Mysuru: Sarsawati Samman awardee and renowned Kannada novelist Dr. S.L. Bhyrappa regretted that air connectivity from Mysuru was still not taking off. What was important was air connectivity between Mysuru and Mangaluru and Mysuru and Hubballi.

He was speaking after he launched the book, “You Cannot Miss This Flight,” a collection of Essays on Emerging India by Captain G.R. Gopinath, who pioneered the low-cost air travel in India, yesterday at the Wind Chimes in Nazarbad here and said: “I have travelled in Gopinath’s Air Deccan. I feel very sad it stopped flying. For people like us it was so important to have a low cost airline.”

Coming down heavily on the State Government for locating the Kempegowda International Airport in Devanahalli and Mysore Airport near Nanjangud, he said, “It is sheer idiocy of the Government to locate these two airports so far.”

Coming down heavily on the bureaucracy, he said, “Though Modi had original ideas, it was they who were putting all the hurdles, which he understood better after reading Capt. Gopinath’s earlier book ‘Simply Fly’ and how they were trying to finish off the Deccan airline.”

Sharing his own example of the bureaucracy, Dr. Bhyrappa said that when one of his friends, a KAS Officer (who was in the Education Department) was promoted to IAS cadre, he was posted to Bhadravathi. He asked him how he could handle such a post without any experience and the Officer’s reply was, “As an IAS Officer I know everything.”

Another incident of how the bureaucrats worked was when he was in NCERT Delhi from 1978 to 1981. There was textbook printing training programme, which the Germans had offered the NCERT to train. An officer from nowhere got himself posted, went to Germany along with his family for six months, returned and got himself transferred to his parent Department immediately.

Lauding Capt. Gopinath for his efforts in writing the book, he said that only people like him were capable of writing such books with their rich experience, which, he as a novelist did not have. He asked everyone to buy the book and read.

Earlier, K.B. Ganapathy, Editor-in-Chief, Star of Mysore, said, “For the first time, Capt. Gopinath was pioneering helicopter service in a country which was economically emerging. Earlier, only a few industrialists used it. Naturally, his next step was the airline, which was once a rich man’s transport. He thought of an average Indian as the country is teeming with poor people who entertained the desire of flying. He made it a reality through his low cost airline.”

Talking about Capt. Gopinath’s earlier book ‘Simply Fly,’ he said that it was an unputdownable book with perfect choice of words. “When I read it for the first time, I did a lot of cheating. But I read it again and saw his rags to riches story, the rural and urban Indian,” he said and added, “It should be introduced in the graduate classes just like Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘The Discovery of India’ which was edited and introduced in classes when I was a student.”

He gave the example of the mythical Homa bird, which is always in firmament and never reaches the earth. When it lays the egg to propagate its species, from the sky, before it touches the earth, the egg breaks open, the young one flies and goes back. “Gopinath’s airlines should, like-wise, be always in the sky to serve the people at low-cost, said Ganapathy.