Kerala, India

What do you do with an expired passport? The correct answer is: get it renewed. However, in India's Kerala, an old man was left flabbergasted by how his family used his old passport.

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A video of the incident shared on social media platform X has left netizens in splits. It shows an ordinary passport's transformation into something extraordinarily imaginative or ordinary — your choice.

What happened?

X user D Prasanth Nath received a video as a WhatsApp forward. The content? Something too funny to not share.

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In it, you can see an Indian passport, which at first look, seems like your run-of-the-mill travel document. However, a closer look reveals that it is a treasure trove of contact numbers.

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Nath, in his post, shares that the passport belongs to an elderly man. The man had submitted it for renewal, completely unaware of its contents.

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Watch the video here:

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Unknown to him, someone in his family had used it as a makeshift phone book, meticulously scribbled with seemingly important contacts. These numbers are accompanied by the names of the people they belong to, all written in Malayalam.

Not only that, the passport was also "optimally" used for budgeting purposes. The last pages have some calculations that could very well be an account of household expenses.

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Sharing the now-viral video that already has more than 895,000 views, Nath wrote: "An elderly gentleman submitted his passport for renewal. He was not aware of what someone in his house did. The officer has still not recovered from the shock after seeing this."

"It's is (in) Malayalam, but you will understand the same," he added.

Internet reacts

Netizens were quick to react to the one-minute video, with one user calling it the "Optimum use of resources".

Another left a tongue-in-cheek comment, "If you can't travel at least make use of the pages properly."

Yet another said, "Found some real use for passport!"

One user went a step ahead and used the video to promote sustainability, saying, "Someone put the empty pages in a passport to good use. Instead of issuing every passport with too many empty pages most of which may never be used, go paperless and digital. Time to drop the 18th-century habit of hand-stamping passports with ink and rubber typefaces."

Others, however, didn't find the video funny and pointed out that a passport is government property, and the owner is "likely to be questioned" for defacing it.

(With inputs from agencies)