I went to the booking counter for Indian Railways at Indiranagar last weekend. Three cheers for the online booking facility of Indian Railways which means that I rarely have to visit the booking counter any more. I had to do it recently because I wanted to ensure that my mother-in-law gets a lower berth, something that the online site does not do so well.
There were two interesting things I noticed there. One was an ad for Agarbatties that said: "Pray for confirmed tickets with Cycle Pure Agarbatties". And a further statement underneath "Everyone has a reason to pray". Funny, no? They had found a humourous way to get their message across that plays on the anxieties of people sitting in queue waiting to buy a rail ticket. Further the message is very customized for the location -- it would not work anywhere else. That is nice to see -- most of the time people would just reuse their standard ad that they use elsewhere rather that create a new ad for a particular use.
The other thing was a notice board, of the sort where you have individual letters, that you can put together in order to make whatever message you want to convey. Here is the message I saw there:
ADVANCE BOOK NGSIARE OPEN UPTO 04-07-2009
It took me a little while to figure out what they were trying to convey. Want to give it a shot ?
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Photo from isado on Flickr. I don't know if there is a standard English spelling for for agarbatties, but the version I used is in use on many websites. The English word for agarbatties is 'incense sticks'. Did you know that incense sticks are popular in several south asian and south east asian countries too. Click through on the photo above to see lots of pictures of incense sticks. And there is a site called agarbatties.com ; quite funny, it has this rock music playing in the background that seems inappropriate for an idea like agarbatties.
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