An assistant professor at the University of Delhi has alleged that her car was broken into on a busy road in North Campus, with thieves stealing her wallet and laptop.
The faculty member, who teaches at Maitreyi College and is also pursuing a PhD at DU, shared details of the incident on Instagram, where she posts content under the handle ‘Praso Literature’.
Thieves break into DU professor’s car
“I went to North Campus with my husband because I had some PhD-related work,” she said in her video posted on April 7, speaking in Hindi. “After wrapping up the work, we decided to go to Kamla Nagar as I had to give some clothes to the tailor for alteration.”
“We parked our car in front of Croma on Bungalow Road, which is a very busy road,” she said.
The tailor informed them that the alteration would take roughly two hours. To kill time, the DU professor and her husband went to a restaurant for some food, and then to Tanishq in the Kamla Nagar market.
“Now if we had walked to Tanishq, we would have seen our car parked on the road. However, we wanted to relive our college days, so we took a rickshaw,” she recalled.
After visiting Tanishq, when the couple returned to their car, they saw the driver’s side window had been smashed.
“We saw the glass window had been completely shattered,” said the DU professor in her video. “We stood there shocked, numb. A couple of people also came over to see what had happened, and they were shocked too,” she said.
Laptop, wallet stolen
The assistant professor said the most stressful part was seeing that the thieves had stolen her laptop, which contained six years’ worth of PhD work. “Will my supervisor believe me?” she wondered.
Her laptop with all her banking cards was also stolen, as was the air purifier inside the car. The professor said that she and her husband called the police, but is yet to post an update on what happened next.
(Also read: Bengaluru’s ‘pookie professor’ wins internet’s heart with hilarious reaction to students’ prank)
Her video elicited sympathy on Instagram, where she has over 97,000 followers.
“Losing research data is literally disastrous,” wrote one viewer. “Check all your sent emails because we send updates of work minimal monthly to supervisors. Thoda time lgega, but worst case scenario will be losing one month’s work. Also, I hope you have at least some backup,” another advised.
“I always had this nightmare of getting my laptop stolen and losing all my PhD data and work.. I hope you kept a backup in drive,” an Instagram user said.