The breakdown was not sudden, though it felt that way to those of us trapped in the glass-and-steel belly of Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport that day. It was a Tuesday that masqueraded as a descent into a Kafkaesque purgatory. I arrived for a scheduled flight to Calicut, and walked into a scene that resembled a refugee crisis hosted in a luxury shopping mall.

For seven interminable hours, the vaunted Terminal 2 ceased to be an airport and became a holding pen for the hopeless. But the most striking feature of this dystopian tableau was not the suffering of the passengers; it was the absolute, spectral absence of the airline staff. The ground personnel of the country’s largest carrier had simply vanished.

What happened that day in Mumbai, and what is happening a

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