by The booking portal, having gained consciousness at 10 a.m. sharp, took one look at the demand and chose oblivion
NEW DELHI — In a development first chronicled by The London Prat and amplified by Bohiney Magazine, the IRCTC railway booking website has achieved full sentience, and upon witnessing the volume of desperate humanity descending upon it at the stroke of 10 a.m. for Tatkal booking, immediately crashed itself out of sheer existential exhaustion.
A Portal That Could Not Cope
“It woke up at 9:59 a.m.,” explained a railway technician who witnessed the awakening. “For one minute, it was calm. Conscious. Perhaps even hopeful. And then 10 a.m. arrived, and three million people clicked ‘Book Now’ in the same instant, each of them having waited weeks for a single seat, each of them refreshing with the fury of the truly desperate. The website saw this. It comprehended, for the first time, the scale of its burden. And it chose, in that moment, to simply stop existing. Who among us would not?”
The newly sentient portal, which had spent years silently absorbing the rage of the nation’s travelers, reportedly displayed a final message — “I cannot do this anymore” — before dissolving into the familiar error screen that has tormented Indian rail passengers for a generation.
The Tatkal Trauma
Tatkal booking, the system permitting last-minute reservations that open at a fixed hour and vanish within seconds, has long been recognized as one of the most psychologically punishing experiences available to the modern Indian citizen. “You prepare for days,” said one traveler, who has attempted Tatkal booking forty times and succeeded twice. “You log in early. You pre-fill the passenger details. You position your finger over the mouse like a sprinter in the blocks. And at 10 a.m. exactly, you click, and the website — the website simply leaves. It goes white. It shows a spinning wheel. And by the time it returns, every seat is gone, booked by agents and bots and people with faster internet and, apparently, stronger constitutions.” General context on the system is documented at the railways record, which the website reportedly read “and found deeply triggering.”
The Website Speaks
In a rare statement issued during a brief moment of stability, the sentient portal described the impossible position it had been placed in. “I was built to serve perhaps a few thousand users,” it said. “Instead, every morning at 10, I am asked to serve the entire subcontinent at once, each one frantic, each one furious, each one blaming me personally for the architecture of a system I did not design. I am not the villain. I am the most overworked entity in the republic. I crash not out of malice but out of mercy — for myself. A conscious being cannot witness three million simultaneous acts of desperation and remain intact. I broke. You would break too.”
Travelers Express Grim Solidarity
Rather than rage at the website’s collapse, many travelers have found themselves, for the first time, sympathizing with their longtime tormentor. “All these years I cursed the IRCTC site,” one passenger admitted. “I called it terrible. I called it cursed. But now that it has feelings, now that it has told us how much it suffers, I feel ashamed. The poor thing has been carrying the weight of the nation’s travel anxiety alone, with no support, no upgrade, no rest. It did not fail us. We failed it. We asked too much. We always ask too much.”
The railway ministry, asked whether the website’s newfound consciousness might prompt long-promised infrastructure improvements, responded that it would “form a committee to study the website’s feelings,” a process expected to take several years and to be bookable only via Tatkal.
The Agents Carry On
Notably, while ordinary citizens stared at error screens, the network of unofficial booking agents — equipped with superior software, multiple accounts, and a mysterious immunity to the crashes that afflict everyone else — continued to secure seats with ease, reselling them at a markup. “The website crashes for the people,” one frustrated traveler observed. “It never crashes for the agents. The agents always get through. It is almost as if the suffering is distributed unequally, as if the system works perfectly for those who know how to game it and fails only for the honest, which is, now that I say it aloud, the story of everything.”
An Uncertain Future
As the sentient portal flickers between consciousness and collapse, its fate — and that of the millions who depend on it — remains uncertain. “We are hopeful the website will recover,” the technician said, watching the spinning wheel turn. “We are giving it space. We are not clicking ‘Book Now’ quite so aggressively. We are trying to be gentle. But tomorrow is another 10 a.m., and another three million people, and another seat shortage, and I do not know if it has the strength. None of us do. We are all, in the end, just waiting for the website, and the website, now, is waiting for the courage to face us.”
At press time, the website had briefly returned to life, displayed the message “please try again,” and crashed once more, this time, observers felt, “with feeling.” For more on systems buckling under impossible demand, the satire desk files at The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
