Seeing the comments here, it is quite apparent that we Indians have become so politically correct that we choose to neglect common sense.

To the person above that suggested “longer seat belts” for the obese attendants, since obviously obese travelers are allowed, well, the passenger isnt expected to perform any duties. Please try and use logical reasoning before you make comments such as these and prove your near-sightedness.

@Areem: If you are obese, do you expect to be taken on the olympic swim team? And I would like some justification of your claims that weight once lost is “gained in greater sum” if the “genetic set point” is violated. There is no such thing as “genetic set points” as far as weight is concerned. There is also no co-relation between weight and genetics. I dont know where you are getting your info, but it is BS. Weight has to do with hormones and metabolism, both of which continuously vary throughout the life of a normal human being. It is quite possible to affect a change in your metabolism (speed it up if you are fat, or slow it down if you are too thin).

Finally, to the article itself, I don’t think wanting to hire “hot” men and women as cabin crew is a bad thing. To the naive, appearances ARE important in any hospitality industry. The rants just go to show the duality and hypocrisy of the commenters. A suggestion as well, how about more facts and less opinion. You haven’t really mentioned what the airlines expect of their cabin crew to comment whether they are “asking for too much” or if there is any “gender disparity”.

ya, i def. have checked, and your facts need to have some sort of back up because there is NO minimum wage in india, and in patna there are labourers who carry shit (yes, actual human shit) all day, as their jobs, and make about 20 rupees a day. so please, please don’t be so naive as to believe that this is normal for a labourer to make $5 a day (which for those keeping track would be 220 rupees.)

Just for a back-up, in real-time, the people working on the apartment building next door are from Bihar (I live in South Delhi) and they are making 1,000 a month each NOT including food, but they do get to live in the building as they are working on it. and these people have families. and this is a “good job”… i guess all those $5 a day jobs in Patna are filled up?

It’s not, and it’s perfectly legitimate to acknowledge that the situtation is widespread. Which is certainly not the same as defending it.

“You won’t find a lot of obese hostesses at restaurants, and there’s a reason for that: an obese hostess does not attract customers to a restaurant as well as a svelte one.”

Yep, or in lots of other jobs either. The research shows that, even in the US, this type of discrimination is rampant. For example, “16% of employers admitted they wouldn’t hire obese women under any conditions; an additional 44% would only hire them under certain circumstances. An 1993 article in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that, on average, overweight women earn $6,710 less per year than thin women” (source linked to above). Problem is, fat people need to work, regardless of whether their presence is perceived as ‘attracting more customers’. Claiming that customers prefer thin employees just perpetuates the cycle of discrimination, and makes it appear to validate the prejudices of those holding them. The situation is nearly identical to that described in the previous post, re: the hotel industry and complexion colour.

It not too hard to imagine employers in India setting a “fairness standard”. I did my undergraduate in Hotel management in India and tried to get a Management Trainee position with some of the leading luxury chains (Oberoi, Welcomgroup, Taj, etc). During the interview process my faculty kept telling me that I should apply for a sous chef position, because the fact that I was very dark would stand in the way of me getting a job in the front of the house. Anyway, I didn’t get a MT position, but didn’t want to be pessimistic enough to believe it was my lack of fairness. After working for two years in a position one step removed from management, the people at Welcomgroup decided to send me for an interview for a management trainee position again, and I didn’t get it. When I got back, my boss told me that they had said I was good but my skin was too dark. I promptly quit and went to get a business degree and get the hell out of the hotel business. The airline business isn’t too far removed from the types of people and the attitudes you encounter in the hotel business in India, I have a lot of friends who went from one to the other and tell me it’s the same. Its pretty disgusting and I don’t believe that its fair to consider someone’s looks as a factor when employing them, no matter what the job is.

In case you haven’t checked, minimum wage for a lowly unskilled labourer in India is over $3 a day. UNSKILLED. LABOURER. In Patna, NO labourer will work for for an entire day for ANYTHING less than $5 a day, PLUS food.

Dal, the last time I checked, is rich in protein. Also, the last time I visited India, organic veggies were less than 20 cents for a kilo, and EVERYONE I could see (meaning POOR people living in HUTS) were buying them – EVERYONE EXCEPT the rich, pot bellied idiots who prefer pizza. In other words – go to the MOST POPULOUS and POOREST states like Bihar, and you will find that THEY are the ones that eat the most nutritious food, for the simple reason that they cannot AFFORD junk food. While I want them to have more money, I certainly DO NOT want to see the filth of McDonald’s in Patna. I hope McDonkey’s…..oops….McD’s stays away.

I am NOT saying that things are excellent; just that 50 rupees is a LOT of money in India.

And 67% of Indian population lives in villages. Most of the others (by most I mean over 25%) do NOT live in metros. Isn’t that the figure? Correct me if I am wrong.

Ofcourse. But let’s face it..things do get out of hands. You can’t really reason with a one year old on a flight. But I’ve seen AI stewardess going out of the way to deal with kids. Like offering the first row seat to those with small kids in tow and asking the person sitting there if he’d like to exchange seats, getting toys before the kid starts crying, coming over to help that mom flying for the first time to handle the kid while she fills in the customs card etcetc.. I just think they have a way with all this and that just helps fellow passengers to doze through their postmeal session Faced with such situations PYTs quickly turn into clueless zombies not knowing what to do.

Um, no. Much of the most-compelling research on weight and genetics has been done with twins (such as this study), and demonstrates genetically alike (or similar, in the case of fraternal twins) adults have similar adult body weights regardless of other factors. While pretty much every aspect of body formation has both genetic and environmental influences, weight, like height, seems to be strongly marked by the former. (You can systematically starve a naturally tall child to try to make him shorter, or a naturally fat child to try to make her lighter, but the result will surely be a physically and emotionally damaged person). It’s been pretty well established that, while ‘better’ lifesyle choices may reduce weight, in a proportion of people, to some degree, it will not necessarily put them anywhere near what is considered ‘ideal’ by the mainstream media and the allopathic-medical-industrial complex (or Air India management). The point of all of this is that Air India is discriminating against people for something which it is often not within their power to change, is of marginal-if-any relevance to their work, and could induce self-destructive behaviour like dieting and excessive exercising in employees desperate to keep their jobs. Further, this is being done in hopes of attracting customers through ‘more-attractive’ attendants (as if thin=attractive? How come no mutineers are challenging this little piece of Anglocentric nonsense?) Air India must surely be aware that if they came right out and said ‘we only want hotties’, they would be publically disgraced and perhaps legally challenged. The persistence of the ‘fat-by-choice’ lie lets people get away with a lot of despicable behaviour without facing the appropriate social and legal consequences.

“[A]sk any grad student that binges on chocolate and puts pounds around the mid-riff.”

Yes, I’m fat, and a grad student — though I personally prefer bingeing on tofu rather than chocolate.