HYDERABAD: I’m sure there was a time when travelling was as easy as packing your bags and leaving. But now, it has become more and more about juggling various aspects of your life to get a window of opportunity. Don’t believe me? Just look at all your cancelled Goa plans.
It all begins with convincing your boss to grant you leave. After weeks of begging, when this finally goes through, you have to find like-minded people to take the trip, make sure everyone agrees on the same destination and finally check for the cheapest flights. Somehow, every time you check the flight rates, they go up (someone really needs to file an RTI on this). If all of this goes as planned and you don’t miss your flight/bus/train on D-day, the stars align in the sky right above you and voila! You get a vacation.
But thanks to Covid, there are now 19,000 more steps (conservative estimate). You wish it was as simple as ‘Got a vaccine? Come and travel’, but it isn’t. Every vaccine comes with a list of countries that you can and cannot go to. But the woes are not just limited to international travellers.
Even travelling locally has a new set of questions. ‘What is the quarantine period in that State?’ ‘Can you travel with one dose?’ ‘I shared a biryani with someone who is vaccinated, can I go to Maharashtra?’ The list of questions is unending. Sadly, there’s no fixed answer for this chaos.
Travel companies and brokers are the worst hit. Their job just went from telling their customers about Agra, Paris and London to AstraZeneca and Pfizer. Travel agents have the same look as LIC agents these days as they run around with huge bundles of papers to find the right permutations and combinations to lock in a client.
Commercial establishments aren’t far behind as a lot of them have set up their own rules on which vaccine is the ‘best’ and are allowing customers based on that. To add to the chaos, the government is now proposing to allow the mixing of vaccines -- which promises to open a whole new can of worms. Imagine going to a restaurant and finding out only one dose of a particular vaccine is acceptable there.
But it’s not all gloom and doom, as 54-year-old Indian comedian Atul Khatri has found a solution that saves a lot of time. That’s right, a comedian has beaten all the scientific and administrative brains of the world to a solution: Printing his vaccination certificate on his t-shirt (as seen in the photo).
Cool brands, that’s your cue to start printing these certificates on masks, mugs and flip flops. And for even cooler individuals, I suggest you get it tattooed. Because then, finally, we’ll have a tattoo/mug/t-shirt that actually says something useful and contributes to the functioning of society (offence intended).
(Bhavneet is a stand-up comedian and this may be his new material)