&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Rajat Patidar’s old SIM lands with Chhattisgarh youth who received calls from Kohli, De Villiers")
How destiny sometimes rings for you is surprising. A technical glitch has recently resulted in some of the greatest cricket players, including Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers, calling on one of RCB captain Rajat Patidar’s old phone numbers, only for a Chhattisgarh youth to answer it, much to everyone’s amusement. In a routine telecom company practice, a mobile number that usually remains inactive for nearly six months is reallocated to someone else; the same happened with one of Patidar’s unused numbers, which is now in the name of a 21-year-old Manish Bisi from Madgaon village in Chhattisgarh.
The incident came to light after Manish Bisi began receiving a flurry of calls from some high-profile names from the cricketing world, Gariaband SP Nikhil Rakhecha said in an official statement. He said it was a WhatsApp number that wasn’t used for some time but has now been reallocated to the original owner, the RCB skipper.
Also read | End of the road for Virat and Rohit as batting pair do not fit in plans for 2027 ODI World Cup – Report
“It was a WhatsApp number and had probably not been in use for the last six months. As per company rules, a number that remains unused for over six months is allotted to other customers, which might have led to the allotment to the Devbhog youth. We have now returned the number to cricketer Rajat Patidar,” the SP said.
Meanwhile, Manish, who claims to be a massive Virat Kohli fan, purchased the SIM from a Devbhog mobile shop in June. A week later, one of his friends, Khemraj, helped him install WhatsApp on his mobile, where Patidar’s picture automatically came up as the profile photo.
They initially thought it was a glitch as soon as calls began coming in from numbers claiming it to be Patidar’s current and former teammates, including Virat, AB de Villiers, among others, all addressing him as ‘Rajat’.
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Thinking of this as a prank, Manish and his friends also chatted with the callers for about a fortnight before the matter escalated. Patidar, unable to access his old number, contracted the Madhya Pradesh Cyber Cell, which then reached out to the Gariaband Police.
The police then reached out to the village, tracking the number and recovered the SIM, which has now been reallocated to Patidar.
