Collecting Bus Tickets |
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Collecting Bus Tickets |
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I was born and brought up in Dharwad. Schooling was too good and the type of education given to us was also great. Student life was wonderful as we all had the tendency to follow the latest trends. One such was the collection of bus tickets. Some of my friends got the news that if we collect the bus tickets from A-Z we will get a camlin pencil box (the bus tickets have the serial numbers.It displays some alphabet and some number along with the alphabet).Camlin pencil box was(is) one of the expensive item for a school student and the quality of instruments being given with the box was also very good.To collect that we had to come to Bangalore and so had lot of dreams that we can visit relatives and other places. So our hunting started. School was close by,so no need to travel by bus hence no tickets.Started requesting everybody if they had two similar tickets give us one.All the students who travel would have the bus pass. Tickets were usually picked from bus stand as soon a passenger threw his tickets, or from garbage , or from main bus stand . Morning by the time teacher entered school we would finish our exchanges ,advises, suggestions etc. Some how we were able to collect all except "I". So we started cursing the people who initialized this."deliberately they are not releasing tickets with "I" and so none of us will get the prize. Later we understood that there was no such scheme if there was one also none of us will benefited.One girl came out with a great suggestion telling we can get the "I" ticket from "L" ticket by erasing the tail of "L".This was accepted by all and that process was also over. So now the collection was complete.Who will go and give it in Bangalore? One girl had relatives in Bangalore and was coming frequently to Bangalore.So everyone spoke to her, put their tickets in a cover sealed it with each ones names written on top.Still some hopes....That girl could not come to Bangalore and so our dream was shattered.In the mean time one of our teachers came to know all the happenings and warned all of us to concentrate on studies than such silly things.How could she know how much pain we had to take to do all this.Searching all the roads for tickets(some didn't even spare the gutters also). This was the popular incident in our class and if we think of the tension we underwent at that time to reach for pencil box still feel like laughing. |
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| - Aruna Rajagopalan |