We may be the world’s fifth largest economy, an emerging superpower etc etc etc, but nothing brings home the fact of how ‘Third world’ we are, as when one has to apply for a visa!
It is a humbling and humiliating experience!
We must send bank statements, balance sheets, and property papers and fill in multiple forms. Then, go for a silly interview, give biometrics and then wait, wait, wait till the embassy finally decides that you are not poor and homeless and can be trusted to roam around freely in their country without blowing up buildings or worse still, robbing their economy by availing of their freebies.
We are now the world’s number #8 in outbound tourists. We are also good spenders… We stay in decent hotels, order large meals ( even if only in Indian restaurants), buy cuckoo clocks, Murano glassware, and gifts for all the extended family and we never leave Duty-Free without a couple of Scotch bottles and a haul of Toblerone chocolates!
As for Thailand, their ‘main industry’ would fold, without our corporate travel groups going there in hordes for “annual reviews”.
So we should have get some recognition and respect and be ushered into their countries with speed and open arms.
But sadly it’s not the case, every country seems to treat us with outright suspicion and mistrust…and harassment!
And in this regard, Australia takes the cake!
If you need a visa quickly, they charge you an obscene amount of money as ‘ priority charges’, then randomly and unnecessarily request mandatory medical tests to ensure you have functioning kidneys, Good eyesight, regular blood pressure, no TB, and are not pregnant.
And they don’t trust just ‘any’ hospital, So you have to travel to Pune, Mumbai etc to go through an examination, get your chest x-ray and give up some of your blood at an ‘authorised’ centre, when all of which could have been done in Nagpur itself!
One assumes the prisoners entering Nazi concentration camps were treated better! Although Thank-God these visa centres don’t tattoo our wrists with our passport numbers.
For two-tier cities it’s way worse…you have to travel to a Metro for the visa interview (a waste of airfare and a full day) or pay the equivalent in your home city on certain dates to the visiting visa official, in what clearly is a scam.
So what can we do? Retaliation by imposing similar ludicrous conditions on their passport holders seems pointless and petty, And our terrible tourist infrastructure means very few foreigners want to visit here in any case.
What could work, is a Mahatma Gandhi-style Satyagraha, in which all Indians take a vow not to travel abroad for one whole full year, That should get the foreign embassies on their knees!
No visa fee collections, A huge dent in income to tourist hubs like Singapore, Europe, the UK etc.
(We can instead tour within India, spending our money in our own country).
Soon instead of treating us like parhias,they will repent their ways and lay out the red carpet with ‘no visa required ‘ or ‘visa simplified’ schemes.
The only thing that worries one is how the corporates will manage that whole time to run their companies without taking their dealers/agents/ distributors etc for the “annual review“ to Thailand.
@bits_of_beauty_everywhere ( #BOBE)
