friend who had briefly run with the Olympic torch. It was all very impressive.

But I felt a bit sad too when I remembered so many Indian passengers arriving in wheelchairs. Certainly none of them can climb up to the Great Wall of China if they can’t climb the few steps up an aircraft. So the question is: are we unfit and/or lazy or both? The Indian middle class is unfit compared to citizens of countries in the West and Japan, where I briefly lived in the past and China that I have now visited.

In Japan, I grew slim and fit from the amount of walking I did to catch the subway connections. It is currently the world’s third largest economy. The second largest is China, where people do everything for themselves (even though unlike Japan, there are lots and lots of people here). China is of course behind the US, that continues to be at the number one spot. The world’s fourth largest economy is Germany, where people walk, hike, climb mountains, cycle, swim and are overall so fit that two years ago my 75-year-old German friend in Berlin walked so briskly that I had trouble keeping up though I consider myself very fit.

At the heart of the Indian psyche is the caste system (actually across religions as even Indian Muslims and Christians have social categories, albeit less rigid). So many of us are raised in a world where we have been served from birth onwards so our fitness levels are poor compared to the rest of the world, that’s walking and working for itself and far more briskly and efficiently.