Our MTNL phone stopped working a year back. I was given the task of closing the connection. K would tell you that if procrastination was an Olympic sport, I would have won Gold, Silver and Bronze. Things stood in limbo till I set out today.
We (our neighbour joined me) drove to the MTNL HQ at BKC. Google Maps took us in circles once we reached BKC till I decided to do it the old-fashioned way. I asked an auto driver for directions! He sent us on the correct path. We reached only to find the building empty sans a watchman who directed us to Khar Telephone Exchange. We felt silly as the latter was a lot closer to us. Our driver insisted on taking the Khar subway and we were stuck in torrid traffic on the way.
We reached and were told to walk down a spooky passage on the ground floor. There was no one in sight. The rooms were locked. We passed by a dark and empty room with rusted machinery inside it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was haunted.
We reached a whiteboard with ‘MTNL’ scrawled on it and an arrow which pointed towards a door on the right. The door opened onto a path that seemed like a slushy, weed-infested dead end. We stepped out and spotted a tiny outhouse. A gentleman sat there impassively in front of a pre-historic desktop. A lady at the next desk sat fiddling with her mobile. The last of the Mohicans!
We took out our papers – adhar copy, bill copy, cancelled cheque, application letter – and said what we had come for. The gentleman waved the papers away, ran our phone numbers through the computer and told us with an air of resignation that our connections were closed last year. That was it, our relationship with MTNL had come to an end. It felt bad to see the once grand entity so broken.
I turned and spotted a couple, who had just got married, stand in the marriage registrar’s office which was next to the MTNL one. They posed for pictures, encircled by happy relatives.
I smiled wryly. It was the end of an era at one hand, the start of one on the other. Such is life.
What does this have to do with a food blog? I came home & ordered a mutton biryani from Lucky. It had been an eventful day and ‘I deserved it’. Any excuse works when it comes to biryani.
