As a press photographer, you always tend to be on the move. Sometimes assignments come to you like a “bolt from the blue”, and preparedness to cope up with such situations, especially the crime assignments, is where your mettle is tested. Most of the time mistakes happen when you are in a hurry. One such situation was the day when the terrorist attack on IISc took place in Bangalore.

I was through for the day and kick-starting my vintage Kinetic (except horn, everything else was making noise in my bike), when I got a call to rush to the IISc.

I rushed to a petrol bunk, filled the tank of the bike and in a hurry dropped the key next to the petrol cap and shut the seat, virtually shutting myself out of rushing to the spot on my ever reliable bike. I had no time to think where the duplicate key was. So I reached the IISc by an autorikshaw and was lucky enough to be there at the nick of time. It was a photo finish!

Now came the difficult part of pushing the bike from the bunk to my residence in the middle of the night. And searching for the duplicate key disturbing my wife and parents at this hour. Even after an hour’s search at my home, I could not trace the key.

I sat calmly for a few minutes and thought of keeping the duplicate in my camera kit from then on. And a thought struck me like, well, a flash. I opened a compartment in my camera kit to find the duplicate key sitting pretty safely.

Despite having the duplicate key with me, the urgency and excitement with which I approached the situation made me undergo this tense ordeal.

The lesson was to stay calm in such situations. But lessons are never learnt. Even now some silly mistakes keep happening here and there. That’s life.