Tatkal Ticket Drama - Part 1 (iNuke's Travel Blog)
India is known for being the largest railway network in the world. It's also known for its prehistoric era website. I mean, how are you the world's largest railway network and the worlds stickiest website at the same time? (Sticky may not be the proper word for the behaviour, but let's go with it for now).
Like every trip, one has to decide the route to get to the destination. And I had two options, option A being a break journey where I have to book a ticket either to Chennai or to Vijaywada. Option B: I have to wait for a chance to get the direct train from Trichy to my hometown, the chances of that happening is astronomically low. I had better chances of winning the Kerala super lottery than getting a confirmed ticket in this train.
Anyway, I went with Option A. Let's get to Chennai first, and from Chennai, we will get to Palasa. Simple and straightforward. Trichy offers buses and trains to Chennai at a good frequency. It will get you to the destination in 8 hours. I booked the bus to Chennai, as the trains were already overbooked, and I missed the Tatkal window. (For those who dont know what Tatkal is, think of it as the last-minute booking service; they will charge a little extra for your lack of planning or your misfortune that made you travel in the first place.) The bus timing was confirmed at 2330Hrs, and the expected time of arrival was 0730Hrs the next day. Guess what, the bus got us there at 0600 hours in the morning. Any faster than that, we would have broken the space-time continuum and time-travelled into the future. I got so scared that I was awake the whole journey. I am pretty sure we were doing above 120Kmph on the highway, and as you know my experience with the speed wasn't that good.
Anyway, once I got to Chennai, the next task was to book a Train because I would rather walk to the destination than get on a Volvo bus cruising at supersonic speed on the busy highway. And that forced me to log in to my IRCTC account. Booking a train ticket is no joke; you have to have mental toughness and strategy to counter every move. The last login was showing of Dec2024 when I travelled from Chennai to Trichy. The portal seemed to be updated a bit. And then the alert popped. For booking the Tatkal, the user account must be verified against the Adhaar (Adhaar isa unique ID issued by the government of India, Something similar to Social Security Number of US not the same but somewhat similar)
Source
Ah!! Obstacle number 1, Well, no issue, I can get past that. I entered my Aadhaar number and waited for the OTP to be triggered to my mobile.
1 minute passed.
No SMS.
No issue, the resend OTP option is there. I triggered the second one.
Another minute passed.
Still no SMS.
I triggered another OTP.
Again, No SMS.
Well third time is the charm. I triggered again.
And this time I received 3 SMS at once. (Just Wow!!)
I entered the third OTP quickly, as there's an expiry set against each OTP. Without wasting time, I pressed Verify. And the system showed an old spinner which was doing rounds time after time. Before I could process the thought that maybe the system is slow, the Error popped up. INVALID OTP PLEASE TRY AGAIN.
Sure, no problem. I pressed the resend OTP button. And this time, a new error popped up. “OTP GENERATION LIMIT EXCEEDED, PLEASE TRY AGAIN IN 24HRS” .. WTF
Stay Tuned for Part 2
Hi
Seriously, booking an IRCTC Tatkal ticket is no joke. I used to think that's why people get stressed about ticket booking, and now I realise what it really is. Small distance trains are easy to get on, but long-distance trains like Hawrah SuperFast, Ernakulam Patna Express are a different story. I read it somewhere that the number of passengers that Indian Railway handles a day exceeds the total population count of many countries. And that is just mind-blowing.
Thank you for your time.
Will be back soon with the second part.
PS: I am having a good time here. Although the Network is crap but I am enjoying life a little.
A big thank you to IU and the BeAwesome community.
Ooph!🤯
I do understand why mindfulness was invented in India. It is very much needed there...
Hahaha...
😂
Perfect explanation ever.
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This is what happens when there is a refusal to spend the money on upgrading the system when it needed to be upgraded and now their problems have compounded so much that their terrified of the fact that they probably need to burn it all down and start from scratch and the cutover will generate even more teething problems x_x
I always imagine one guy ready with the optimised code to be pushed into production, but the approver is chickening out and counting his days till retirement. LoL!!. I believe it's a problem that exists everywhere. Nobody wants to touch the Legacy codes.
Had one such issue with my current system, and we rectified it by adding more lines of code and adding a new parameter to handle the process smoothly. Results..😅 Now there is a pinned instruction on the General Chat "DO NOT ALTER THE TABLE xxxx" 🤣
That was one of J's early jobs as well. The thing that he was working on/helping to maintain was basically held together with the code equivalent of duct tape, superglue and prayers XD
Hahaha.. 🤣
Yes, early humans never believed in documentation.
The only way to fix it is spit, grit and a whole lot of duct tape.
Tatkal booking feels less like booking and more like a daily soap opera 😄
From login to payment, every second is full of suspense.
The name Tatkal booking reminded me of those days during holidays when I used to rely on Tatkal for going home, but the website wouldn't even open on time and in the end, I would have to travel by bus anyway.
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