Taking Stock - Part 1

It's been a year and about a week to the day we arrived in Bangalore. Regrets? None really. Miss anything? Sure. Here's my list: (not in any particular order of importance)

1) Stacy's pita chips with hummus

2) Driving. Although I have promised myself that I'll be out there behind a wheel this year contributing to the city's smog problem. Unless, of course, I get a REVA, but that's a topic for another post.

3) Stress-free driving (an oxymoron in India) through tree-lined roads. In the concrete wilderness that is modern-day Bangalore, most forms of the color green are found on giant billboards announcing the next big development in gated communities. You may have trouble spotting a tree in the midst of all this.

4) Cleaning the house (and having a clean-looking house to show for it)

5) Getting the house cleaned (and having a clean-looking house to show for it)

6) Being able to have more than five people over at a time

7) Not having to arrange your life around traffic patterns

8) The ability to bundle everyone in the minivan for an impromptu hike or bike on local trails. Even though, more often than not, such suggestions were greeted by: 'Nooo! Do we have to?'

9) Not having to get your darned vegetables weighed at a separate counter at the supermarket before you take them to the checkout register. Believe me, this is extremely annoying!

10) The luxury of pouring cold milk onto your cereal from a respectable and sturdy plastic jug. Polythene milk bags that leak all over your kitchen countertop....grrrr!

11) Oh alright...for those of you reading this....old FRIENDS!

Stay tuned next week (or whenever I get around to it :) for my list of things I don't miss from our former lives.

The Greased Palm Delivers the Goods

It’s sometimes easy to forget that, despite our core identity, we are not currently Indian citizens. All five of us hold American passports and we recently realized that we had visa "issues" that made our collective residency status a little shaky. The kids had entered the country on visitor visas, one of which had expired. The other two had exceeded the 180-day period within which they have to register with a local Foreigner Registration Office (FRO). The same was true was for the PIO card that I held. The only one whose status was current was B., whose frequent trips to other parts of the globe worked to his advantage in this instance. So the rest of us had, in effect, overstayed our welcome in the country. Such a realization, in the US, would have sent us into a tizzy and had us frantically contacting immigration lawyers to avert deportation. In India, we handled it with the “yahan sab chalta hai” indifference that defines the general Indian attitude towards rules and regulations. Still, it was a situation that had to be rectified and so we trooped off to the FRO in Bangalore city to see if we could rejoin the ranks of the country’s law-abiding residents. Thus began a frustrating cycle of endless paperwork, long waits in longer queues, and multiple visits to that office, at the end of which we were no closer to our goal. “Why you don’t have copy of husband’s passport?” demanded the clerk, on my fourth trip there, after going through the five-inch thick sheaf of documents that constituted my application.
I pointed out to him that this was not on the checklist of required documentation that they had handed me the first time I came there. He seemed ready to admit, albeit grudgingly, that I had a point but then, the next instant, his face brightened as he saw a way to score a decisive win in the exchange: “But you overstayed, no? Then what you expect?” We ended up hiring a travel agent to dig us out of the mess. The next time I went with V.’s papers, I was met by a person from the agency. As the line we were waiting in moved forward slowly to the desk where applications were being tossed aside on such grounds as “where is proof of residence in quadruplicate?” or “you must have old passport copy (even if it expired 25 years ago)", the agent looked nervous and unsure of himself. A quick phone call later, another person suddenly appeared in the line next to us. This middle-aged, mild-mannered man was THE INSIDER, the guy who could move our papers up the line, stand next to the clerk and cajole him into clearing them, get some other key signatures on them, and eventually deliver V.’s passport to us along with the all-important visa extension.
What, I asked the agent after he hesitantly disclosed the not insignificant fee for the insider’s services, would have happened if we hadn’t used this guy. After all, we still had to pay a penalty for overstaying and we weren’t trying to bypass any laws; just figure out what the legal process was to stay on in the country. So, in essence, all this man was doing was helping us jump the line. The agent seemed ready for the question. “It would have been impossible to get this done today “, he said. “You would have had to come back four, maybe five times”.
And so therein lies the root cause of dishonesty among Indian government officials. The system is purposely flawed and inefficient in order for this counter-system to develop that then becomes accepted as the way things are done. The innocuous looking person who pushed our case forward, as well as his cronies within the FRO, represent the face of systemic corruption; the openly murky side of the government's operations.
But what about those of us that go along with this? I was initially outraged by the whole thing...I pictured myself taking on the system ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron’ style. But then the main characters in the movie didn’t really come out ahead, did they? And so while I’ve given V. the whole spiel on the importance of being principled and not being a party to this, I’m not sure if we’ll do anything differently when it comes to pushing the other children’s papers through. After all, who wants to be a frequent visitor to the FRO? It's definitely not on my list of delightful places to hang out in in Bangalore.
What would you do?