INDIAN BUREAUCRACY
India visas again. After great effort we sent in our Indian visa applications with our passports by Fed Ex on Tuesday, hoping to get them back in time to leave. Luckily we paid $5 to get constant updates on SMS. Because today at noon we got and update. We were missing a form, the Added Particulars Form For Visa Services. I clicked on the link they gave us and there it was. I went next door to Don my neighbors house to print it up and then Susie and I filled it out by hand. As I filled it out I realized that every single piece of information asked for without exception had also been asked for on the original visa application, every single thing. Name, passport number, even Kathe’s nationality, whether I had ever been arrested or refused entry to India, all of it was on the previous form. We were even invited to sign into their website and download and pay $18 for a prepaid label to have it be mailed to the Indian Embassy.
But the website wouldn’t accept either my email name or any password I could think of. But reading more carefully I was told we could sent it by Fed Ex on our own, which I did. But the cost for me to send it overnight is $67. No matter, it will get there tomorrow, Saturday, when they will certainly be closed.
When I got home I asked Vickie Collins, next door, who was out for a walk why they would demand the same information twice. She has an Indian son in law. Her feeling it is to give people more jobs. And then I was reminded of a time 30 or more years ago when I was with a group of students in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. One of the students had gotten a care package from home and it was being held at a customs center in Colombo, the capitol. I was going there a couple of days later and said I would pick it up. I could the customs center. I sat at a table and four men brought the package out. One of the men’s job was to cut it open, another arranged it on the table, a third wrote down the contents, the four supervised. It was three candy bars and a t-shirt which the man assigned to open the box then put back in the box and handed to me. It certainly looked like make work to me. So maybe Vickie is right.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 