But getting in for us mere mortals is proving tricky. It’s the online visa application that has us tearing our hair out. In the good old days, it was a trip to the Indian Consulate, armed with photos and money, then a few weeks’ breathless wait for the visa to be stamped into your passport. Today it’s just you and the Indian government website, and it’s as scary as hell. What if “it” doesn’t like your answers? The thing about this silent adjudicator is that it won’t always tell you straight out what you’re doing wrong. It simply refuses to budge.
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Take our ID photo, so to speak. We do a crash course in what makes a good one. Stand straight on, no shadows, no borders, no fly-about hair, no smiling, no winking. But none of that matters because it’s the photo measurements that are key. The photo must be square. Down to the last millimetre. Go one millimetre too high and you’ll never get to see the Taj Mahal. Three hours and five brandies later, we master the photo upload.
This makes the written stuff seem easy. Almost. Curiously, indianvisaonline seems much more interested in your parents than in you. They want to know their addresses – “present” and “permanent” – their nationality and their … previous nationality. Plus phone number. The instructions say, “One phone number is mandatory”. Our parents died some time ago. So I insert my own phone number into the space. Should the Indian embassy need to get in touch, I’ll just patch them through to Mum and Dad in “the clouds”.
Another little anomaly is my hyphen. Like the Mary-Anns and Billie-Jeans of this world, I carry the mini dash wherever I go. It signifies that we’re a special breed: odd and punctuation-loving. The only trouble is that computers can’t hack it. The application form says that unless you type in your name exactly as it is in your passport, you may be kicked off the planet. So I type in Jo-Ann. But the form is furious. It’s not going to budge until I’ve gotten rid of that pesky non-letter thing. So I delete the hyphen, add a space and all’s well. It’s not the same as my passport name but at this stage no one gives a toss.
In the final pages, the questions get really interesting. “Have you visited a SAARC country in the last three years?” What the faark is a SAARC country? I google SAARC to find it means South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. This sounds like a nice group. I say yes and wonder if Bali counts. I’m sure they’d always be cooperative.
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Then the mother of all questions: “Have you ever been engaged in Cyber crime/ Terrorist activities/ Sabotage/ Espionage/ Genocide/ Political killing/ other act of violence?” Whoa! We were getting on so well up to this point. And I’m a bit offended that the form defaults to YES automatically.
I read the options carefully. Cyber crime? No, I’m hopeless with computers. Terrorist activities or sabotage? I used to enjoy jumping out of bushes when my older sisters were kissing their boyfriends, ruining their moment entirely. Espionage or political killing? I was an avid fan of The Man from UNCLE – that’s United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Could recite it then, can recite it now. I guess that just leaves genocide.
I think hard about this. We all adored Monsieur Tom, our French tutor in first-year uni. And we all abhorred the string of girls who became his latest – how to say in French – squeeze. I hover over the YES button because, yes, the potential was there. In the end, I press NO because I really did want to pass French. And I really, really do want to enter India.
#India #Youll #vaccinations #visa #process
