A Day at the Immigration Office.....

Tuesday, 2nd March 2010

The four of us who had gone to Kerala in January, as pakdokter had reported earlier, managed to get our appeal for this re-entry (within 2 months) into India to be given a special consideration after engaging the help of individuals in high places to support our appeal. A condition for this approval was that we had to report ourselves at the FRRO Office in New Delhi within 14 days of our arrival there.

We engaged our local agent to take us to the FRRO Office. Early Tuesday morning the 6 of us cramped into an 'Ambassador Taxi' and headed to the FRRO Office.

The scene at the office was reminiscent of our own Immigration Office at Damansara Heights or the National Registration Office in PJ New Town 20 years ago! Long queues of people from Afghanistan, Nepal and a mix of tourists from everywhere....they either had to re-endorse their visa as pakdokter and group had to do, or had to re-apply their visa if they had lost their passports to thefts etc, or perhaps had to extend their expiring visa........( Malaysians who groaned and whined about our Immigration and Registration Departments and had nothing good to talk about of our own country should be sent here for mental-tuning...)

When our group arrived, the number in queue was already at 400 and the queue was hardly moving........

If Indonesia goes with the tag-line " semuanya bisa di atur, pak...." well India falls in the same bracket. Pakdokter and gang did not have the time to wait for the papers to be done over the estimated 3 days! We had to report to the 'Palace on Wheels' train the next day!

So with a little bit of Indian "ingenuity" and "goodwill" we overcame the wheels of Indian bureaucracy and sorted out our paper-work within 5 hours!

Ravee, our local agent and the driver cramped-in at the front...

pakdokter, pakdokter's partner and Siti at the back of the Ambassador
maybe the Nano can fit all 6 of us too...

first to take 4 photographs...

then ran across the street to photostat the forms in triplicate

(the photographer said he will be able

to afford a photocopy machine next month)

business is booming in India.....

the queues of people we had to join.....

the relieved but tired faces after a half-day

jostling with people of the world

to get our papers done....