funny happening at humayun tomb...

I was in delhi on 25th Nov and had planned to visit humayun tomb.(HT) I was staying with a friend near H.nizamuddin station. I asked an autowala to take me to HT. he said the route is a long one and will cost more money. Instead of that, he offered to drop me on one side of nizamuddin station and advised me to cross the station and walk from there (which apparently was 5 min rastaa)......i diligently followed him......got down at the station, walked to the other side and then enquired how to get to HT. Ppl there pointed me to a gate in the station parking lot and asked me to jump over it. I cursed the auto wala and these ppl for making me do such stupid things. But as I had no choice, I did exactly as they said. The other side of the gate has a road adjacent to it. The road leads to a side entrance of HT. So I took the road and reached the said side entrance. There was no one to stop me there, so i happily entered HT, went around the place for 2 hours, enjoying the majestic monument. I congratulated myself that for the first time ever, i am gettting away without paying for tix(i know.....that bad)

At 11:00 am i decided to leave the place and walked towards the gate (not the one i entered thru but the one thru which everyone enters), all along smiling that i am not paying the money i needed to. To my utter disbelief I noted a turnstile (look at the pic if u dont know wat it is) at the exit gate. All smiles had disappeared. I thought this is god's way of asking me to pay up. I went to the security guy and said "Bhaiya, I lost my tix somewhere. Kyaa karoo? App mere liye naye tix lenge?" The fellow gave me a 2-min lecture on how careful i shud be and bought a tix for me(with my money that is). Just when I was about the enter the turnstile........i noted the others who were going thru it...and to my disappointment.....none of them had a tix....and the turnstile is not working the way it shud....u just had to push it and it rotated allowing everyone to go thru!!!!!!

life is so funny sometimes..........

camera@bangalore airport.

slightly longish....but please bear with me.........
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aaaaa.....the thing is I was supposed to board a plane for delhi last tuesday (20th Nov). so i went to the airport, handed over my luggage at the check in counter and waited for security check. I had only my
camera as hand luggage.....When my turn for frisking came, I put my camera in the x-ray machine and went to the police wala so that he cud frisk me. To my horror, by the time my frisking was over, i found that the my camera was no where to be seen in the vicinity..........i discovered that some one stole it.......for twenty minutes, i searched the whole area trying to figure which stole it......the only ppl whom i cud suspect, given the circumstances were the security police stationed there. i tried to see if there was any place near by where they cud hide it....when i found a small desk where i saw something blue (colour of my camera pouch) i asked the security ppl to show me wat it is.....it turned out to be his cap!

so a couple of security guys came to my rescue and took me to the CC-tv section. There they told me to write a letter explaining the situation and asking them for permission to view the CC-tv footage and
x-ray machine footage. After this episode, they re-played the cc-tv to show how I entered and how i was frisked and I started searching for the camera and didnt find it. But it was not evident from the footage
as to wat happnd to the camera..didnt appear any where!! i was really pained at the way things were going. i was already pained that the flight got delayed by 3 hours......i started considering packing the
whole trip (which was planned for 5 days). somehow i managed to tell myself that these things happen and tht hopefully, i will forget it and enjoy the trip. when i asked their names, they started getting hostile, saying showing cc-tv is a big security threat....that they will loose their jobs if authorities know of this and all such crap. surprisingly, not one of them revealed their names.

i just lodged a rewritten complaint, cribbing about indian bureaucracy, abt the security agencies, police ppl and boarded the plane at 9:00pm (scheduled time-5:00pm) and landed in delhi at 11:30 pm. i also started feeling nostalgic abt my camera and how I shud I hav put fight to understand it better....i vowed not to buy another camera until i read up all books on digital photography...

the next day, i traveled from delhi to jaipur to kota, all the while cursing that i cudnt take pics of rajasthan.......i switched off my mobile till 12:00 in the afternoon.....when i switched on the phone at
12:00 noon, i got a phone from an unknown number. the caller said "sir, i am vinay, head of CISF in bangalore airport.....we hav traced your mobile camera and have been trying to contact you since 12
hours...please come and collect it".....yeyeye...hehehoho..gud heavens....i thought....i was over joyed and felt thankful to all those security ppl....i also thanked myself for not giving up the trip.

it seems some other passenger has somehow taken the camera along with his bag. after 2 hours (thank god...his flight is also delayed)....he realised it and returned it to the police!!!

yesterday, when i came back to bangalore, i went to the airport and collected my camera.
this, is why I dont have photos of a very memorable trip to the north.

--raghu