Bureaucracy Part II

I am at a point now where things are really the new normal. Flying around in traffic almost getting side-swiped, byranni and dosa for breakfast, peacocks outside my door, these are daily events that leave me calm.

I am _beginning_ to approach the bureacracy here the same way. Yesterday Scott and I had to get our residency slips and register with the local police. Now we need to do this only because the person that filled out or visa's in Canada screwed it up and added a SINGLE extra say so we are at 181 days vs. 180. We didn't want this or ask for it. We are leaving the country WELL before the 180 days would be up, and both us, the school and the police know this, but I digress.

So anyways we have to deal with it, and that's fine. We go to the station - via my first autorickshaw which makes driving even more exhiliration, but as I said - it's the new normal. It was however interesting when the driver decided to take a short-cut to the police station by DRIVING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD for about 1/2 a mile.

At the station we are shuffled from waiting area to waiting area. Finally we meet the police chief who berates the ISB chaperon that many students fail to de-register (oh yeah did I mention we have to go back and do this again :P). I got a little crap for having a passport that expires before my visa would be up but I told him I was leaving April 4 anyways so he was totally cool with that. All in all the chief seemed like a pretty cool guy.

Then we wait for the next step which is the processing of our docs etc. Scott and I just get started through this process - they took our pictures and were beginning to enter our data when there is a power failure - arghhh.

After 1 hour we are finally told it will be 4 more hours before power is returned so we decided to go back to school, but we stopped at Subway for a little snack first.

The day thus becomes a 'Time Vampire' as Scott refered to it. IT killed any chance we really had of going anywhere this weekend, and the whole thing is utterly pointless since neither of us wants or needs this residency thing.

So we go back again at 4:00 and are processed for another 45 mins or so. Again we would get shuffled from this seat to another seat for seemingly no reason, but Scott and I both approached it from the point of view of just tell me where to go and what to do.

The amount of paperwork and duplication we saw was also mind numbing. As Scott said it felt like the DMV - except, I pointed, out that everyone is speaking Hindi so you don't know what people are debating or checking or discussing which just makes it more confusing.

Finally the main guy takes this form we filled out and tears the bottom off - this is a form I printed off the net and not officially looking at all really - and hands it to me. I am done.

What the form is for or what I can do with it I have no idea.