While most people buy a ticket to travel, 54-year-old Pramod Navare travels just so that he can buy a ticket. Here, he admits being biased towards local buses. "Train tickets across the country are uniform in appearance. Bus tickets, on the other hand, radically change with every city and state," say Navare, who works with the Mumbai Port Trust. What reeled him in was that the tickets "had character". As a result of this fascination, he now has over 3,000 bus tickets not just from Mumbai, but also Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and 18 other states. But if you browse through his collection, it's the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) bus tickets that form the largest piece of the pie. They rub shoulders with passes from Frankfurt, San Francisco and Paris and still, stand out.

In the wake of the BEST reducing bus fares to boost ridership, loyalists, who have travelled extensively in these buses, continue to hold on to the tiny red, blue and green coloured tickets as keepsake. "This affinity is part of the Bombay experience," says Navare, who has even held exhibitions of his collection at the Trust.

Thirty years ago, when he started collecting them, he didn't know that they would end up being collectors' items. Today, the tickets occupy an entire drawer at his Goregaon home and have been arranged in ascending order of denomination. "I go back to it on weekends, just to ensure they are in mint condition," he says. Although he started collecting it from 1987, the collection comprises tickets that date back to 1930. "Unlike the later ones that featured the amount and the serial numbers, these also mentioned the route and were larger in size." Turns out, Navare is so famous in his circle for this fixation, that when friends and acquaintances stumble upon a crumpled bus ticket in yellowed books, they sound him out. "I've been lucky to have people who understand this fascination."