Angela, the FRRO and then there's me.

Hey Ange, read your piece on the FRRO [http://angelacarson.wordpress.com/]. 

Glad everything worked out for you. 

You may want to thank your parents for making you the babe-o-licious person that you are. I think that babe-o-liciousness helped ease your way through the process of being a legal foreigner in B’luru. Well, that and the fact that you are, judging by your columns, a friendly, sunny, all-around-good-guy, type person, A SoCal Gal.

I, on the other hand, am not. Any of those things. Except for the legal foreigner part. That I am. With a twist. (Hey, this is South India. Everything comes with a twist.) But, what I definitely am not is any degree of babe-o-licious. (I use the term generically.) Quite, in fact, the contrary. My attempts at using my inner babe-ness, (during my callow youth), inevitably led to threats of arrest and detention for violating the local anti-pollution ordinances. The FRRO bureaucrats care not for ‘cute’ when it comes from a used to be Indian who escaped the rigors of India’s recent political past. My attempts to register myself as a foreigner... Well, let’s just say, as a starter, didn’t go so well.

My, now mercifully in abeyance, registration process took, not 2 visits on subsequent days, but rather 2 years of multiple visits, multiples of thousands of rupees, (man, that’s a lot of coffee those guys drink), bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label, (which might help explain the need for coffee), multiple public dressing downs by bloated bureaucrats (BB), (that would have to be upper case, now wouldn’t it?), all of whom might as well have had ‘payback’ tattooed on to their furrowed brows.

I should add – that payback thing? When I first started to get the impression that I was being picked on because I was an American of Indian birth, I disciplined myself into giving the BBs’ the benefit of the doubt. Then I got to talking with another miserable looking specimen who seemed to be spending as much time as I was leaning his elbows on his knees, his head bowed in submission, his mien that of a soul coming to grips with the concept of Karma. He, poor bastard, was trying to legalize the continued stay of his Vietnam born, naturalized US citizen wife, and their US born children. He had made his choice of US citizenship as an adult who had escaped the Robber Baron Era of Indian politics. His education and subsequent well paid employment in the US having been facilitated by the fact that he had been born into established wealth and comfort. He now had to explain himself to his peers – to BBs of less fortunate birth and the opportunities therefore denied to them. His mistake, he told me, was in being truthful when asked for his reason for moving back to India. He, poor sad soul, had thought that his desire to give back to India what his foreign sojourn had taught him, enriched him, would be met with enthusiasm and cooperation. Wrong. He had been told, when he tried to argue some deficiencies of service (I know, hard to believe, at the FRRO, but I’m just reporting), that he had some nerve, just because he was “foreign returned”, to expect things to run according to his schedule. That They, the ones who were left here, his peers, had had to claw, scratch and bribe their way to the heights and that they were going to make sure that... He started to sob at that point, and I had to get him out of there and buy him a drink. He had been waiting the outcome of his written appeal for a waiver on the fines imposed on him for having missed his deadline because his hearing for the extension was three weeks (IBT – Indian Bureaucracy Time) down the calendar. He was still there, in the same position when I returned three weeks later to pick up the papers I needed, having the previous evening visited, at his behest, the home of a Baron in the Police Force where I had inadvertently left a package containing two bottles of aged scotch, one box of imported ‘duty free’ chocolate, and a not-so-slim envelope of high denomination rupee notes. He, the poor bastard (pb) (n.b. lower case), had with him, his family, each of them learning the truth of Karma in their lives. In discussing our mutual miseries we were joined by others. Eventually we formed a club; our bonding based on our experiences with the FRRO. We still keep in touch, the pb and I. It seems his wife has divorced him, taking the alimony and herself to Vietnam, and his children decided to return to the land of their birth and he has a monthly tab at the place I took him for his drink.

Why did I tell this tale?

Oh, yes, to make the contrast between what happens when a non-blonde applies for permission to remain in India. Quite different from yours, Ange. 11 dimensions, string theory, alternate universe, different.

Which reminds me, sadly, my own permission to remain here, in B’luru, is coming up for recertification.

Let’s see now, yellow pages, agents...

But first a word from my vices, my soul fortifying vices.

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