Just me and my aircraft

Hyderabad: Salva Sidiqui is on a journey she can barely believe. Since last March, Salva has been training to be a commercial pilot, the only Muslim in a class of 30. These are youngsters hoping to plug the short supply of qualified Indian flyers that the booming airline industry faces, its rapid growth forcing it to import pilots.
Salva cuts a rare sight, her 5’ 2” frame clad in a starched, buttoned-down, full-sleeved white shirt with black and gold lapels, teamed with natty black trousers — and her bespectacled face framed by the soft folds of a hijab. Her ensemble reflects the changing world inhabited by the city’s young Muslims, citizens of a new Hyderabad with their roots firmly in the Old City.
The 19-year-old is the first person in her family to complete school — her father Syed, now a delivery man with a bakery, dropped out of school, and her mother Syeda was never allowed to study.
In 2006, Salva’s life took a turn when a local scholarship body, energised by the bright junior college student’s ambition, offered to fund the prohibitively expensive flying course.
Today, more Indians than ever before can afford a flight. Salva’s family isn’t there, yet. The only time Syed took a flight was a decade ago, when he joined South India’s great faceless migration of labour to West Asia, to work in a Jeddah hotel.
Salva can’t stop marvelling at the “different” road her life has taken, including the long hours of study — “navigation, air traffic regulations, aeronautical maps, weather, instruments in the cockpit… the exams are hard work, and you have to score 75 per cent to pass!” she says happily.
Twenty hours into the mandatory 200 flying hours she must clock to qualify, and the teen still cannot get over that first high: “Each time I am up in the skies, the world looks so beautiful. It’s like there is just me and my aircraft.”
17/03/08 Chitrangada Choudhury/Hindustan Times