Train to Pakistan
Year 2004, It all started with one of those coffee chats somewhere right next to the Okhla vegetable market. Me and my two other colleagues Noel and Srinivas were working with you guessed it right, a *software development company* called Induslogic and we were discussing the media hype created over the upcoming cricket series between Pakistan and India and the madness that’s been happening around grabbing a Pakistan “Cricket” visa. Yes, there was this special 3 day Visa being issued by Pakistan Embassy. Thanks to a dormant Laalu ji and some other news makers like Mallika Sherawat’s vacation from their quest for attention, we discussed the cricket visa daily for a week. And then this one day, Noel suggested that we should give it a try. Since we were doing nothing important in life and just working on some software projects, we had nothing much to lose. My then Project Manager, Rakesh Gupta, wasn’t my best buddy then, so getting a couple of days off during a tough schedule was a big issue. I rang up Mr. Gupta in the evening and said that we are planning to go to Pakistan and needed a couple of days off. Surprisingly, he said yes and even better he got nostalgic about him missing the India Pakistan hockey(he preferred to call it Haaaki for reasons unknown to me) test match in Delhi . So, we were good to go. We only needed to do a few things in little time, we had the tickets booked on the web and there was a special train(Cricket Special) running for the series to Lahore(Wow!).
Chapter One(Pakistan Embassy, Chanakya Puri)
Fill the form, stand in a queue of 1000, submit it to a rude official(now when a guy from Delhi calls someone rude, he must be RUDE), come back and collect it later. Except for the waking up and reaching embassy at 6 part, which was a challenge, all you had to do was just stand in a long line for hours to submit the application. There were three options to travel from which we had to choose: Road, Rail and Air. Just to be on the safer side, I decided to have a plan B and checked with the official if we could cross Wagah by road. He just said, “Aapke mulk ki sarkaar agar aapko jaane de to chale jaiye”. 3 days later we got the Visa(my first visa stamp on the passport)
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