incredible india

Do you remember the book V.S.Naipaul wrote some years back about India which he called "An area of darkness"? Well, in my opinion, his views are still valid today despite all the hullabaloo about India soon becoming, along with China, a modern developed country.

What impresses me about any country is not how industrialized it has become or how much financial clout it wields but how intelligently it is being run. I look at such things as corruption, bureaucracy, cleanliness, discrimination and so on. In all such things India fails miserably. The country is truly incredible and not in the sense that the Indian Tourist Board means it with the slogan "Incredible India".

The country wants tourists but the visas cannot be issued on arrival. If you are outside your own country and if you apply for an Indian visa in a third country, a fax will be sent to your country to check on you and to add insult to injury you have to pay for the fax (there are millions of criminals in India and the authorities are worried about one or two foreign criminals creeping into the country!). People of Indian origin are entitled to a five year visa but try applying for one and see if you can get it without a lot of fuss.

Once you are in the country after having paid through your nose for a visa you are likely to be bombarded with meaningless forms to fill out wherever you go. I once took a bus from Madras to Kodaikanal and the driver gave me one because I was a foreigner (I doodled on it and gave it back. The fellow looked at it and took it away. Not even a professor of English would have understood it but he did.) I once heard of a western couple who had wanted to enter India from Pakistan and were given a form to fill out in triplicate but without any carbon paper. When eventually they did, the Indian immigration simply handed them back and waved them on.

Incredible indeed!