This morning, too, a family is scattering the ashes of their mother into the sea and she too will be on a flight winging her way back to those whom she loved and who went ahead, blazing the trail for her.

So my first flight of the year was on an AirAsia to Kuala Lumpur. I wish I could say my first flight of 2011 was on a Singapore Airlines’ First Class to Barcelona but perhaps that’s so passé these days in an age when travel in Asia has become so mass, so instant and so much of it shorthaul.

I am sitting at the café at the Low Cost Carrier Terminal in Kuala Lumpur. I missed my flight last night and ended up having mojitos at Funky Villa at The Curve, one of the many happening spots in this city that continues to sprawl and sprawl like the roots of a tree gone rampant.

But this morning I got here in good time and I have two hours of free wifi and lots of time to people watch. There are people from everywhere – it’s like the world has comverged here and all are winging their way to somewhere – Bali, Solo, Bangkok …

Ten years on, and what a trail AirAsia has blazed. On the flight over, I ran into Kathleen Tan, their irrepressible head of commercial.  She looked like she had come straight from a gym and at the rate the airline is growing, I reckon it’s one non-stop treadmill for senior executives like her.

Indeed, she told me she had been pounding the treadmill the night before and had missed the earlier flight because she had been woken up at 1am by her manager in Hong Kong who called her with the good news that her Weibo feed had crossed the 5,000 follower mark.

“I didn’t get enough sleep,” she said, but she was visibly excited by the new record set in China on the new Twitter-like service launched by Sina. According to this post, Weibo is currently growing at 10 million users a month and will exceed 150 million users this year.

Says Kathleen, “This new generation of Chinese, they are so different. They are so interactive, so into sharing,”

Unlike her followers on Twitter who are mainly passive, she says her Chinese followers on Weibo comment and respond enthusiastically. One time she tweeted that she was having instant noodles for dinner and she got remarks like, “Please look after yourself, you must eat better” and “I will come and cook herbal chicken soup for you”.

Man, with followers like these, who needs friends on Facebook? But then AirAsia has also crossed the one-million-fan mark on Facebook.

See, what social networks have done is help someone like Kathleen to scale.  I mean, physically, it’s impossible for her to be everywhere although she tries to be – but these networks enable media faces like hers to connect with customers and by allowing them to get to know her as a person with a certain lifestyle, it is hoped they then form a relationship with her, the person, and transfer that into loyalty to the brand she works for.

With a company like AirAsia, there’s no boundary between your personality and brand – you are the brand you work for.

I asked her if she had trouble balancing what was private and professional in her tweets and Facebook and she said, “Our generation has issues with that but the young, they don’t. We just have to let that go.”

As she had shared at the WIT Conference last October, AirAsia will be investing more into its owned media assets – “everyone is doing that,” she says, and she’s already halved her advertising budget in 2010 – and mobile.

There are many things AirAsia is doing right, I reckon, to have grown the way it has.

But there are a few tbings they have to get “righter”. Like their website – there are still bugs to be fixed. It’s easy enough booking but when it comes to managing your bookings, there are instability issues. I couldn’t check in online and I couldn’t change my flight, for example.

Their inflight magazine also looks like it was designed in the 80s – definitely they are not blazing any trail here.

The ground experience could also be improved but I suspect this has more to do with the fact that this terminal is past its use-by date and was not meant to cope with an airline that flew its 100^th million passenger last year.

On landing, Kathleen streaks ahead of everyone, obviously still on her treadmill.

Outside, I hop into a taxi and a few minutes later, we stop. I look up from my Blackberry and find myself in a queue of taxis at a Petronas gas station. “What’s happening?” I ask the driver.

“Have to get gas,” he says.

His taxi runs on NVG and there are very few stations he can get it – they are all run by Petronas. “I may have enough to get you to the city but I won’t have enough to get back,” he says.

In the next 10 minutes while we wait, he tells me his life story. Last night, he slept at the LCCT because he couldn’t get any passenger. I am his first customer. On an average day, the most number of trips he makes to and fro the LCCT is three. Four nights a week, he sleeps at the airport. “It’s worse at KLIA, fewer customers,” he says.

With NVG, he can do 100-120km on RM8 worth of fuel.

After this, I can hardly complain about the waiting time. He tells me he’s been driving for four years, he retired five years ago. “Why don’t you just retire and take it easy?” I ask him, because this man looks seriously tired and I surmised, in his late 60s.

“I have young children,” he replies.

“You must have married late,” I say, “or have a much younger wife.” I sometimes have the subtlety of a chain saw.

“You must think I am very old,” he responded. “I know, I look old but I am only 52. I haven’t slept well the last three years.”

See, whether you’re working for a successful low cost airline or driving an NVG-powered taxi, we all need more sleep and we are all on some sort of treadmill.