About a friend...

This post is triggered by a short conversation I had with a college friend, AN or as we call him B, yesterday evening.

Now this guy is a one-in-a-million piece. The number of goof-ups, gaffes and pure bad luck that this guy goes through is phenomenal - He has left his debit card in the atm machine and ended up losing 10,000, bought an absolute lemon of a car for 60 thousand, seen someone stealing the said car in front of his eyes, hung on to the car and had a knife shown to his face, the number of times he overpays for stuff is innumerable.

But he's still an amazing guy who laughs a lot at himself (almost as much as he laughs at others, especially me) .

Now the latest in B's saga is that his company was sending him for a few days to Malaysia on a dealer conference. Great, a company paid semi-vacation, what else does one want (especially at this stage where getting visas stamped on your passport is so cool :) )[quite a few people have been going abroad recently..lemme see R, RB, SP, BK,AK, me.. hmm, and a few people who don't make this blog too frequently like Sukrit, Akshay A, Bhupesh, Neha S, Gaurav B, Sayantan, Saurabh A, Avneet] .

Right, moving on, B's story. You guys should really stop me from digressing. Anyway, so B is all happy, telling all and sundry about his forthcoming "short hop" to Malaysia. All approvals are in, tickets have been scheduled for, bags are being packed, Petronas towers websites have been scoured, prayers for a safe journey rent the air in various temples in different parts of the country. And THEN the inevitable happens.

B gives his passport to the office travel agent, he opens the little blue book, and voila - THE PASSPORT IS EXPIRING A WEEK BEFORE THE SCHEDULED TRIP!

This is what I meant by "gaffes, goof-ups and pure bad luck" that we've come to associate with the ever smiling B. Have you heard of anyone's passport getting expired? atleast in our age group (Heck, I haven't heard of this happening for anyone, even my Dad's passport has never expired, atleast to my knowledge) . Apparantly B had got his passport made on a fast track program of the Government "tatkal" scheme. And passports under this scheme are valid for just five years as opposed to twenty years for the normal procedure. And just see the sheer bad luck that the expiry date falls tantalizingly on the wrong side of the travel date.

Hard luck mate, dunno what to say - better luck next time, I guess.