Need to renew my passport

How time flies!

I still remember the day I applied for my passport. That was, in the same manner as most of the people at that age, made in the heat of GRE fever. In anticipation of securing an admission for a MS course.

And now, ten years later, I am looking at my passport and thinking of the ten years that went by.

How my passport grew from a small, unstamped novelty to a more-than-a-hundred-pages behemoth, how it accumulated more than fourteen Singapore and six US VISAs, how I almost forgot it in the hotel safe (luckily I didn't, thanks to my habit of checking the hotel room a few times before I leave). Sigh!

Gone will be the old number. I will get a new passport in a week and a half's time. That is what I was told at the Indian High Commission this afternoon.

I have to tell you about the Indian High Commission. As I walked into this decent colonial looking building, I was surprised to see that there were very few people loitering around the place. My recollections of the Passport Offices in India are full of people everywhere.

I need to find a place where I can submit my application for passport renewal, but there is no sign of it anywhere. There is a sign which says "Travel Agents only", but no passport application. Finally I ask one of the people at the gate and he tells me to go through the door labeled "VISA". Supremely intuitive!

Like everything Indian, the Passport / VISA Application room caters to a mass of humanity in a small under-developed space. There is only enough space for a hundred people to stand in the room and there are already more than that number which I can count with my eyes.

There is a huge queue in front of me and I have no clue what it is for. So I try and be adventurous to see where it goes. Luckily for me, my adventurous nature helps (not always the case in the Indian version of the story) and I see a number vending machines with the clear label of "Passport" over it. I pressed the button and waited my turn.

When my turn finally came, which was surprisingly quickly, it was only to go to a counter where a woman checked my form, gave me a few more forms to fill and asked me to come back. I thought this was a non-scalable model of operation. I should be given all the forms needed in advance so that there is no need for this back and forth business. Anyway, I persevere.

When I go back to the lady, she tells me that all is in order and then writes some stuff, obviously in Indian Government code, on my form and then, to my horror, asks me to submit this at the cashier. When I look around, there is only one cashier and there is a huge, and I really mean huge, queue of people waiting to pay for their sins...oops...applications.

So I walk and join the queue. And then I realize that the cashier has a window on the other side as well. This side faces the VISA section. So I join the tiny queue on this side. When the guy in front of the guy in front of me gives his application and money to the cashier, the cashier asks "Cashornets?" The fairly progressed-in-age man could not understand what he was saying. So the cashier repeated "Cashornets? Cashornets?" till someone deciphered that he meant "Cash or NETS?" (NETS being the Network of Electronic Transactions in Singapore...which in other words, is the electronic banking network here in Singapore)

Then, to my amazement and the other people's dismay, he pronounced that THIS side of the window was only for NETS and THAT side of the window was for cash. Ironically, the NETS machine was closer to THAT side of the window. Since everyone in front of me was a "cash" person, I slid to the window and passed my NETS card along with my application. The cashier extended the NETS machine from THAT side of the window to THIS side of the window so that I could punch in my PIN.

After an hour of this penance, I was out with the knowledge that I will get my passport in a few days time.

Hopefully, the new year and the new passport will bring me luck.

Here's hoping!