Last week, Tharun Bhascker called me up to tell me that we might be heading to Delhi and Mumbai to shoot a corporate video for one of the Big Four in a couple of days. Needless to say, I was rather excited at the prospect of traveling around the country to shoot a video for an international firm and asked for further details about the shoot. He gave me a quick briefing and said that he would confirm our dates shortly. I did not hear back from him after that and assumed and we would not be going for the shoot.
Monday evening, 5:40pm. My phone rings. It’s Tharun. “Kishor, pack your bags, our plane leaves in 2 hours.” A bit more notice would’ve been helpful but I wasn’t complaining. After a mad rush of packing, charging batteries and formatting memory cards, we were swiftly on our way to the airport. As we hit a patch of traffic, I could see the inevitable consequence of the short notice – we were going to miss the plane. Couple of phone calls later and couple of missed planes later (one plane was missed due to our agent assuming that 20:15hrs and 10:15pm meant the same thing), we were on our way back home, only to wake up in 4 hours to catch the first plane of the day to Delhi.
We thought the worst of the trip was over. How wrong we were. However, the shoot in Delhi went off rather smoothly even though we had to cover a lot of interviews in that one day. After some rushed goodbyes and spending less than 12 hours in Delhi, we were on our way to the airport once again to catch our plane to Mumbai. On the way there, our genius agent called us to let us know that our plane was actually at 7pm and not at 7:30pm as he had originally told us. Well, wasn’t that just great – we were definitely going to miss this plane too.
Once we arrived at the airport, we were greeted by a representative of our agent to who was supposed to book us on the next flight to Mumbai. After lots of squabbling, some cash inevitably changed hands and we were booked on the place departing at 10:50pm (that’s 22:50pm to our agent). We paid the representative, he grinned broadly and showed us to what he called the “Transit Lounge” but turned out to be just the waiting area. He was gone by the time we could complain – smart chap. In this entire rush, at one point, Tharun had accidentally dropped his laptop and when we sat down to check if it was still working, all we saw was a blank screen. Things could definitely not get any worse. Fortunately, they did not. The airport bar was our best friend for the next few hours as we familiarized ourselves with the wonderful drink that was Kingfisher Blue.
After all this madness, landing in Mumbai at 1:30 in the morning was not fun. As we stepped out of the airport, we found ourselves sweating like pigs while we tried to coordinate with our driver who we just could not find! This was hardly what we needed at this point of time, deprived of sleep and food but such was the situation. Couple of phone calls later and realizing that Mumbai had two airports, we eventually arrived at our hotel at half past 2 in the morning. What fun. On the plus side, we discovered that Tharun’s laptop was working after plugging it in and it was only his battery that had died.
4 hours of sleep later, we woke up groggily to three alarms – one on my phone, the wake up call from the hotel and a phone call from Tharun’s parents. After a breakfast consisting of what can only very crudely be described as dosa, we checked out of the hotel (much to our pleasure) and were picked up to go to the company’s offices. Once again, the shoot went off very smoothly and we found some fantastic locations for shots. In a sad way that can only be appreciated by other photographers, I was rather excited with some of the opportunities for beautiful compositions in what was otherwise a rather drab environment. But moving on, we managed to catch our plane this time, played some games on the iPad and landed in Hyderabad before I knew it.
While it was a relief to be back at home, I must say that it was a very exciting trip that kept us on our toes all the time and provided a rollercoaster of emotions in such a short period of time. Bring on the next trip!
Currently listening to – Alive by Pearl Jam
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