It has been quite sometime that I had experienced the difficult life back home. Staying in Europe for a while had put me in a different comfort zone and now that am back in India I was trying to get up from my lazy couch. What best to do this than trying to book a tatkal ticket so here it goes.
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Am back home now at Pune so guess the home still needs a lot of work to look like a home. Among important essentials I need to get an internet connection....
more... But as you see it is quite difficult to get one. It's been a week and Rcomm has still not installed my wimax yet. I will extract my revenge by shorting the stock one day when it rallies down. Anyway, so I have to depend on my 3G from DoCoMo or the office connection. 3G is quite unreliable as I have experienced so I'm left with the only option to try to book from office. It is not a cakewalk though. I'll have to beat several contenders, First - The PRS queue, then the IRCTC virtual queue, and last my office IP Queue (as only two tickets allowed in tatkal per IP). Looks like the world cup final against Pakistan where Dhoni, Kohli, and Tendulkar all are sitting out and you're left with the likes of Unmukt Chand who have to prove a lot.
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Reached office at 8.30 (I've gone used to starting early from my stay in the west) and was glancing thru the papers when I decided that I would need a strategy to book a ticket. So, I would need to be logged in by 9.30 AM on IRCTC (so that I beat the PRS and IRCTC login queue as well as my office queue), next I need to keep my train list ready in my plan my journey. As well I needed to keep clicking the radio buttons till 10 AM so that I am first to click the book button as soon as the # disappears.
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As it is life is not easy I was able to pass time by clicking all over the trains' radio buttons but when I most needed the 'kaal chakra' to stop it refused to respond till 10.15 when I lost patience and clicked search trains again. I clicked on the SL radio button assuming AC would have been gone by now (and I was right). Voila the Book button was available now with a 182 no of seats (against a quota of 260 for 11019 from PUNE to SC). So i quickly add in my details and enter the captcha and am at the make payment screen where the availability now is 162. I quickly click the payment button and am now waiting again as the kaal chakra is taking me to the payment options page. Am simultaneously tracking availability on the govt. maintained site where availability is fast filling at the tune of 20 seats per minute. God is gracious and most helping when we need, I reach the payment options page. I have experienced that netbanking is by far the fastest method to make payment and here I quickly select the hdfc netbanking method. Within seconds I've authorized my payment and the kaal chakra is revolving as I track the fast filling seats now standing at an availability of 52. Fingers crossed and I see fast filling seats at 16 and boy I have my ticket booked.
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Phew, now I can fight my daily survival with a new spirit.
PS. Thanks for reading thru, My objective was to help others to be successful to book a tatkal ticket on IRCTC. Hope this helps others here.
