How small-minded can Asian governments get!

India:

I have talked about India elsewhere on this blog. Here is some more.

People of Indian origin like myself can apply for a special permit that would allow them to stay in India long term and leave and enter the country without further formalities. You have to prove that you were born in India by showing a birth certificate. To produce your foreign passport where it says you were born in India is unacceptable to them. Oh, no. In my case, and I am sure in the cases of a lot of other overseas Indians, the certificate got lost somewhere when India was left behind in search of greener pastures.

Now I ask you: Is it more important to produce a birth certificate or simply to prove that you were born in India? Any developed country would have accepted any proof, particularly that contained in a passport.

(2) There is an Indian visa office in Penang, Malaysia, but they only issue visas to Malaysians -- not to nationals of other countries. They told me to go to Kuala Lumpur to get a visa and if I wanted to apply for a residence permit I had to go all the way back to their embassy in Denmark. Can you beat that!

Malaysia:

There is a "My Second Home" scheme in Malaysia which allows you to settle in that country provided of course you have brought in a load of cash. The amazing thing is that you cannot walk into an immigration office, get all the forms and make your application then and there. Oh no. You have to go to a private agent who would help you with all the formalities and the agent of course does not do it for free. You have to cough up a fortune for their services.

And here's another amazing thing: You as a foreigner are not allowed to open a bank account in Malaysia; still in order to make your application you have first to show money in a Malaysian bank. There's catch 22 for you.

Thailand:

Some years ago I applied for a retiree visa and obtained it by showing 250,000 Bath and a document from the Danish consulate in Penang proving that I was a pensioner getting a certain amount every month. In Thailand you have to apply for such a visa every year. You would think that having proved everything about you the first year, that you would be sailing smoothly. But no. So the second year I applied again with the same documents as the year before. But this time the application was rejected. The document from the Danish consulate was now not acceptable; this time they wanted a document from the Danish embassy in Bangkok. I was in the city of Chiang Mai at that time and the lady head of the immigration office there simply stamped 'denied' in my passport. I wanted to tell her that I could go to Bangkok and get the required
document from the embassy. Her reply was, "You have to leave the country. We have stamped your passport. It's finished." So I left the country and when I came back with a simple tourist visa, I decided to talk to the immigration in Bangkok. The guy there told me: "If you had come to us we would have extended your retiree visa." I had to apply for it all over again but the money required had now gone up to 800,000 Bath! Amazing Thailand.

Sri Lanka:

The immigration there is so chaotic and so corrupt I don't even want to talk about it, except to say that they don't even bother to respond when you have made an application. It is as if you never applied.