Bareilly ke bazaar mein.........

My long hiatus due to certain, words don’t describe them, events which are to be narrated below. Please bear with me if you feel I am gettimg too technical.


There was suddenly an outburst of oppurtunities in R-land through which “students” could venture abroad. Sushi happened to come across one of them and he gladly took up the offer thinking about the country that was to be bestowed upon by the visit of inaurguably the greatest person to grace the Earth since the Laurel-Hardy duo. However the events that transpired afterwards shattered my self righteous nature. (Shattered, I think, is too weak a term, annhilated would be more appropriate.)

The first task that had to be performed was to get a passport. The previous sentence had 13 words. Well 13 was exactly how the whole thing went, extremely unlucky. Six people (who have now turned into zombies) went together to the land of madness, Bareilly to get their tatkal passport. The first real (some might call it awesome) thing that happened to us was our trip in the general comparment which has made my nose defunct I think. People were everywhere. Trust me you don’t want me to elaborate on my “everywhere”. It was a very tiring overnight journey so……….
DAY 1
No sooner had we gotten near the passport office, we were drowned in a slurry of “helpers” who according to themselves could do anything. One of them went ahead and said: Shaam tak passport aapke haath mein hoga. Paanch hazaar lagenge.

We didn’t think even once before walking away. Unfortunately being a student (family background, disregarding) doesn’t give you that much luxury financially.
The humunguosly huge passport form was filled out and just when it looked things would go smoothly, came the first bombshell. There is this document called the verification form that you need to fill out and get it attested by a high ( and by high , I mean there would be around 1000 people in the whole of India with that much authority) authority. The catch was you had to get 2 copies attested. Our over sized brains thought, 1 attested and the other its photocopy. Hearing this news, one thought simultaneously raced through our minds: We COULD jump of the roof. (We had done that much to get the verification form, you see.)
After a brainstorm, that surely would have outwitted Einstein, we got two sets of the required documents transported from Roorkee through, behold yourself, a TTE who was on a train from Haridwar to Bareilly. We meanwhile, passed the time by watching “Sunday”, a pathetic excuse for a comedy movie. I still have nightmares about the PJ’s cracked in the movie. We received our forms late in the night, where we were so politely reminded by the TTE that he was not a postman. We were very close to a tantrum. So we reminded him that by taking a hundred bucks from our friend in Haridwar, he had done exactly what a postman would do. We IITians can seriously kick ass when we need to. Later that night, I had my first anger outburst of my life when I shouted at some poor soul who kept on petchering us asto which was a good hotel. Like Ed Norton said: Babies don’t sleep this well. That’s how we slept that night

DAY 2
We reached the passport office again and did the necessary formalities. They say the main thing to do when you are getting a tatkal is convince the passport officer that you really need the passport urgently. Passport officers are civil services exam qualified and that too in the Foreign category, the toughest to clear. So they are generally, witty enough, not to be taken for rides. One of the few instances where, phatte don’t work. Inspite of our best efforts and convincing, he gave us the collection date of a week later. Lowblow. But again we werent to be outdone. We brought REAL tears to our (what we hoped would be) innocent faces and gave him the senti treatment. Result: We got the delivery dates of the next day.
We slept rather peacefully that night.

DAY 3
Again the ghosts returned to haunt us when we found out that the person who had attested our verification forms wanst high enough in power for them. We told them he was an IPS (They qualify to sign the document) but they wanted some proof of that. Just read asto what happened next.
We googled his name. We got a webpage which listed IPS officers of his batch. We got a printout of that page. Howsatt for innovation? This (much to my surprise though) convinced the officer and he gave us the go ahead. There werent now many hurdles remaining. So when the first one among us got the passport, we really got carried away and gave him bumps inside the office. Security was called to immediately get us thrown out. We treated them the 25-bucks’ style and in the end just 5 minutes before the scheduled close of the office, the last one among us got the passport.
I doubt I’ll feel this happy even if Nicole Kidman proposed me.
After a 10 hr back breaking bus journey (yeah, we didn’t have the guts to face another trip in the general compartment) we reached our cosy hostel rooms.

We really had travelled miles before we slept. And boy oh boy, we slept after that.

(Personally my woes continued as I got diarrhoea for the next 3 days. Normality it seems has been finally restored as I’m now feeling quite at ease typing this, once again, immensely long and boring post.)