The Truthiness about Santa and Banta

According to Captain Nanu and Prabhu, this story actually happened. Since both of them are not the kind of guys who say just about anything when drunk, I am inclined to believe the 'truthiness' of the story. And as Stephen Colbert never tires of saying, truthiness is more important than truth.

All the people who joined our company through campus recruitment had a common training programme for 4 months. During this time, we used to stay at our company's training centre in, let's say, Bangalore. Life in college hostel had set our bar for 'pretty nice places' quite low. Still, it was a pretty nice place - with landscaped gardens, good food, basketball courts and fantastic weather. The only problem was that they didn't provide internet in our rooms. So to access internet, we needed to go to the computer lab.

Our batch included two sardars - let's just call them Santa Singh and Banta Singh. They are true blue Surds, hailing from Bhatinda and Jalandhar (two of the biggest cities in Canada). Come Diwali and the Surds were feeling quite homesick. With the limited number of leaves available during training, they didn't want to waste time in trains which would have taken them close to 6 days in travel alone. So they decided to travel by air.

However, there was one small problem - all flights to Delhi during Diwali were prohibitively expensive. It was in such a situation that Santa's roomie Prabhu told him that early morning flights were much cheaper than the rest. Santa's face lit up on hearing this and he hurried away to give this info to Banta.

That night, Prabhu had a troubled sleep. He was woken up by Banta knocking on his door at 3 am. This was followed by Santa and Banta loudly discussing how to go about executing their strategy of procuring cheap tickets. Having come to a conclusion by 3.30 am, they both proceeded to the computer lab to book their flight tickets. Poor Prabhu, little did he know that Santa and Banta would confuse 'early morning flights' with 'flights booked early in the morning'.

Of course, Prabhu came to know about this only when a tired and frustrated Santa returned to the room at 6 am and shouted angrily, "Oye! I tried all night, but the flights were all the same price as before."