I Left My Heart (and Passport) in San Francisco

So, my latest adventure with the government of India was last Friday. I arrived with all of my precious paperwork in hand, waited in line, turned in my passport, and - lo and behold! - six hours later was told that I couldn't have a visa after all because I didn't have enough pages in my passport. The people at the window were phenomenonally rude and just generally unhelpful, and most of them had put far too much henna in their hair. Perhaps it has some religious significance I am unaware of? Do they think it looks normal?

Over the weekend, of course, my brother got married, so that was a good time. The wedding was really wonderful - very simple, secular, elegant. And then the reception at Mecca was great. Our only complaint is that it ended too early. It was over at eleven o'clock. Gilles was only just beginning to get liquored up. So Greg, Jeff, Burcin, Gilles and I had to go wander from bar to bar until we found a place that wasn't too trendy, too expensive, too seedy, or too smelly in Union Square.

My friend Michele is staying at our apartment in Bangalore and meeting all of my friends there, which seems to be fun. I wish we were there at the same time! Anyway, reading about her adventures is making me warm up to the idea of going back. Not that I don't want to go back, I'm just tired of the administration. They are also not ready to give Gilles his visa because they didn't like the letter he had from the Government of India. And in order to verify it they will need 6 weeks, apparently. Do they not know about an invention known as the telephone? The British authorities can be tough, but if you have a phone number when you arrive at Heathrow they just call and check up on you. I'm sure we would be willing to pay the long-distance charges for the Indian Embassy in Paris to call the Ministry of Human Resources in Delhi. Heck, they can call their mothers for all we care. I think that India has to do some serious thinking about how it wants to collaborate with Europe and the US. I have to say that if anyone were to ask me about doing a Fulbright in India I would advise them to go to some other country. It's not so much that their paperwork takes so long as that they can't say when it will come through, and all along the way they are unhelpful and often just plain rude. Their "Incredible India" campaign is honest in more ways than one. They should call it "Unbelievable India" to make it less ambiguous.