IndiGodot: What We Wait for When We Wait for Change

December 2025, airports across India, those monuments to aspiration, transformed overnight into something resembling a Beckettian staging of waiting. In Beckett, you wait for Godot; here, thousands of passengers found themselves sitting on marble floors, staring at departure boards that had stopped pretending to mean anything. 

IndiGo, the airline that flies more than half of India, had cancelled over a thousand flights in a single day. Videos circulated on social media – this is part of our new national pastime, documenting indignities on phones that cost more than most Indians earn in six months. They showed passengers howled at airline staff who were either struggling too or had clearly stopped listening hours ago. Families camping under airport lights. Not because these passengers were entitled to perfection, but because a promise of reliability had been sold as infrastructure, and when that promise failed, it revealed not the vulnerability of those sitting on the floor, but the fragility of the machine that had been built above them.

The Official Story Which Nobody Believes But Everyone Repeats

The explanation was bureaucratic and therefore boring. New flight duty time limitations, FDTL in the jargon, designed to keep pilots from being worked to death. These were not draconian rules, but night landings capped at two instead of six, 48 hours of weekly rest among other things. Kind of regulation that shouldn't cause chaos unless someone decides not to prepare for it. But when you're that big, when you own that much of the sky, caring perhaps becomes optional. 

IndiGo called it a "reboot." Corporate speak for when you've made a mess and need to pretend it was intentional. A cleansing ritual to realign crew and machines. Very spiritual. Very necessary. Very needed. Very conveniently timed. And then, right on schedule, the DGCA folded. A soft exemption was granted till February 2026. The new rest requirements, designed to keep pilots from flying while half-alive and half-dead, effectively neutered.

In any other country this might be called corporate blackmail. A monopoly leveraging its stranglehold on national mobility to force a regulatory rollback. In India it's called Tuesday. Another day, another capitulation. The market barely blinked. IndiGo's stock dipped marginally, then resumed its upward drift, almost smugly. Investors knew what passengers didn't, this wasn't a failure. This was a demonstration. A flex. When you control 60% of the market, when you own the slots and terminals and routes and manpower, you're not really a company anymore. You're a microstate. You can stall the arteries of national mobility to make a point. You can perform a crisis, watch the regulators scramble, and emerge with exactly the exemption you wanted.

Perhaps one can call it brilliant, in a sociopathic sort of way.

What IndiGo revealed, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not, is that the infrastructure of this nation is not a shared inheritance. It's a gated commons, and when the gate malfunctions and the privileged briefly find themselves outside, the panic is treated as a national emergency.

The Gated Commons and Who Gets to Use the Gate

But what stays with me, what I can't quite shake, is the sight of the elite stranded. Not because their suffering is trivial, but because it exposes how selectively the nation recognises suffering at all.

Aviation in India caters almost entirely to an urban, upper-caste, mostly English-speaking population. It is still a privilege masquerading as normalcy. Less than 5% of Indians have ever been on a plane. In a country of 1.4 billion, the flying class i.e. less than 5% is a rounding error. This is the demographic that also often functions as the soft extension of the political regime. These are people who truly believe and imbibe the shining India narrative, because they are the ones shining. They fly, they Uber, they order groceries on apps, faster and faster. They live in a layer of the country that works, mostly, because the layers below them don't need to function smoothly. 

The people most visible in these terminals are not villains, they are participants inside a structure built around them, a system that promises speed and safety to some while quietly withholding it from most. The top 10% of Indians own 77% of the wealth. The bottom 60% own less than 5%. 

And so, when their layer breaks, when they're forced to queue and wait and sleep on floors, it feels like civilisational collapse. Because for them, it is. Their India has failed. The India that's supposed to work for them has revealed itself to be as fragile and poorly managed as the India everyone else lives in.

The Stranded Elite And Why Their Suffering Matters More Than Everyone Else’s

Perhaps the real story here is not a failed airline, but a functioning hierarchy of urgency. It seems that in India, breakdown is only called a “crisis” when it interrupts the lives of those whose voices are already audible to those with proximity to power, media, and capital. Public opinion is not a national phenomenon; it is produced by a narrow demographic whose disruptions are treated as national emergencies.

Millions of Indians live in systems that break daily. Government hospitals without doctors. Clinics without medicines. Trains without dignity. Homes without clean water. Schools without teachers. Roads vanish in the monsoon. Electricity comes and goes. When those systems fail, they don’t trend. It doesn't provoke prime-time indignation. It doesn't inspire DGCA rollbacks or ministerial interventions or corporate apologies.

It's normalised. Background noise. The way things are. Because the people who rely on them are not the people who shape the national narrative. They're not the people who fly IndiGo, who tweet their outrage, who expect the system to work because it always has, for them at least.

The Covid Echo 

Watching this, there was something familiar about the scene. Something that took a moment to place. Then it hit, Covid. Those early months in 2020 when the machinery that normally purrs along for the comparative elite suddenly seized. When trains stopped and hospitals filled and oxygen ran low and the people who'd spent their lives insulated from the republic's daily failures found themselves, briefly, terrifyingly, touching the ground.

That's the noticeable continuity between Covid and this aviation debacle. The comparative elite momentarily experienced what it means to inhabit the republic without insulation. During Covid, for a brief window, it was almost, for a moment, equal.

And the state couldn't tolerate it. Restrictions were eased starting June 2020, explicitly with an "economic focus," not because the virus had been defeated, but because the elite needed their insulation back. The economy had to reopen, which is to say, the lives of the comfortable had to resume their comfortable trajectory. The second wave in April-May 2021 brought catastrophic consequences, with India reporting over 400,000 new cases daily and excess mortality reaching a 120% increase, with the pandemic likely doubling the total death rate from all conditions. 

The WHO later estimated 4.7 million excess deaths in India, while independent studies suggested 3.1 to 4.2 million deaths, roughly six to eight times the official count. Those deaths were acceptable because they were the right kind of deaths. Deaths among marginalized migrants and laborers, people already dying slowly from poverty and neglect and the ordinary violence of inequality.

The IndiGo crisis follows the same script. Pilot fatigue regulations, designed to prevent crashes, designed to save lives, rolled back not because they were wrong but because they were inconvenient. Because they disrupted the mobility of people who matter. Because the elite couldn't be stranded for a month while the airline figured out how to comply with basic safety requirements. This is not an accusation against individuals, it is a diagnosis of design.

In this country, equality does not fail because it is undesired, it fails because the system was never built to sustain it, and when rare moments of balance appear, they are corrected quickly, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally.

Unless it can't. Case in point, the AQI.

In Which Nothing Changes 

The IndiGo crisis will probably soon be over. The flights will fly again. The elite will be mobile once more, cocooned in their insulation. The DGCA will continue to regulate with the spine of overcooked pasta. Pilots will continue to fly tired, until one of them doesn't, until a plane falls out of the sky, and then we'll have investigations and inquiries and assurances that lessons have been learned. (They won't be.)

And the rest of India will continue to live in the India where things break constantly, and nobody fixes them. Where the infrastructure isn't infrastructure, it's just the physical manifestation of inequality. Where your relationship to the state depends entirely on whether the state sees you as a person or as a problem.

But the lesson remains, the infrastructure of inequality holds until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, the people who built it will always, always make sure they're the first ones airlifted out. Last week, a private jet was rushed to Guwahati to pick up the children of top corporate executives who'd been stranded in Kaziranga after a school trip. 

The rest can wait, they're good at waiting. They've been practicing their whole lives. 

The same week as when the IndiGo situation was unfolding, I watched the film Homebound. I tried to lose the irony, but it stuck with me like Dickensian chimney soot. This is not the first time one has wondered why no mass people's revolution ever happens in India. Why the breaking points never quite break. Why the accumulated indignities and inequalities and everyday violences don't somehow ignite into something larger, something that might actually change the architecture of who gets saved and who gets abandoned.

There's no good answer for it. No single explanation that satisfies. But there's a line from a jailed resistance poet from Pakistan, Faiz, who understood something about waiting and hoping and the stubborn refusal to accept that things must always be this way. Someday, he wrote, laazim hai ke hum bhi dekhenge. “It is but set in stone- that we shall see those who toil and grunt shall accede to throne”.

Necessary. Not sure. Not probable. Not hopeful. Just necessary. 

Vladimir and Estragon still wait, Godot never arrives.

Maybe that's the only answer there is.

Raj Shekhar is based out of San Francisco and works in the area of data privacy regulations. He also occasionally contributes as a freelancer writing on politics and runs a podcast on politics called the Bharatiya Junta Podcast.

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