One Year Away

Joseph

It all started before we even got to India.  The Indian Embassy in Kathmandu was where we had to get our entry visas.  It has convenient opening hours of 9.30 AM to 12 PM (that’s 2 ½ hours for the non-math inclined).  Through a series of painful and long processes over 3 days and 15 hours total time (including showing up hours before opening to queue) we finally got our visas.  This was a primer on what it would be like to deal with Indian bureaucrats.

The best way to imagine the process of getting anything from a visa, to a train ticket to mailing a parcel, is to imagine an amusement park on the busiest day of the summer.  You wait forever in a line up to get to the ride, except that in this line people just rush to the front and the loudest, pushiest person wins. When you finally reach the ride you’re told, “OK, now go wait in that other line.” You say, “But that’s a whole different ride!”…but get a blank stare and someone pushes in front of you.  After a long series of line ups, if you’re lucky and an operator takes pity on you you get to ride.

The Indian Postal system is one of the least efficient operations I’ve ever witnessed.  To mail a parcel we had to; show a customs official the items we were shipping, fill out a form in triplicate, have the parcel wrapped and stitched, have melted wax dripped on the stitching and stamped with an official stamp (the “Stamp Guy”), see a woman who recorded our passport info in a huge ledger book, return to the customs official for her to initial our package,  wait for 2 hours at a counter to have the package registered into the one computer, then pay and collect the receipt.  During all this the one computer  broke and people started to get really impatient.  The more people crowded and yelled, the more the bureaucrat’s mustache would twitch back and forth, his eyes widened and sweat beaded on his forehead.  I thought he would resign on the spot.  He didn’t, and after 2 ½ hours we finally left the post office with a tiny receipt.  Now we just need to hope the parcel makes it home.