The woe of booking a train ticket on the IRCTC portal is not new to Indians. In fact, it has been deemed to be more difficult than even cracking the IIT-JEE and is listed as the toughest thing for an Indian according to NDTV’s public survey, in which eliminating corruption took the second spot. The matter has gone farther than this as research lead Peter Stanley of Stanford University, who leads a team of doctoral students studying ‘The difficulty of handling or executing any task’, has listed ‘Booking a train ticket on IRCTC website’ at 100 on a scale of 0 to 100 thereby making it as a standard measure for estimating the difficulty level of executing other tasks (On a side note, on his scale, eating a banana stands at 0.1 while not even eating a banana is at the minimum 0).

While most of us either give up after a gazillion failed attempts at booking a ticket on the site, or keep trying forever, a Computer Science student has found his own way of getting things done. Rakesh Kapur, a final year Computer Science student from the prestigious IIT- Kharagpur, who considers himself an expert at executing ‘Denial of Service’ attacks and has links with international hackers’ group ‘Hacktivist’, has successfully hacked the IRCTC portal to book a ticket from Kharagpur to Mumbai. According to Rakesh, it is quicker and easier to hack the site than book a ticket in the usual way. “After 782 unsuccessful attempts at booking a ticket on IRCTC”, said a delighted Rakesh, “I decided to tap into my programming skills and it turned out to be surprisingly simple to hack the site. You can find out how I did that on my blog, hackandbookquick.blogspot.com. While the normal procedure takes a minimum of 500 attempts and yet doesn’t guarantee you success, this approach is foolproof, swift and reliable.”

When contacted, the IRCTC technical division said they were themselves thrilled to know that a way existed to book tickets quickly and are even considering making it the regular process to book tickets. “No we aren’t shocked,” said a calm Sukhdhir Singh, the chief of IRCTC technical division. “In fact, we are delighted to know that there is a way to swiftly book tickets through IRCTC. Sometimes our own staff cannot book tickets, it’s so embarrassing. So we are going to give this new hack a shot.”