I’m not a stranger to airplane travel. My parents left India for Australia when I was about two years old and I’ve been on airplanes ever since. I’ve flown to small 400-person communities in the Arctic and to villages in southeast Asia. 

But it’s never smooth. 

I don’t mean the airplane ride. I mean getting through security at airports. 

I recently flew to Nova Scotia for a less-than-24-hours trip to drive my parents to Ottawa. When I arrived at the airport security in Ottawa, there was no other passenger around. I was still pulled aside because I had been “randomly selected for additional security screening.” I looked around quickly and I thought to myself, “You must be joking. I’m the only person here. In what way is this random? Blatant profiling.” At times like these, of course, my parents have trained me to stick to my inside voice —