Visa, schmisa

PERIPATETIC

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The visa photography session was fair indication of the inconveniences that lie ahead. No glasses, no hats, show your ears, pin that fringe, correct your head orientation and no smiling. With US visa regulations, zero expression is the standard.

The French way is that 70 per cent of the photo should be occupied by your face. Does that account for the size of your head? Some people genuinely have disproportionately large heads. Anyway, by the end of it you're so self-conscious that when the photo arrives you're looking like a deer caught in headlights.

"But that's the way you always look," says my mother, also rejecting my plea for sympathy. I hear the rigmarole will also involve an inkless scanner that will register my fingerprint and attempt to match it to that of any and all registered felons, and with robotic proficiency, fail.

The Schengen visa, in my case for France, has been rated as the second toughest visa administration for Indians. A spring win for Nicolas Sarkozy, whose hard-line stance against radicalism and terrorism is thinly veiled, could mean tighter French visa regimes. Ironically, despite these continuously fortified fortress policies, tourist arrival numbers in most countries are rising through the roof.

Except, apparently, in Russia where visitor numbers are falling, and the Duma is being forced to sit up and react. Long known for its arctic attitudes towards tourists, Russia still requires American male citizens to fill in a very strange paper to make sure they will not be spying in Russia. As someone once said, the new rules for visitors are even more complicated than under communism.

Reaping rich dividends out of all this bureaucratic tedium is Indian visa facilitation service VFS. What was started by the Kuoni travel group as a small BPO meant to service visa processing work for diplomatic missions in India has morphed into a Rs 100-crore global company with subsidiaries in over 28 countries servicing almost 20 diplomatic missions.

Travellers are finding that in this case with middlemen things actually work much faster. The queues are more manageable, lead time for visa processing considerably shorter, deliveries of passports are now by courier, and the relief of being served by your own countrymen speaking a language you understand cannot be overestimated. For diplomatic missions, the grunt work is off their plates.

Ironically, for exactly the same reasons, the Indian embassy in Washington plans to outsource processing of visas for US visitors to a private American firm. In the words of an embassy official, the visa process will be made more efficient, smoother and quicker. Obviously, foreign visitors to India find the hand of Indian bureaucracy equally sticky.

For all the scrutiny that comes along with owning an Indian passport, I take umbrage at any suggestion of swapping it, courtesy (they suggest) my British spouse. Some even stop short of asking, "Isn't that why you married him?" National pride kicks in and I find myself zealously defending that little blue book.

Besides, a few days in Paris will no doubt erase any trauma associated with getting there. It isn't after all for nothing that it was Hemingway's "Moveable Feast".