ost modern-day airports work as zones for cultural experience; letting visitors experience a preview of a country’s everyday life, beliefs and attitudes, providing the lens through which a country wants the world to see it. Airports offer a robust system for hundreds of thousands of aircraft across the globe to reach their destination; they are a quintessential enabler of physical and emotional connectivity for billions of travellers across continents.

The airport-related anecdotes that I’ve collected throughout my life may require a longer piece than the one I am attempting to write, but it is a good place to start nonetheless.

My first experience beyond the departure gates – through stringent border security that has been in place since 1999 – was when I took my first international long-haul flight from Lahore to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to perform an umrah. Then there were a few more domestic flights from Lahore to Karachi and Islamabad and back till 2004 – when I and my wife travelled to the UK, flying out with Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) for the one and the only convenience that it offers: a direct flight to London’s Heathrow Airport without the hassle of layovers and prolonged wait for the connecting flight. However, one regrettably realises later that opting for this mode of travel is not conducive to adding exposure to world views, cultures and diversity. The more stopovers are included in the itinerary, the more one is able to observe and discover during one’s travels.

It is preferable for a travelller to either stay in the connecting city for a day or two, or just lounge around at the airport for a few hours to see the blend of conventional and neo-futurist architectural details, or decipher ginormous paintings/ murals hung on the walls and life-sized sculptures placed in the big lounges and waiting areas. One can observe people from all over the world moving around together; eating, shopping, giggling and celebrating diverse world views. There are always a few who aren’t concerned about their immediate surroundings; their utmost priority, catching their next flight by running towards the assigned gates and focusing only on the last departure calls. One may feel overwhelmed witnessing the system and service design mechanisms through which hundreds of airport staff serve thousands of passengers at any given time but how everything is still spick-and-span.

The enchantment of an airport is universal. On cross-border/ long-haul flights offering the opportunity to see in and around the busy and challenging lives of the on-ground staff/ flight crew we also carry a lot of fictional/ real-life stories in our heads, thanks to the films that have been made about these. Everything about airports is magical. Many critics argue that what they show on films is far from the truth. Nevertheless, large parts of it seem genuine, as the filmmakers of these films have special permission to shoot scenes from places and corners of an airport that a regular passenger might not have access to. The film records and manifests larger than life views, particularly for commercial cinema.

I can’t forget the excellent film, The Terminal, directed by veteran filmmaker Steven Spielberg, featuring Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones and some other seasoned actors. The Terminal is, in fact, based on a true story. It may sound hard to believe, but the film is about Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who stayed in the departure lounge of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years. A lack of documentation and the French law left him with no choice but to live at the terminal. In the film version, Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) is an Eastern European forced to reside at a New York airport as he finds out that his homeland has ceased to exist due to a coup. He quickly finds comrades to rely on, gets a job and falls in love with an air hostess (Catherine Zeta-Jones). However, neither publicity materials, the DVD special features, nor the film’s website mentions Nasseri’s situation as an inspiration for the film.

It is preferable for a travelller to either stay in the connecting city for a day or two, or just lounge around at the airport for a few hours to see the blend of conventional and neo-futurist architectural details, or decipher ginormous paintings/ murals hung on the walls and life-sized sculptures placed in the big lounges and waiting areas.

In a weird turn of events, I found myself in a somewhat similar situation – though thankfully not as dire. It so happened that I got stuck at Doha’s Hammad International Airport for almost twenty hours due to a miscommunication between connecting flights from London to Edinburgh and then from Doha to Lahore. It was not an exciting experience to get such a long unplanned layover. The first thing that came to my mind was to get myself a visa on arrival and go out to see Doha city. But when I calculated the expenditure involved and looked at my not-so-deep pockets, I decided to stay at the terminal. The second option was to hibernate in the sleeping pods available at the airport. But as I proceeded toward this brilliant facility, I was informed by the staff that it was fully booked, and the waiting time was between five and six hours. I had to keep an eye on the App, which would ping the push notification once a sleeping pod became available. So I had plenty of time to explore the terminal. A usual stroll at the glittering showrooms of the world’s famous brands to find out or try out new cuisines was in order, being a curious gastronomist.

There is a well-known phrase in the English vernacular, “Shop till you drop.” I did the same before literally dropping down at one of the resting areas near the whimsical bronze sculptures. While resting I noticed a small group of airport staff members, an arts manager, and a European girl – judging by her accent – who was expressively training staff in what and how to explain the art pieces to anyone who showed an interest in them. I discovered that these installations were a series of playful bronze sculptures by Tom Otterness, a New York-based artist known for his cheerful figures that pop up in unexpected public spaces. Standing, sitting, tumbling or curled up on the floor, the towering frames of the bronze characters contain stairs, and slides, turning each work into an interactive jungle gym for children and adults alike to enjoy. One can witness many other artworks, mainly film/ art installations running on massive screens. A twenty-three-foot-tall canary yellow teddy Lamp Bear sculpted by Swiss artist Urs Fischer takes centre stage in the grand foyer. It’s a playful piece that humanises the space around it reminding travellers of their childhood or precious objects from home.

Interestingly, most airports nowadays are on a mission to become the world’s most Instagrammable airports. To grab this title, Heathrow once commissioned the street artists behind four of the most Instagram-famous murals in the world to recreate their work at its terminals. The campaign brought together new renditions of Colette Miller’s iconic Angel Wings in Los Angeles, Rogue One’s Floating Taxi in Glasglow, Alice Pasquini’s Above the Line in Rome and Odeith’s Anamorphic Frog in Lisbon. Selfie-friendly, easy-to-spot artworks measuring approximately 10 feet each were strategically placed in terminals with flights to their original location. The airport hoped that travellers would post their photos on Instagram to help Heathrow move up from the second-most Instagrammed Airport in the World, past South Korea’s Incheon International Airport, to number one. After all, did you truly travel overseas if you didn’t upload an airport selfie to Instagram? It applies to all activities, becoming an unavoidable part of our day-to-day lifestyle.

I remember flying from Gatwick Airport to Belfast Airport in 2004. I recall my first ever experience of travelling on a budget airline, Easy Jet, in which one could only take hand luggage (just 10kg) and would have to pay for food and the lavatory facility. I found that very interesting but at that time, neither Instagram was present nor Gatwick was on the list of most Instagramable Airports. I remember regretting not bringing my digital camera along with me to post images on Flickr, alas…

Stringent security checks are a quintessential element at airports across the globe, as the border forces and other surveillance agencies make sure that no traveller smuggles a prohibited object of any sort. The usual emphasis is on drugs, gold, diamonds and firearms, but there is often a complete matrix regarding what is allowed and what is considered illegal or prohibited.

Once at Heathrow Airport in London. I was taking a 120ml gold colour tube of Windsor & Newton acrylic paint to Lahore at the request of an artist friend. I also had a receipt with me and had placed this tube in its original hard casing in my hand luggage so it didn’t get punctured or damaged in the booked one. But I was in for a surprise. After one and a half hours through and through body search plus a string of strange interrogation about the presence of the said tube, I finally managed to convince the staff that I was a law-abiding global citizen.

There are many stories of the kind that I’ve come across at airports during my travels, a few of which I no longer distinctly remember. The ones I do, I plan to pen down soon, lest I should forget.

The writer is an art/ design critic. He heads the Department of Visual Communication Design at Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts & Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore