Mumbai – a turning point?

It’s been four years since I left India. I’ve always wondered if there would come a time, when I came to India and felt I did not belong there anymore. I wondered if this trip would be it. I got here on Wednesday morning, and since then, I have either been jet-lagged or watching TV. Three days of minute by minute coverage of the worst terrorist attack on Indian soil, have made me realize I am more Indian than I thought I was. I felt the same frustration, anger, disappointment and grief that everyone in Mumbai did. I was anxious for my brother who worked a few buildings away from the Oberoi Trident hotel. I was waiting for him to get out of Mumbai and get to the safety of our home in Bangalore. Yet I worried incessantly about the route to the airport, the security at the airport, and his plane journey home to the point that I wondered if perhaps he should just stay at home in Mumbai and not come to meet me. For an hour on Thursday I was seized by anxiety as we heard about an uncle who was at the Oberoi. We were later informed that he had left from there earlier that evening.

While I would love to ramble on about the gruesomness of the despicable act carried out, I doubt if I can truly ever express what I feel. I am not sure if it is more helplessness or more sorrow at what has happened. It is good to see that we Indians who are usually an imperturbable lot, have reacted and in some cases quite strongly. People are openly telling politicians to go to hell and not talk to them about the Mumbaikar spirit and crap. For the first time, I am seeing little coverage of politicians on TV.

After this is all over, when the investigations have been completed and some terrorist group has been blamed along with Pakistan for it’s support of that terrorist organization, when the news media has moved on to more mundane and useless news like an actor getting married to an actress or the election spectacle in the country, when the fallen heroes have been honored, this day would either have been a turning point for the country or it would have been yet another terrorist attack.

I salute the security personnel who gave up their life or put their all at risk and saved the many hundreds that did get saved. To those hundreds who didn’t make it, may their soul rest in peace. I hope their deaths will change things around here.

Penny wise pound foolish

I have been waiting for quite some time now to blog about this, but I didn’t want to jinx myself by saying something before I had my passport back in my safe hands.

Some of you might have read before (over here) about how much of a pain it was to get my tickets booked to go to India. Obviously I did not know at that time, what the “real” definition of travel-pain was. Happy to have gotten a good deal on my tickets to Bangalore from Chicago for $1100 on British Airways via London, I whiled away some time before I started working on putting together my papers for the U.K. transit visa.

So the British consulate has this esteemed opinion, that if you are an American citizen or permanent resident, or a person on a valid American visa, you can be considered safe to roam the waiting areas of Heathrow airport. However if you are one of those sorry souls, who lurk in between those two statuses, and are on your way from becoming a visa holder to a permanent resident, then somehow you are automatically not considered allowable on airport premises unless you hold this farce that is called a transit visa.

I started with googling (wow, that’s not a word yet?) the local British consulate, to see what I needed to do. After linking me to another site and another and another, I got to the site where I could start filling out my 8 page application. That used to be the first step, before getting an appointment with the UK consulate in Chicago. So, I started filling it up on weekday morning while at work. Then, it started asking me questions I had no answer for. So, I gave up, saved it and went back to work. Once my husband got me the answers to those questions, I went back to finish it. Of course, I didn’t finish it because, then they started asking me for my entire history, my families’ history, geography etc etc. So I gave up again and decided this was not something I could finish during lunch. So, I finally waited until the end of the day before I could complete answering all the questions they had for me and I clicked ‘Next’. So, it asked me to get an appointment, and gave me the option of picking a place that was much closer to home, not to get my visa, but to get my biometrics taken. Not knowing what to do, I picked the option. The next screen asked me if I wanted to mail my documents or take them over to the Chicago British consulate. Again, because that’s what we used to do, I chose the second option, and then that’s it, it gave me the links to download the application, the appointment letter for the biometrics and then said I should mail my documents to the British consulate general in Chicago. I was totally confused. So, I looked up the phone number for the British consulate in Chicago and called them. The message for those who are looking for information on visas was “go to the website”. After scanning the website from top to bottom, I found that the only number one could call to get any information was a 1-900 number that apparently went to the UK, and was charged at $3 a minute. My dear friend Fa, who was also in the same predicament as me, and who could no longer take this uncertainty, decided to make a trip to the British consulate where she was stopped by security who she confused into putting her on the phone with another guy inside the consulate. She was then told, that we needed to get our biometrics taken if the website asked us to, and drop off the application and the original passport, EAD, advance parole, photograph and itinerary at the drop-box outside the consulate. They would then process it in about 5 to 10 working days and send us an email once it was ready. We could then come back to pick it up. All originals! What were they thinking? No option now, because it was too late to cancel tickets and re-route. So we had to go through the torture.

I telecommuted one day and got my fingerprints taken. I wasted another half day driving to Chicago and dropping off my papers (they only accept them between 9 and 10 in the morning). After about 6 days, I got an email that said my visa was approved and my papers were ready to picked up any weekday between 3 and 4 p.m. Last Friday, my husband wasted 2 and half hours on I-90 trying to get into Chicago, while the clock ticked past 4 and took a U-turn back home. Yesterday, I wasted half a day taking a train to Chicago and picking up my papers. In all, I’ve lost about a day’s worth of billing at work, 86$ for the visa, and another 50 something on travel expenses etc. That money would have spared me the pain and torture of the process had I spent it on a more comfortable ticket on some other airline.

I’ve absolutely been “penny wise pound foolish” like the British say!

Election Time!

Happy election day! It’s too bad there is no holiday for Election day, and no special movies on TV (except 16 hours of House which my husband and I and even my daughter have started watching like maniacs).

I have only voted once in a political election – the first one that came by after I turned 18. I was in college, voted for DMK, and I remember my friend wondered how a maami like me had voted for DMK. I have voted in a few other elections as well. I’ve voted for class leader elections, house captain elections, head girl elections – you get the idea?

Class leaders/monitors/Class representatives were responsible for occasionally filling in for the teacher. If the teacher stepped out or was on leave or for some reason the class needed to be “monitored”, the class leader would step forward, chalk in hand, and in a shrill voice, try to drown the noisy class, by such things as “I will write down your name if you talk”, and “Everybody keep quiet”. There were the occasional strict class reps and the occasional “jaane tho yaar” cool class reps, but no matter which kind, teachers’ day would always cause a revolution in the class. There would either be a “move of no-confidence” or a “take responsibility and step-down” act. I was a class rep only once, and I did the latter, because I couldn’t get all the 7th standard girls in my class to agree on whether we should do a dance or a skit for our teachers. Duh!!

My highest held office by election was as house captain for the school when I was in class X. There were four houses, and I still believe the cream of the batch that year was kind of concentrated in one house (not mine). Therefore I got a chance to rise above the radar and get nominated alongwith two other girls – one was a surprise, the other was shocking. Being in class 10, and naive that I was – I thought I would be too immodest if I voted for myself, so I voted for the shocking nominee. I won by a margin of one vote and became house captain. The shocking nominee became my vice-captain. I endured her vice-captaincy for the whole academic year – she was a rowdy and I didn’t want to get beaten up by her “brothers” if I pissed her off. It was kind of fun to be popular and admired by juniors, to select teams, put together plays, plan a drill display, motivate a team, etc. The best part of it was to carry all those trophies and shield we won all the year through. I think it was one of the best years of my life.

Today John McCain or Barack Obama will feel the joy of winning an election that is being termed historic no matter who wins. I did follow the election campaigning pretty closely, and enjoyed every bit of information and misinformation I came across. It’s too bad I cannot vote, but I look forward to hearing the results tonight. CNN will be on full blast at our home today.

So, those of you can vote, go ahead and make a difference – vote for the right guy, at least this time round. Those of you who cannot, you can still vote here.

Happy election day again!

Grow up Mommy!

Today I experienced something for the first time, something I am sure I will experience many many times in the future in worse proportions, and my reaction today makes me worried as to how I am going to cope in the many years to come.

We were at a get-together. Five families and five children, the oldest of which was in third grade and the youngest was my daughter at 2 and a half. They decided to play “run from someone” game, where someone ended up being the youngest, most innocent and naive kid, my daughter. They all ran from her, and hid in the bedroom and shut the door, while she slowly made her way up the stairs to find herself locked out. They’d see her, scream, run and shut themselves in the bathroom and she’d call me “Amma.. all go in bathoom”. It was some silly kids’ game, but my daughter clearly didn’t understand it, and more so why she was being left out. She just wanted to play with them. Every few minutes she called out “Mommy”, because she’d been left out of some room. I couldn’t take the disappointed look on her face. It broke my heart to see her being the scapegoat of the game. When one of the other moms reprimanded the older kids and asked them to include her in the game – I saw a smile light up her face. Few minutes later, she was normal, running behind the older kids, trailing by a few feet wherever they went, but I cannot shake off that disappointed look she gave me. I’ve done this like 1000 times to my brother – when he thought I was his only friend and my friends were his. 15 something years later, I feel guilty for having done that.

I know it’s a really stupid incident, and that she will grow up have her own friends, probably do the same thing to younger kids, but it scares me that I was affected by it. If I can feel so bad that some 6 year old or 8 year old ignored her, I guess I have a lot of growin up to do, before I can be unfazed by people and events that disappoint my daughter for the rest of her life.