Flight Lt Colin Blythe and his unflinching standard of forgery

Right, I'm getting to grips with this place. Time for my lucid rants to begin.....

I had been forewarned about the unique concept that is Indian bureaucracy, but to experience it first hand certainly teaches tolerance and directs one toward the goal of suppressing any urge to yell.

As seems par for the bureaucratic Indian process, nothing can be simple.

Any foreign national planning to spend more than 6 months in the country must register their intent with the authorities. This is of course is despite the fact that you have already been granted a Visa to stay for such a duration when you made our initial application.

In fact, given that said application was made online, almost all the required information for this second stage registration was already held by the Indian authorities.

Nonetheless, it took two visits to the office in South Mumbai before I successfully acquired my documentation. The first visit (which involved a two way car journey totaling nearly two football matches worth of road time) was fruitless because, well, because they said so.

This is after all bureaucracy central and there is no point in arguing.

The second visit (better traffic conditions, there in 70 minutes, back in 50) proved successful yet still involved a 3 ½ hour wait at the offices during which time I had to enter the already once submitted personal info on their computer system, as well as writing out the same within my newly provided identity card which I had finally acquired following a pointless queueing process and a small bribe to the surly admin exec.

I once read about the strong correlation between corruption and poverty within a given regime.

This I assume was the theory in action.

Given the undue bureaucracy and the attention to detail, one might think the final supplied documentation would be somewhat more sophisticated than the identity cards produced by Donald Pleasance in "The Great Escape", but no, even a progressively blind WWII PoW would consider these ID cards as somewhat retro.

I swear a junior school art class could be more creative.

Luckily for me, it was not me, but her indoors who registered our shipped belongings. This meant that I would avoid the frustratingly tedious 6 hours she spent in a non air-conned building somewhere out back of the airport where our boxes would be opened and sorted through with a fine tooth comb.

Fortunately the customs officials had little idea of the value of our belongings which they had decide to tax in their entirety. In fact she undervalued our two bottles of champagne at a paultry 5 squid each. Tidy.

How embarrassing would it be for a single young man with some "adult art" titles within the shipments? Please estimate value of dog eared Western pornographic literature sir...... Uh, thats not mine!

There's a lot to be said for marriage you know.