Friday, June 20, 2008

BLACK (or white?)

A common sight that you see outside a movie theater, especially if the movie is brand new or super-hit is people selling tickets in black. I've purchased tickets that way 2-3 times in the past, never did i experience what i did today.
Normal day to begin with. We went just in time for the movie only to see house-full board at the ticket counter. And, the guy at the counter said 'you should've come before 2 minutes'. Sigh! Wondering what to do we look around only to see mere baap pehle aap playing in the next theater. Throwing one another an expression of disgust we waited for don't know what. After a wait of around 30 minutes, we gave up.
We finally started walking out which is when there were these people who were chanting 'balcony balcony'. On being asked how much, he said '100 rupees madam'. My friend very smartly asked '100 rupees for 2 tickets?' (I couldn't suppress a grin because I knew (so did she) that the tickets costed 65 bucks apiece) . There began the bargaining. We said we were ready to pay him 160. He dismissed the idea without even considering our beseeching looks. With heavy hearts we began tracing our steps back to where we parked our vehicle. The guy who earlier said no to 160 rupees came running towards us and said 'give me 160 and take these tickets, the show is about to start'. We couldn't belive our eyes, readily gave the amount and walked inside the theater.
We went in the theater, the guy nicely tore our tickets, and then we happily went to occupy our seats and we found 2 other people already sitting. The guy who shows people to their seats asked us for our stubs and verified with those people and saw that they had the same seat numbers. He asked us how much we paid for these tickets. We said '80 rupees'. He grinned making us look worse by the minute. He later came and said ' these are tickets for the morning show'. We were stumped, felt extremely stupid and walked out hurriedly(with one half of the ticket) in a hope to find the guy who sold us the tickets. Hah! Like he'd lurk around, wait for us to come yell at him or whatever. End of story? No, not so soon.
Now that we didn't have any other option, feeling awfully cheated we walked towards the parking lot which is when we were approached by 2 people. One of them told me ' I want two tickets please give them to me'. The other one said 'no, no don't give him both, give me one'. The 1st man had already snatched the tickets from my hand, oh they weren't even tickets just the stubs, thrust 150 bucks in my hand and left in a jiffy. I was so shocked when he asked me for the tickets, even more shocked with how quickly it all happened and I had the 150 rupees in my hand. I still am very puzzled with the whole thing. There is something very wrong. But we were tensed-happy that we got our money back. All sorts of things started reeling in my head. What if that money was fake? What if it were some kind of a nasty business that we got ourselves into? Who was that man? Well, you know..
How strange do you think it is?