Passport, Income Tax and a red Signal

One of the things I am scared of is going to the government offices. The way people in government offices make you run around is not funny. During this visit of Delhi, I had to interact with the government officials for more reason that one.

Passport

Mira's passport has been delayed by the passport official for one reason or the other for the past ten months or so. This time they had asked us to submit an affidavit of our marriage and an ad in two national newspapers saying that Sunita's name is Sunita. (Mira has always been Sunita officially and the name on his driver's license and voters card is Sunita)

To get all this done, we first had to go to the Janak Puri's transport authority to get hold of a Notary Public who would give us two affidavits, one for the passport office and one for the newspaper. In one place is the passport office that is asking me for countless proofs of name and on the other hand is the notary public that is not the least bothered about any proof while making the affidavits for us and why should he be bothered about anything when the “Price is right”. I could have taken a guy along with me dressed in a burka instead of Mira and he'd have given me the affidavit for all he cared.

Any way armed with the proofs we landed up at the passport office. People here are quite enterprising. Once something is set up, a lot of other businesses supporting it spawn like mushrooms around it. “Sahib, anything you want to get done in the passport office?” asked a tout as I got out of my car and another one said “New passport, passport renewal, ECNR” like a guy selling movie tickets in black outside a cinema hall. The touts are not the only people surviving like plankton sticking on the ship of passport office. There are people selling food and drinks (mostly illegal hawkers) and the parking attendants parking cars in no parking area for those extra 10 bucks a part of which is definitely going to the cops who turn a blind eye to the cars parked in the no parking area and people driving in the no entry zone.

Once inside the passport office, I was confronted with the semi-gods of bureaucracy running our country. He looked up the file on his computer and updated me on the status and I showed him the proofs and documents that I had gathered. He asked me if the proof was for change of name. I told him it could be called that “Yes, you can say it is for change of name, while in reality it is very natural thing for a girl to use the family name of her husband after getting married.” He looked at the documents and asked “What is Harish?” I told him that Harish is my surname and he got more curious “But usually Harish is the first name” He said it like it is an offence to have Harish as your surname and I would be punished for it by whipping my arse in the public. My patience that was already running thin finally gave in “Well it is my misfortune that Harish is my family name.” The guy turned a little sympathetic “Why call it a misfortune.” He sort of assured me that it is not really a crime. I told him my plight “If it is not my misfortune that you won't have made me run around like crazy for the past tem months.”

The man asked us to wait outside his office while he asked someone to get our file. I sat there cribbing about the whole thing for half an hour when he called us again “I still have not found your file, you can leave your documents with us and I will try to make sure that you don't have to come here again.”

A couple of days later we went to the passport office again, this time dad was also with us. This time Mira and I had decided to give a piece of our mind to the passport guy. We decide that if he still creates any more trouble for us, we are going to ask him to keep the file and that we don't need a passport anymore and we would prefer to get a forged passport and face the risks rather than take any more abuse form the passport office.

To our surprise, the guy looked up the file on his computer and gave us the news we have been waiting for too long “We have made this passport and you will be getting it sometime in the first month of September.”

Income Tax
I decided to file my income tax from Delhi instead of Bombay and went to the same guy who is filing my returns for the past two years. When I went to Delhi I knew that I would be required to pay some tax in addition to what has been deducted from my salary but little did I knew how much.

The accountant looked at the papers and told me what I had been expecting. I had changed the job in the last financial year and TIS did what a lot of other employers do while calculation the tax. In the column of any other income they wrote nil, instead of my salary that I was drawing from QAI. The ignored the salary I was getting at QAI and gave me the standard deduction twice and the slabs for income tax they used were also incorrect. I don't know how this happened but it is not a good idea on the part of Income tax department to just assume that I was not working anywhere before I joined the new company.

After some calculations he looked at me told me the bomb I owed the income tax department. I knew I would be paying something but the amount he told me was 5 times more than what I expected.

The next day I had to go to my bank to pay the tax that wiped off everything except one thousand bucks from my account. This makes my current trip to Delhi the most expensive one.

Red Signal
A day or two after reaching Delhi, some guy was standing outside my door with some papers in his hand. He asked me “Navin Harish?” I said yes and he handed me a paper and asked me to sign another one.

It was a fine for jumping a red signal in the month of February. My car jumped a red light on Baba Kharag Singh road. My brother may have been driving the car but 99% chances are that it is a mistake on the part of the cop while writing down the number because bhai is in Chandigarh, not Delhi. I treated as one of those random fines you get and you are better off paying them than arguing with them.

I was a little surprised that now they are delivering the fines by hand but that guy cleared my doubts “It is notice, the challan must have come by ordinary post.” Ordinary post that was so ordinary that the postman decided to throw it away rather than delivering it to me.

On the appointed day, I went to the Magistrate's office at Janpath with dad. As I reached there some guy came to me asking for the notice. Assuming that he was an employee of the court, I handed him the notice. He looked at it and said “Hundred bucks for this, hundred bucks for this and 165 bucks-a total of 365 bucks. I will get it done for 300 bucks.” Before I could figure out what was happening, dad snatched the paper from the tout and gave it at the window where it was supposed to be given.

First I was asked to sign a register that said that I plea guilty for the offence, then I was asked to pay a fine of 100 bucks and then I was asked to wait for the receipt. All this took about 3 hours and waiting in between these exercises, I was observing other people. There were lawyers-not the kind of lawyers you see in news making statements on behalf of their clients. The lawyers you see there are the ones I would like to say are -third rate. They come from the least preferred law schools where they got admission by bribing someone and passed the exams by copying the answers on their sleeves or better yet, sending someone else t appear in exam in their place. One of the lawyers was chewing pan; one was looking like a typical Bihari wearing cheep sport shoes with his court dress. All of them were trying to extract money from people who came there. A large percentage of those people were drivers who didn't know any better. The others decided to pay them to avoid the wait (but they did have to wait.)

All of this made me think about the opinion I had about the government offices. I used to think they are inefficient but I was completely wrong. They are not inefficient; they are more efficient and organised then the private sector. The work doesn't happen there because they don't want to do it. It takes ages to do anything but you must watch their speed after showing them the face of Gandhi ji. The same people who made you run around will start running around you after you offer them a little incentive for doing it.

The efficiently of those people is directly proportional to he money you offer. Gandhi, after all, is one man you can take for face value.

Opportunity lost is opportunity cost

I read this line while going through the economics book of my brother. It is a part of the process of calculating your profit. Among the costs, one is opportunity cost. If you were not doing your own business, you would be doing something else and for doing that you would be getting paid. In your own business, you are not getting that money so that is also a cost to you. I am thinking about this because of my recent trip to Delhi. I have taken a leave from my job and then I extended it. I extended it without prior approval so in some way, it is a risk I took. On its own, it is not so significant but an accumulation of such things may be damaging to my career. If I continue taking decisions like this that are not in the interest of my employer, I may suffer in long run. I may not get as much money as I could otherwise or I may not reach the level I could be making different decisions.

This is something I think nobody considers. There are people who would get upset because I didn't visit them, but I am sure they themselves will not be too keen themselves to take a decision that may be damaging to their career, none of them would be willing to take a day off to see me. Leave that aside, none of those people would consider leaving the office a little early for me. At this point I would like to say that it is wrong to generalize people. Not everyone is like this there are people who would take time out to see me and as a matter of fact, those are the people who are NOT going to taunt me that I came to Delhi didn't went to see them. "You were here for a complete week but couldn't take out some time to visit me."
"I am sorry, I was really caught up, why didn't you come over?"
"Yeah right, I am so busy, marne tak ki fursat nahin hai, kahi aana jaane ki to baat hi choro."

This reminds me of another thing-the tendency of people to show that they are the busiest people in the world. Those people have no respect for time. They will invite you for a meeting and will be late, you invite them over for a dinner and they will make you wait till 11 in the night and worse is that they will invite you over their home and will not be present when you reach there. Someone invites you to their home, you land up there on time only to wait painfully long for them to come. When they do come, they will act as if what they have done is completely normal and they won't even apologize for wasting your time.

"I got stuck up, just as I was about to come, my boss called me for a meeting... it's all right yaar, I am only an hour late. Did you have tea?"

Un(usability)

As a designer in interactive medium, I have to make sure that things are usable while designing anything. I think about how user would interact with it and that sometimes requires a change in the original design. If I see that user is going to feel lost with the way things are currently designed, I do them again to make them more usable, and that sometimes means compromising on the aesthetics of the original design. The final design may not look as appealing as the original one but it is definitely more usable than the original one. An example of this is the navigation on two image galleries. The first one was "Textures of life". The navigation in that one showed six thumbnails at a time and to see the next or previous six images, one has to click on a "more" button. When I saw people not being able to see the next set of images by using the "more" link, I changed the navigation to what it is in "a look around" where all the thumbnails are shown upfront.



I feel that the same thought should be applied to every thing but sadly it is not. One good example of bad usability is the buildings I see around me. "RNA heights" is a building that was being made when I moved here. Now it's complete and a lot of houses have been occupied as well. You can spot which house is occupied by the grills outside the widows and a sunshade above it. After these modifications by the residents, the building does not look as good as it used to earlier.



Any builder who has built even a single building in Bombay knows that people do the two things mentioned above. So why don't they make some arrangements for it themselves while they are making the building ensuring uniform look. They can alter the design so that a rain/sun shads is not required. Even it is required, they can make it uniform and they can themselves install the grills.



Going one step further. I have seen that the buildings are made using the concrete pillars. The structure of the building is supported by a concrete structure and the brick walls will not add to the strength of the structure. In such a case, why don't these people give the buyers a choice to design their own house? As a buyer, I may choose the entire wall to be a big window and it is possible for the builder to do it for me because I bought the house long before it is completed. I'm paying Rs20 lacks for a house, I won't mind paying one lac extra for an option to design my house.

Shining my shoes

I didn't polish my shoes this morning because whenever I do it, it rains. I have seen that if I polish my shoes, wear clother that take long to dry, wash my car or generally anything that could be affected adversly by rain, it rains.

This made me thought about Indra-the god of rains. There are people who are worshipping him, trying to please him so that he will bless them in rains in draught affected areas. If only those people knew that Indra can be pleased just by polishing their shoes.

Working in Government/Private sector

Working for the government of your country is a nice thought. In an ideal situation, the government is working in the welfare of its citizens and directly helping the cause by working for the government is a very great and fulfilling experience. But things are not always so and the situations are not always ideal. I don't need to say what government and the people representing government offices do.

I am not interested in criticizing the government but talk about the option of working for government or working in private sector. Let's stick to that.

The opinion about working for the government is divided. They are some who think the only job worth doing is a government job and the other who don't like to work in the government sector.

There are a lot of reasons why people are not interested in working for the government. read the complete thing here

Image Gallery :: A look around

I guess I need a new subject. This is one more image gallery that I have created of things in or around the house. This gallery features the pictures taken around the house. Check it out. While you ae there. You might as well see the rest of the image galleries.

Veg AC

I didn't knew that the ACs are also veg or non veg. Check this out

Civic sense

We talk about our rich heritage and our culture as we are the only cultured nation in the entire world but when it comes to putting our speech in action or in other words, showing some civic sense, we are among the worst in the world.

We cut people off while driving. A few days ago I was in the office pantry with a friend of mine taking tea from the vending machine. I had two cups in my hand. I filled one and just as I took it, some other guy standing with me jammed his cup.

Today I went to the doctor. I took off my shoes, after a while it started raining and when I was coming back I realised that some nice woman had taken mine and Mira's shoes from where and put them in the rain so she could leave her shoes in the dry.

A day in Monsoon

A drop of water on my face was a rude wake up call of the monsoon this morning. I lied there still for five minutes trying to get out of my sleep and to get a hold of reality. Finally I saw water droplets on the ceiling. It had rained all night. The substandard structure of this building managed to keep the rain out for the entire night but by the time the morning came, it gave up and accepted defeat.

Some people are of the view that a building made by RNA 15 years ago is almost as good as the skeleton of a T-Rex or Wooly Mammoth but I guess those people are uselessly trying to malign the reputation of RNA builders. In my opinion RNA is as good as or as bad as the rest of the builders. By making the building of this quality, they are actually helping in creating employment opportunities for the construction workers doing the repair on such buildings and doing their bit in equal distribution of wealth.

Anyway let's get back to the rain, outside the home and inside it. The ceiling is throughout the house-bedroom, drawing room, kitchen, toilet and the passage. After making the arrangements to contain the dropping water by putting buckets and rags of cloth, I decided to get on with the routine of the day when the milkman came. Today there was 25% extra milk but the price was same. “I only charge for the water I add, the monsoon water is free.”

Giving the government a run for money
After taking a shower I decided to go the office of our society. Little did I knew that the going there would be like going to a government office. I was looking at the wall and ceiling from where the plaster had fallen off to reveal the concrete and iron structure when the manager asked me what I wanted. I told him about what my problem was and he promised to send someone to take a look and that is exactly what the people who came did. They came like the minister go to survey a flood or draught affected area in their helicopters. They came and looked at all the leeks and left without doing anything.

A rain suit
I was getting late for work so I got ready, put on my raincoat and left for work. The raincoats are quite effective as they keep out the rain but also keep out the air. Actually when I think about it, they keep the air out but the rain seeps in through the stitches as it seeps in our house. I'm not sure a why a rain suit is called a rain suit. Is it because it's supposed to keep the rain out or is it because it gets you soaked in sweat even when it's not raining to give you the feeling of rain.

A game of potholes
I was on my way to work, playing the game of avoiding the holes. When I came to Bombay, I was playing level 1 of this game as the pot holes were few and far between but as the time passed, I have moved to the level 7. This means that now there are more pot holes than road. By the end of monsoon, I will be moving to level 10, the highest level where you won't able to know where the road used to be and all the potholes will be covered in water so you will have to guess where it is and how deep is it.

Any way after playing for 10 minutes, I realized that I'm soaked till my undies so I decided to take a U-turn and headed back home. At home I took off my rain suit to see that I'm soaked in rain and sweat. I cursed the rain and rain suit and changed into dry clothes, had a cup of tea. I decided to attempt the journey to the office once again. This time I decided to take a rickshaw.

Socialism
I guess that the rickshaw drivers in Bombay are from Bengal and they are spreading socialism. You may be a fruit vendor, a construction worker or a CEO; they will treat you with the same disrespect. “Marol” I will ask them and they will just shahe the head without even looking at me. I think they feel I am a dirty capitalist so they are extra rude to me. None of them will agree to take me to the office, maybe that or because the Andheri-Kurla road has transformed to Andheri-kurka River.

While I am looking for a rickshaw, the bus and truck drivers are playing the game of potholes. Their game is a little different than the one I play. I have to avoid the potholes but they have to run the bus through as many potholes as possible and the points they get depend on how many people they splash and how many of the passengers break their hip joints and spine. A bonus point for the driver if he cracks the skull of a passenger if he jumps high enough by the impact of the potholes and hit his head on the roof of the bus.

One BEST driver did quite well and I am wet again, only this time the water is a little dirty. I have walked about a kilometer and have finally found a rickshaw driver who's either too brave or ignorant about the state of Andheri Kurla road and has agreed to take me there. This driver is going to take me to my office and repent it for the rest of the day.

“You don't cross your legs in a Rickshaw”In the rickshaw I position myself correctly. There is an art in sitting the rickshaw. You have to sit right in the middle and jam your feet on either corners and push against it so that you can transfer some of your weight on your back. This has many benefits-it prevents your arse from falling asleep after sitting on it for a very long time, it minimizes the impact of potholes and it ensures that your are not flung out of the rickshaw when you get in a big pothole. A rickshaw ride is a good exercise and I have managed to lose 5kgs in only one month.

On and on, the river flows
After some mild traffic jams I reach the mother of all traffic jams. The rickshaw is going at a speed of a turtle. After about 30 minutes and one kilometer, I reach the “sangam”. This is where the rainwater merges with the sewage water to create a bulging river in the middle of Bombay. Every time I see it I say to myself “God! I should have carried my camera with me. "I know water flowing on the road is not such a big thing for the people in the Bombay but if I take these pictures with me to Delhi, people there are going to be as amused by it as the Americans are when they see the pictures of cows roaming on the roads.”

I get off the rickshaw as I have reached my office. Just a few steps further is a fountain, it is a sewer from where the water is gushing out and next to it is the betting booths where people are speculating how many people are going to drive into that sewer while sipping the rain diluted cutting.

In the office people are discussing what has happened throughout the city because of the rains “People coming to Borivali and Goregaon have gone back because there is a big traffic jam.” “The trains to north India have been canceled”. “Bombay Rajdhani is late by 28 hours.” “There are boats on the Grant road.” “There was knee deep water outside my house.” While listening to all this I am wondering if I will be able to go to Delhi next weekend as I have planned.

I call up Mira and she tells me that a couple of more people have come to inspect the house and the leakage. This time she gave a piece of her mind to one of them.

In the night, I take up a rickshaw back home. The traffic is not as bad as it was in the morning because most of the offices were closed in the late afternoon today. Back at home we empty the buckets placed under the leaks and realign them with the leaks again for the night.

We go to bed but tonight it is a little different. Instead of our normal covers, we are using the plastic sheets.

Goodnight.

To my old headmaster...

"At times I am grateful to the education system not for teaching me what it taught me but in keeping me busy with it to prevent me from possibly going on a self-destructive path."
I have never been a fan of formal education because in my opinion you don't really learn a lot in the schools beyond getting literate. A lot of time I felt that the schools and studies should not be given as much importance as they gets and the kids should be let free a little more. The burden of books is weighing them down> the bags should be lightened and they should be allowed and encourage to explore things that may be more meaningful to them.

Inspite of this I belief, when it comes to kids dear to me like my nephew, I feel that they should study and get decent enough grades. I can't understand why this bias exists but it does. May be it is because I am not liberated enough or may be because of the unhealthy spirit of competition the current school system generates. I want Bharat to get good enough grades if only to have more confidence in himself.

It is not limited to my nephew, when I think about my past, I sometimes feel almost grateful that I went through the entire thing myself. This thought comes to me when I see what other kids of my age, some of whom I used to play with, have done with their lives (Neither they nor me is a kid anymore but we did started out as kids with similar opportunities and similar limitations maybe because of our social status).

One guy (I won't write the names of any one here) got into bad company, he started drinking and quit school. I don't know what he used to do for a living but a few months ago he died leaving behind a wife and a few months old kid. No points in guessing he died of alcohol. That guy started out just like me. He used to play cricket with my friends and me but he went down a completely different path. Actually not talking to him after growing up is another interesting thing. After our paths changed, we failed to identify with each other and so the long conversation changed to short ones, then to hellos before we almost stopped acknowledging each other.

He was an extreme example and not all of them have ended this way but they are not too better either. All the kids who quit education early are either struggling to make both ends meets or are living on the money of their parents. A lot of them are alcoholic and I don't know what else they do.

So although I may feel there was not much of a value-add in school education but just the fact that it enabled me to eventually go and seek education that is useful to me, makes up for all the time spent in school. Seen from a different perspective, it was sort of a preventive facility. It occupied me enough, kept me busy for most of my time that I didn't stray and got into destructive things even before I have to chance to understand life and had an opportunity to do something constructive and positive in my life.

Image Gallery::Textures of Life

I have taken some photographs of the objects in my house and I am really pleased with the results. The gallery is available here.

Who wants to be humiliated

I remembered a Dilbert cartoon where Dogbert says to a man “I will give you $10,000 if you roll in this puddle.” The next frame was the man rolling in the puddle and Dogbert saying, “I can’t imagine how rich people can ever get bored.”

This is true, if you have money or something that the other person needs, you can make them jump through as many hoops as you like.

A very good example of this is the TV. There are so many shows that are exploiting the participant’s hunger for money and fame.

You have these so called reality shows. They call the participants and then in return of prize money they get them to do horrendous things like eating earthworms and bugs, lock them up with roaches and rodents and make them jump on a running car from a helicopter. The organizers are ringmaster and the participants are the animals of circus. I guess since the animal rights activities are pressurizing the circuses to stop the shows of animals, these people can be employed there to do the acts that animals used to do in circuses. Only the people who are organizing these shows are not responsible for it, some responsibility of it falls on the participants as well. In the greed of money, these people are behaving like prostitutes. They are ready to give up their self-respect and dignity and are ready to be mistreated in return of “chance” to win some money. (The emphasis here is on chance, there is no certainty).

The humiliation does not stop here. Following the reality shows are those TV shows where the prize is a role in a TV serial or a movie. This is happening in India as well as Hollywood. You have young people swarming these shows like locust to be exploited by the TV channels and for what? TV rating and the popularity of the show. You can switch on the telly and see a girl crying because she has not been selected or a man in tears after failing to get into the next round. Their faces are plastered on TV as losers on countless ads that are bombarded for that show. I am not sure if a chance to work with Salman Khan or to be the tormented bahu in one of these saas-bahu serials is worth all this humiliation. Publicly humiliating hundreds and rewarding one is something that came out of a sick mind but again, it’s not only the people who are making the shows who are responsible, the people who participate in those shows are equally guilty.

Just imagine going for a job interview that is videotaped and then telecasted on national TV and you are portrayed as a loser who couldn’t get the job, as he’s too dumb and clueless. I guess that is going to be the next thing in the reality show. “Kaun banega naya employee”