Tales from Mumbai - a visa for Arthur Dent?

If you're travelling to India, one of the first things you need is a visa. The High Commission website tells you that visas can often be processed the same day in person, and since our group was making the trip at fairly short notice we thought we'd do that rather than risk posting three passports and hoping for no delays. It turns out that this was a terrible mistake.

My colleague, went down to put the applications and came back with two receipts and he message that the visas should be ready on Thursday next week. (He'd not been resident in the UK for a year, and I have dual Australian/British citizenship, so that makes things take a little longer). Ok, so far so good, and I had the easy job of taking the receipts down and picking the passports up. On the Thursday I duly rang the number on the receipt and was told the visas would be ready at 3pm, no problem...

God still speaks in the world, and he does it with great humour, so naturally my journey into Greater Bureaucracy began when I hopped onto a London bound train, found myself a seat, and seconds later the message "due to a faulty overhead line in Royston, this train is now cancelled and will terminate here" (along with all other London bound trains that day). Friday. The trains are running, and I make my way to India House: one of the biggest and busiest embassies of one of the world's fastest growing high-tech economies.

The place you collect visas from is a small external window that during lunchtimes looks as though it is a closed remnant left over from the fifties. It turns out that this is because the entire High Commission feels like an old remnant left over from the fifties. The upstairs and downstairs halls are full of old wooden bank-teller windows behind which the overworked staff sit, dealing with paperwork in ranks of wooden pidgeon holes. I'm sure they do have computers too, but they seem well hidden. Both the upstairs and downstairs halls are packed so full of applicants it's hard to move around. At the front door, a tired man looks at an enormous queue of people's paperwork and snaps 'upstairs' or 'downstairs' at them depending on where they need to go. In my case this turned out to be downstairs, where they told me about the little window outside I really needed to go to (when it opens after lunch).

The woman behind the window (after lunch) was friendly but quiet. I handed over the two receipts, and she efficiently hunted through her pigeon holes, eventually returning both receipts and one passport. There was then an awkward pause as I stood there waiting for the second passport, or for her to say something, while she stared quietly out at me, presumably wondering what the heck I was doing still standing at her window. I broke the silence with a nervous
"Erm, I think there should be a second passport".
"Not ready."
"Oh, do you know when it will be ready?"
"It's not here. It's not ready."
"Yes, but can you check when it will be ready - they told me on the phone it was ready yesterday"
"Not ready. I don't have it. It's not ready."

This was a little awkward. The official on the phone had told me it was ready, so presumably it had left her desk, and it hadn't arrived at the collection window. I had visions of my colleague's passport floating lost around a creaking embassy building while nobody would look further than their pigeon holes to find out where it was. I didn't have a phone or pay-phone change to call the first official with. Obviously I'd have to ask inside the halls. But whom? Faced with the daunting task of two halls crammed full of people and a take a number system that I knew (from another colleague) would give you a number at 9.30am that could be called at 4pm, I decided to ask the doorman.

"Excuse me".
"Upstairs".
"No, I need to ..."
"Downstairs."
"Can you please listen to me first. Last week my colleague applied for our visas, and..."
"Applications upstairs"
"No, we've already out in the application, but..."
"Collection downstairs"
"...the woman on the phone said they were ready, but..."
"You need to go to the window outside"
"but the woman at the window didn't have them"

At this he said something new - "Go to the PRO". Unfortunately, the questions "Where is the PRO?" and "What is the PRO?" were also met with the response "Go to the PRO". After a trip upstairs, frantically looking for anything marked PRO (there isn't any sign), and returning to ask "I can't find the PRO, where is it?" his helpful reply was "Just go to the PRO".

Luckily for me, asking random customers in the hall "Excuse me, do you know where the PRO is?" worked, as the second customer asked happened to have been there before. The PRO is the unsigned locked door between two of the upstairs bank-teller-like windows (numbers 9 and 10 I think) that's normally obscured by all the people waiting for the windows. (How foolish of me not to realise!)

When I squeezed my way to the door, there was a small huddle of forlorn-looking people who were also waiting for the mystical PRO. Apparently, they said, a grumpy man (the PRO?) would come to the door every now and then, open it, maybe say something to someone, then close it and disappear. More worrying was the tale of the PRO-seeker in front of me. He had a story that started similarly to mine -- he had applied for two visas and only one passport was returned. He found the PRO, and explained his plight. The PRO said to come back next Wednesday, which was difficult because the man was flying on Monday. The PRO relented after a while and asked to see the passport he did get back, so he could sort the problem out. He then abruptly disappeared behind the door, returning some twenty minutes later with a receipt for the passport and the message "yes, you can collect it next Wednesday" (still two days after the flight).

Keeping my passport well-hidden inside my coat, I braved the PRO.
"Three thirty", he said to me before I could even say a word.
"I was told my colleague's passport was ready, but..."
"It'll be ready at three thirty", he said still not looking at the receipt and having no idea which passport he was talking about. I had a strange feeling I'd had this conversation before, with the doorman.
"No, I was told it was ready yesterday at three thirty..."

It took a little convincing, but eventually I did convince the PRO to at least look at the receipt and check where my colleague's passport was, without handing over my own precious passport. And, with an expression of utter jubilation, a short while later I did get the passport with the visa. I understand the previous customer also eventually managed to persist enough to collect his and his colleague's passports that day (rather than having to return two days after their flight).

If there's a moral to this story, well I guess it is this. Bureaucracy is always going to be tough and slow with any country and any embassy, but if you need to apply for a conference visa to India, maybe you'd better do it by post.

Tales from Mumbai

This week I'm over in Mumbai, at IIT Bombay's TechFest, helping our research group present the same MindReading Machines demo that we presented at the Royal Society's summer science exhibition. (Don't worry, MindReading Machines won't find out that you had Mars Bars for breakfast -- it's all about understanding facial expressions and gestures rather than mystically reading your secret thoughts.) I'm not directly involved in the MindReading Machines research, but I'm usually up for a free trip somewhere exciting!

Anyway, travel to exotic climes is always fun, and I've got a few spare jetlagged hours when I can't sleep, so I'll try to post a few of the more fun stories.

Comments Moderation turned on

Well, those more regular updates haven't happened (yet). Neither has posting sections of my thesis (it turns out I'm too embarrassed to post the unedited parts, and some sections of my thesis include work that has not yet been published so blogging it is perhaps a bad idea).

I've turned on comment moderation, so the number of spam comments should slow down. Why do I mention this on a so-far fairly inactive blog? Site statistics for the Computer Lab suggest a surprisingly large number of people visit my lab pages each month (probably mostly prospective PhD applicants checking out the group). Since I do link this blog from there, it's worth making sure the spam comments are kept in check.