On arrival at airport, we paid up, gathered our luggage, checked in and soon found ourselves in line for passport control counters. It was then I realized that my phone was missing!

Panic!

First, breathe and do not try to imagine all the disasters that can happen when you mobile office is lost!

We left the queue immediately and tried to figure what to do. As we had just checked out, we got the hotel number form the invoice. My wife called them up. She remembered the person at the gate had noted the taxi number.

They asked us to continue the journey and they will get back to us on email if they recover the phone. In the meantime, I checked at the point we alighted the taxi. Asked the cops who were controlling the traffic and they asked me to talk to Lost+Found.

In the meantime, my wife was done talking to hotel on her phone (Thanks to Airtel’s international roaming that actually works!). We checked with Lost+Found. He just said he had not received any lost iPhone.

Almost giving up, we walked towards the passport control counters. My wife wondered if we should give our flight information to the Lost+Found counter. In case someone does find it, he will be able to contact us. We walked back to him and he suggested we talk to Tourist Police in the airport.

So we went to the office on Level 2 of Suvarnabhumi Airport. We approached on of the officers on front desk and told her the whole story. Within 5 sec that followed, I realized that if there is a scope of the iPhone being returned, it will be.

She asked us for the name card of our hotel. We showed her the invoice. She called them up and started collecting information. Fw minutes in the conversation she confirmed wit us if we had contacted the hotel. I told her that they had noted the taxi number. She replied with a short, sure and authoritative, “Of course they will!”

In the meantime, another office came and gathered other information from us. They asked us to identify the taxi color from a booklet. This helped them identify the company. Another one took our number and asked if it was Thailand or India SIM. She called up the number and told us it was switched off. I told her about the thunder storm and all that. I was handed a form and by the time we had it filled, the first office came to the front desk and said she was able to track the taxi and had called the driver. He acknowledged finding the iPhone and was on his way to airport to drop it. She asked us to pay him the fare for this trip.

Breathe!

While we waited, she called up the airlines office and told them about our position. As we were close to boarding time, the airlines asked us to stay at Police post as it will be easy for them to trace us.

The driver showed up just in time. He handed me the phone and I handed him the fare and some extra.

The whole staff clapped as I thanked all of them and the driver. I think it was mostly for the driver for acknowledging he had found the phone.

While we ran to our gate, I clutch to my phone hard. It was, probabaly first time in my life, I saw real police work.

To the  Thai Royal Tourist Police, a big Khob-kun-Krub!

Of course, I knew of his brave hero and felt kind-of honored to know someone who knew someone from Major’s family. Let me try to summarize why this is such a big deal by quoting form Wikipedia article:

“Of the 120 defenders, only three survived, seriously wounded. The rest, including Major Shaitan Singh (who was awarded Param Vir Chakra), were discovered after the winter, frozen, mostly holding their weapons but with no ammunition. This was a genuine ‘last man-last round’ defense and many times more Chinese were killed, the evidence again being frozen bodies on the slopes. Of the 120 soldiers, 114 were Haryanavi Ahirs.”

I can’t ever get enough of thinking of personal courage and ethics of these 120 people and not be inspired. For some reason this story keeping coming to me every so often and inspire me to go beyond the ordinary.

No, this is not a blog on nationalism or hero worship. This is a lesson in work ethics on how some can do what has to be done, even when on one side it is duty-death and on other side it is dereliction-life.

According to them, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germ, and Steel is a Science Fiction.

In 1998 it won a Pulitzer Prize and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book was broadcast on PBS in July 2005, produced by the National Geographic Society.

To get some context, see my earlier post, ‘Ironic, funny and sad at many levels’.

A friend of mine used to say how weird is it that in India, on one hand there are so many intelligent people doing amazing in studies and jobs (terms meant to be narrowest in scope).

On other hand, when intelligence has to be applied outside of those two, we become dumb.

As if we don’t realize that what we learn in studies and jobs can be used elsewhere too. Or, someone forgot to tell us that being intelligent is not enough, using our intelligence is equally important.

A book shop classifying a science book in science-fiction is something  can not get enough of. On top of it is the stated reason, ‘they are related’. After all, science-fiction has the word ’science’ in it right there!

Anyway, this time I did not bother to point it to them.

It says L’Oreal ANTI-SAGGING and it is for men. Somehow found it very funny!

This was taken in a book store called ‘Crosswords’ in Garuda Mall last week. Al Gore’s ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ was placed in Science fiction section. I pointed it out to the manager.

He told me, ‘The science section was full so I placed the book in this section. Anyway it (science fiction section) was science related, so it is ok.’

I did not know what to say after that!

If you know more on the festival, please do drop a comment.

'About Ubuntu'

If I have to Google around, uname Linux version name, search in /etc than it is not longer a ‘human’ endaevour. Can someone at Ubuntu please fix this?

HT Sangliana – INC
PC Mohan – B J P
Vijay Raj Singh – B S P

Interesting to know the 11:00 pm shut down of Bangalore started to get enforced by HT Sangliana when he was the Police Comm here. I have heard it before and there was a hint in the interview that it was 10:30 and then got pushed.

One candidate is retired IPS, one is two times MLC and one is MBA. Good collection. Many more too. Enjoy the wide range of choice to pick from!