INDIAN VISAS
We finally got our Indian visa applications sent off at considerable expense and a lot of confusion. In retrospect the confusion was partly a result of there being two kinds of visa with two kinds of administration. But the real reason the process weighed so heavily on us was because of the weight of bureaucracy and the rules and regulations and impersonal presence of big brother telling us what to do.
I’m still not sure of what was going on but this is how I understand it. Twelve years ago when we got a ten year visa we downloaded the application form from the internet, printed it out and then filled it out by hand and mailed it in with our passports and a photograph and a check for about $120. Then three weeks later it arrived back in the mail.
But in the digital age much more can be done on line. And in this case the on line filling out the form had a great number of instructions and warnings and inflexibility. First we read the warnings. If we made any mistakes they could not be corrected once sent in and we would lose the considerable visa fee and then have to start all over again. We could phone in for advice but were restricted to 5 minutes after which there would be a $2.18 charge per minute. We would have to wait another week before we could make another five minute free call. So we could see in advance that the India mission was very fussy and we were in jeopardy. Once we started filling out the form there were a number of questions that didn’t make sense and some things that seemed irrelevant, such as knowing information about my long dead father including the city in which he was born. I guessed at the city, could that doom my whole application?
We were given a temporary ID that would allow us to leave the web site if we had to look something up and be able to come back to our half filled form. I tried this out a couple of times but when I did my number was cut short and didn’t work so I had to fill the whole long form again, three or four times. And then we had to include a digital photograph that had to be no more than one megabyte and I had no way on my iPad to reduce the size of a photograph except to send it by mail in which I was given a choice of how big the photograph should be. But Susie used only gmail which didn’t have this option so took forever. And payment had to be in just certain ways, no credit cards, no personal checks, only money order or bank checks.
But because the Indian government had apparently found this process so tedious, and maybe so irritating to people simply wanting to go to India for two weeks to lie on a beach, that for all except the 30 day visas they had outsourced the other visa options to VFS Global which apparently handled visas worldwide for all kinds of countries besides India. VFS global had different regulations and it turned out was much simpler.
We followed the instructions of VFS Global which included filling out the long Indian government application with all the warnings of the Indian government still in our ears. After finally filling out the Indian visa application and getting the photographs the right size (but slightly pixelated through shrinking them) we were able to pay with a credit card quite normally and needed less documentation than the 30 day on line visa required.
We had paid for, and were given, a FedEx label so we went to Fed Ex to print out the form and the label and to send it off. But it took us another hour at Fed Ex to figure out how to get the form and the label out of Susie’s iPad to FedEx by email and then back to the FedEx printer which in the end only cost 18 cents a page or both of ours for less than a dollar. Finally, exhausted after having spent perhaps ten hours total working on this and totally irritated, we went home, hoping now that we would not get tangled in more bureaucracy and would get the visas in time for our trip.
The heavy hand of bureaucracy is world wide, but many immigrants came to America to free themselves from the heavy hand of government or church or social stratification. We came to be free. And the farther West we went the freer we felt. On the big empty plains of North Dakota and Wyoming that I crossed by Amtrak this summer freedom from government is in their bones. Government wasn’t going to tell us as Americans what to do and just to be sure we weren’t going to be subjugated again we were going to be able to bear arms to protect ourselves, or that that is how some of us Americans interpreted and still interpret the constitution with our militias everywhere protecting their freedom.
So as Americans Susie and I also resent being told what to do particularly when the process is so tedious and requires a digital mind set. So this is probably part of the reason that we resent the bureaucratic process so much. The IRS is another bureaucracy that we have to face once a year, but both of us outsource the process to someone whose job it is to understand it and pay to have our taxes done for us even when we could save a good deal of money by doing it ourselves, our way of avoiding bureaucracy.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 