If you ask computer addicts what they’re up to they sometimes reply, “Skyping” or “Been on Skype”. Skype is the handy Internet-driven computer programme that, with the addition of a pair of earphones, can help you to talk to Skype-enabled friends overseas indefinitely and at no cost. If your computer comes with a web camera, talkers can see one another on screen, watching expressions turn from delight to disgust. This has been happening a lot with my friend J (in Yorkshire, England) and me in recent days. We have been dumping hard on one another’s governments over current visa procedures.
J runs a management consultancy and has been coming to India for work and pleasure since 1970. In the past she used to hand in her passport and completed visa form to her travel agent who did the needful. This is no longer possible. British applicants for Indian visas are expected to fill an eight-page form online. However, for a country with claims to acting as IT powerhouse to the world, the Indian High Commission in London runs a badly-organised and weakly-powered visa website. It is volatile, tends to rapid expiry because of its restricted field, and offers inadequate instructions on how to fill the form. One wrong press of the space bar, the form disappears, and you start again from scratch.
It is also full of the usual off-the-wall questions visa forms ask, for example, place and dates of parents’ birth and whether applicant has any Pakistani or Bangladeshi connections. It doffs its cap at Indian babudom’s obsession with repetitive questioning: asking for your passport number more than once. Once the form is submitted the document shrinks to a reply of a single page which is printed and passed on the travel agent. As my infuriated friend J asked, “Could there be a worse way of destroying a weekend?”
Thanks to Skype, it was my turn to vent. Several man-hours over many weeks of my life recently have been annihilated in helping my daughter complete her students’ visa form before she left for postgraduate studies in Britain. It is a 16-page document and comes with a seven-page addendum called “Guidance Notes”. The British Council in Delhi even holds power point presentations (politely called “Orientations” for which they charge a fee) to explain to prospective Indian students on how to successfully complete this severe obstacle course.
The completion of the form included several visits to the bank, accountant, stock broker and hours of rummaging in desk drawers for bits of paper we had forgotten ever existed. Question 6.3.13: “Do you have any savings, property or other income, for example, from stocks and shares?” Then, question 6.1.35 in British babudom’s glorious tradition of repetition: “Do they (financial sponsors) have any savings or other readily available money e.g. from stocks and shares? Please provide details.”
Barring colour copies with valuations of artworks hanging on my walls, or proof of the number of land acres my forbears may have owned, the British wanted arcane financial details of nearly every asset. My daughter’s friend, who is going up to the same college, was turned back when her father submitted one year’s income tax statement instead of the required three. Postgraduate students are expected to submit every single exam result and mark sheet, in original, from Class X on. A soft copy of my daughter’s unconditional offer from the London School of Economics was not accepted. She spent hours on the phone to LSE to get a hard copy couriered in time.
By the time we finished, the dossier was as thick as a response to a combined inquisition by the income tax authorities, the police and some apocryphal international council on higher education. As the tension mounted over weeks, parents and dependents were reduced to jabbering dimwits.
It is, therefore, a relief to gripe on Skype with J and discover that the world, though smaller, is universally such a tedious place.