Chengalpattu, Tamil Nadu: Remember the movie The Pursuit of Happyness where a man’s unrelenting quest for a lost gadget reflected the highs and lows of life? Like Chris Gardener, Dinesh, a Chennai resident, too has been caught in the dilemma of highs and lows after losing his iPhone six months back. The only solace: he saw his prized and expensive phone not stolen or misplaced but fall into the Sri Kandaswamy Temple hundi (donation box) at Thiruporur, right in front of his eyes, though accidentally.
Dinesh immediately approached the temple, but the officials were in no mood to listen. They believed once in hundi, always a temple property. Though they sympathetically listened to his plight, they firmly reminded him that the hundi, belongs to the deity. So it was no longer his iPhone; it was Lord Murugan’s now.
Months later, when temple authorities opened the hundi, they found the usual cash, gold, and silver and a shiny iPhone. “At least let me see if my data’s intact,” Dinesh pleaded upon reaching the temple. Unrelenting to hand over the phone back to Dinesh, they offered to extract personal data from the phone.