Dear readers,
Your boy is now a ‘Level 4’ offender at Terminal 2 of the Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport. Read on to know how we got there.
There is a very specific kind of delirium that sets in when corporate deadlines violently collide with a last-minute beach vacation. For a guy who does not do ‘vacations’ a lot, a weekend trip to goa was always going to be a novelty. Except that this wasn’t one of your well-thought out plans. This ‘plan’ had all the structural integrity of a piping hot chai loosely packed in a thin polythene bag. You just pray that the bag holds and hope that you aren’t reduced to third degree burns at the end of your adventure.
The travel itinerary wasn’t complex but it wasn’t the most efficient either. The team had been working late nights in the week preceding a very important presentation on Thursday. For the presentation scheduled at 11 AM on Thursday, the team ended up working until 2 AM on Thursday.
After staring at slides that broke down detailed excel sheets and complex data into readable insights, I went back home exhausted and hungry. 1 solitary Vada Pav is all that gave me energy to sustain for the next 8-10 hours. Instead of sleeping, I spent the remaining dark hours furiously studying the deck so I wouldn’t blank out in front of the client. This, of course, left me with roughly no time to actually pack. But that’s okay.
You see, for a guy who doesn’t really travel, I am rather well equipped. I keep a trusty “go-bag” sitting in the storage of my bed, permanently loaded with enough essentials to survive a standard two-to-three-day trip. Call it an ‘apocalypse starter pack’, if you may.
My go-bag is called SHC-1. It’s also what the AirTag neatly hidden into the seams of the bag is labelled and stands for Short Hop Carry 1. And yes, there are 2 of them. These are not to be confused with EDC-1 (Every Day Carry 1).
2 shirts, 2 pairs of denims, 2 T-shirts, a pair of lounge pants, assorted innerwear, a well-stocked toiletry kit and a more-than-sufficiently stocked tech kit complete with phone chargers, HDMI cables, SSDs filled with popular sitcoms, TWS earphones – you know, the works.
But since this was Goa, and a slightly longer trip, I decided to transfer the contents of the go-bag into a suitcase and added a few more Goa-friendly clothes.
SHC-1 was designed in a way that it was travel friendly. Everything that needed to be carried packed into tiny pouches enabling ease of removal and re-packing at security checks. It also included only things that you could carry into the flight cabin. Of all the modes of travel, I hate flying the most simply because of all the protocols that one needs to keep in mind. And the sheer amount of waiting around one needs to do at departure lounges, Check-in/Baggage Drops, Arrival baggage belts, security check-points, it just feels like a very boring way to travel. SHC-1 eliminated all of this for me. One backpack that helped me walk into a flight and walk out of the airport with minimal friction.
Except that now, for this particular vacation, SHC-1 had transitioned from a backpack to a suitcase.
And this is where the chaos begins.
We wrapped up the meeting at 1:30 PM. All of us were exhausted, but the sheer relief of the meeting going well and the impending Goa trip kept spirits sufficiently elevated. I decided to go back home, collect my suitcase and head to the airport.
On my way home, I stopped to treat myself to another calorie-pumping vada pav. At this point, given how exhausted I was, I needed fuel. Not nutrition. The vada pav helped.
I reached airport at 16:15; well in time for my 18:00 flight. I rolled my suitcase into the baggage drop and waited for the staff to attend to me.
“Hi, good evening! I have a window seat at 21F. But I’ve not slept a wink and could really use the rest. Any chance you can upgrade me to a seat with extra leg room?”
“Ummm…. You sure you want to give up your window seat?”
“Yeah.”
“Ok, all I have is a middle emergency exit seat. Will that work?”
“Does that have extra leg room?”
“Ye-“
“Do it. DO IT NOW.”
“Done sir. Do you want to check-in your luggage?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any restricted items in your check-in luggage?”
“No.”
“Ok. Have a safe flight!”
“Thank you.”
Well, that went well. Happy with finishing up with airport rigmaroles well in time and being upgraded to a wider seat, I waited for the rest of my Goa gang to finish checking in.
Here’s the thing, though. My situational awareness at this point was running on fumes. So when the staff asked me if I was carrying any restricted items in my luggage, I forgot I had packed in one item that is an absolute no as far as check-in luggage goes.
Like I mentioned earlier, SHC-1 has a fully stocked tech kit. A bright yellow pouch that contains all the cables and tech accessories that one would need. Since SHC-1 also houses a laptop, the tech kit also contains a wireless mouse. The wireless mouse runs on 1 AA battery. For redundancies, the tech kit has 4 AA Duracell batteries at all times.
To know why batteries are not allowed in your check-in luggage, read up on UPS Airlines Flight 6. TL;DR, UPS Airlines Flight 6 crashed because 81000 lithium batteries caught fire and filled the cockpit with smoke.
Now, Duracells aren’t lithium batteries. They are alkaline batteries and are safe to be carried in checked in baggage as well.
BUT…
To the CISF guard scanning the X-ray machine, my alkaline batteries must have looked like 4 tiny cylindrical canisters clustered together in a tangle of cables. To him that must have looked like an IED. SHC-1 was now potentially a bomb…powered by the Duracell bunny.
We landed at Dabolim International Airport as scheduled and walked towards the baggage belt to collect our belongings. To make my suitcase MY suitcase, I stuck two Ghostbuster stickers on either side of the suitcase to make it easily identifiable.
The following is an excerpt of a conversation that happened completely in my head.
“There goes a giant pink suitcase.”
“There goes a backpack wrapped entirely in cling film.”
“There goes a cardboard box.”
“Hmmm, this is peculiar. Shouldn’t take this long.”
“Oh maybe I was so punctual and on time that they loaded my suitcase first and at the very back. Damn it! My punctuality has become my mortal enemy.”
“Ummm…”
“WHERE THE HECK IS MY SUITCASE?”
“Think, Raghav! Think!”
“Ok. Ok. Ok. Check the AirTag”
“MUMBAI?!?!? WTF?”
I ran towards two hapless ground staff members, shoved my phone screen with the AirTag location in their faces, and breathlessly begged for an explanation. The two women, equally bemused at my arrogance and lack of basic manners, promptly took note of my boarding details and checked with the AIX staff in Mumbai.
“Sir, your bag has been withheld by security at Mumbai because of a level 4 offence.”
“No shit, sher- wait, what?! Level 4 offence?!”
“Yes, Sir. A Level 4 Offence.”
See, here’s the thing about numbers. Numbers are absolutely useless in the absence of context.
Level 4 offence? Level 4 out of how many levels?
4 out of 5? That sounds bad. Level 4 out of 600? That’s great!
Also, what constitutes a level 4 offence? Heck, what constitutes a level 3 offence? Is too many Bhujia packets a level 6 offence?
“Ok, but what does a level 4 offence mean?”
“We don’t know, sir. We are checking.”
“Ok, can you check faster? Everything I have for this trip is in that suitcase.”
Ten agonizing minutes later, one of the ground staff members put down her walkie-talkie. She looked at me with a mixture of profound institutional sympathy and mild suspicion.
“Sir, the CISF in Mumbai pulled your bag off the belt. The X-ray flagged a restricted item in your suitcase. The machine does not specify what it is. It just flags off restricted items. As per protocol, the team will need to open your suitcase and verify the items physically. Once that is done, the concerned items will be removed and the suitcase will be loaded into the next available flight.”
“When is that flight?”
“Lands at 2 PM. Tomorrow.”
“Ma’am, I’m trying to be as patient as I possibly can. At the very least, can you please check with them and tell me what they found and what they plan on removing from my bag?”
10 more minutes later…
“Sir, did you pack any AA batteries in your suitcase?”
“Ah.”
There it was. My meticulous, redundancy-heavy, well-stocked tech kit had officially triggered a national security protocol. My Duracell bunny was a certified terrorist.
Let us take a moment to appreciate the bitter, poetic irony of this situation. I am a man who categorizes his life into modular, highly efficient systems. I have an EDC-1. I have two SHCs. I have an AirTag embedded into the very seams of my luggage to ensure absolute geographical control over my belongings.
And because of this meticulous over-preparation, I was now standing in Goa with exactly three things to my name:
- The clothes on my back
- A smartphone showing my suitcase chilling 600 kilometers away
- The lingering aftertaste of two vada pavs.
My ‘apocalypse starter pack’ had caused my own personal apocalypse.
Spoonful of Chutney 
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