I have stood fuming, behind people in immigration queues in India who appear to be trying to negotiate their way into the country. I get most impatient in check-in lines at the airport and in immigration lines. How hard can it be, I’m saying to myself. Have a valid passport, get a visa, fill in the immigration form, you’re in. Now it’s e-visas and we became that person who’s holding up the queue a few days back. We had our e-visas and all of the other required documentation so what could possibly go wrong. Something induced chagrin in our immigration officer but we still have no idea what. So after handing over passport, boarding pass, e-visa print-out and customs form, he did this :
1. Takes the paperwork and stares at it like it was a ransom note.
2. Consults his colleague in the next booth who shrugs – a problem shared is two problems so he’s not interested.
3. Gets up and walks off. Not a good sign. Fortunately he didn’t return with an officious looking gentleman in uniform, just a worried look.
4. Re-takes his seat and continues tapping his computer and shuffling paper.
5. Stamps passport – a good sign but then…
6. Continues to scratch his head and stare intently at the computer screen and the paperwork yet again.
7. Hands everything back without having said a word or even looking at me during the whole process. I say “thank you sir”, step into India and hope I don’t have to step back into non-nationality limbo (remember, we’ve left Australia) to rescue the Child Bride..
8. Repeats with CB’s paperwork.
At least we didn’t have to wait for our luggage to appear. After this rigmarole it was rotating on the carousel when we got there.
So Trump’s new tariff regime has been announced. I think our hotel here in Delhi must think we’re Americans because our bar bill last night had 4 taxes attached. S.C. was 8%, CGST was 9%, SGST was 9% and DVAT was 25%. I don’t know what any of those are apart from variations on consumption taxes but it increased the bill by about 30% which, apart from being rather excessive, doesn’t appear to make mathematical sense until you realise that the two 9%’s were 9% of the 8%. So the original bill of 6050 rupees became 8133.62. Our government, with only a 10% GST are obviously rank amateurs, especially at milking foreigners.
My first visit to India was 1986 and I haven’t been back since 2013 so it’s changed a bit. The bit we have seen so far in Delhi including the airport, has changed in some fairly fundamental ways especially with their Metro rail system. The place has evolved from the East India Company to the Jetsons. Indians have always been pretty tech savvy – look who runs or at least drives a big chunk of Silicon Valley. But whilst your average Indian can code a moon launch, ask them to drive between two white lines and see how far you get. Those lines represent wasted paint; nothing more, nothing less. How else do you convert three lanes into five if you can’t ignore those pesky lines.
As Geoffrey Chaucer sagely observed in 1395, “time and tide wait for no man”, and neither does Indian traffic. As I remember, the traffic rules aren’t. They’re just for guidance and once you get past vaguely sticking to the jeft side of the road, you ‘re on your own. I couldn’t help notice the dual speed limits – 70km/hr for cars and 40km/hr for trucks….on the same road. Now there’s a recipe for disaster. Not quite as bad as the urban myth about Sweden switching from driving on the left side of the road to the right in 1967 – cars this weekend, trucks and buses next weekend. If you’ve seen pictures of the traffic on the actual fateful day you’ll notice vehicles being hit from all directions. It’s why Volvos are so boxy. What did really cause a small problem in Sweden was that the buses all had doors on the left side so stepping off said bus into traffic mayhem was somewhat problematic I would think.