VISA Power...

This weekend has been a largely forgettable one..well almost. Somewhere between Thursday night and Friday morning, a long forgotten 'friend' called viral fever decided to visit me. I kind of sensed his presence, but apparently did not acknowledge it. Come Friday, and I was too busy working away in the cubicle, trying to get the JSPs to run on my system. I hadn't been forced to work this hard in months. The extreme air conditioning made 'him' feel totally at home. And so, at the end of the day, I dragged myself home in a shivering state, physically drained. I won't go much into what followed, let's just say I was down and out for most of the weekend. It hasn't been a complete waste though. I've been able to catch up on a bit of reading...I'm midway through Paddy's copy of three men in a Boat. And of course, I finally get to inaugurate my blog.

In two months I'll be joining the legions of Indian students heading off to the United states for a Master's program. Around this time of the year, everyone' s attention turns to the Visa Interview and the intricacies it involves. Thankfully I got mine over with on the 22nd of last month. Every other person has their own theories and advice on this final hurdle, which naturally leaves you a bit apprehensive before the big day. Not that my experience at the American Embassy is anything worth remembering, but I'll anyway rewind to Chennai, May 22nd (for lack of other subject matter to blog about).

I always get tense before interviews. In this case, after a lot of useless pondering, I was satisfied that all documents were in place, my acads were decent enough and they really had no reason to reject me. I left for Chennai in a more relaxed frame of mind. The flight landed at Kamraj Domestic around 6 in the evening, where I met my dad and left for the Alwarpet guest house in a taxi. There was the usual tinge of nostalgia I felt during the drive and on reaching my Amamma's old house (now functioning as a "Corporate Guest House"). There's a distinctive something about Chennai from whitewashed old buildings to wide roads, unmistakably heavy air and signs advertising "High Class Pure Veg. Restaurant". Normally, you either like it or loathe it. I choose to like it. Still, no one in their right mind would ever have anything nice to say about the weather there. Particularly in summer. Just when you think you've developed a tolerance for it, it comes back and hits you in the face, as I was to find out the next day.

I spent the rest of the evening organising my Documents. One of the inhabitants of the guest house was a Zimababwean called Melusi Moyo, who works in a software company in Harare. The company has a tie-up with 3i Technologies, and he suddenly had to leave for this obscure Indian city called Chennai on an assignment with 3i. Upon meeting him, I resorted to cliched topics for conversation from cricket to football (thankfully he follows both) and Victoria Falls and Wildlife. Actually he was pretty candid in his views about the crisis in Zimbabwe and the whole Mugabe thing (he called the BBC 'biased'), and shared his own views about life in India ('the food's great but the place is too hot') and his own experiences of trying to get an American Visa. He'd been rejected twice on some flimsy grounds when he was all set to go for his Master's years ago. But that's another story.

My appointment was scheduled for 1045 on Monday Morning, and the consulate was barely a 10 minute drive from the guesthouse. I reached the place around 1015, believing i had made it in good time. In a matter of seconds I realized I had done absolutely no groundwork on the place. Outside the (small) gate, stood a long queue of people holding their files above their heads apparently to provide some shade for themseleves. It's equally likely they were about to beat their heads in frustration. I joined the queue, which was moving at snail's pace. They seemed to be letting in people at the rate of one every ten minutes. While the security guard was busy driving away anxious parents, complaints poured out from everyone around me ('Can't they at least provide some shade? And what happens when it rains?'). I waited a good 45 minutes in the sweltering heat before they finally let us in. By now the queue, of course, had broken in two.

After a basic security check inside, the formalities began. Now, before you enter the actual American Embassy, where the interview takes place, you submit your documents at a processing counter in a semi open-air area which looks a bit like one of the fringe corridors of the Tirupathi balaji Temple. With only one fan, there was no escape from the heat. I was shunted in and out of 2 different queues and made to wait around three hours while they processed the docs. It just so happened they decided to take a really long time to return the docs to me...I saw people who had 12:00 appointments going in and coming out with smiling faces...before I even had a chance to proceed from that annoying room. The Tirupathi similarity pretty much ends with the queues. Over there the pilgrims scream their lungs out in anticipation of getting a glimpse of Lord Venkateshwara, here it was a long, mind-numbing wait with uncomfortable silence surrounding you. For no apparent reason, I started singing Simon & Garfunkel songs to myself. It was probably an instinctive way of not letting everyone else's tension get to me. As the long wait grew longer, I asked myself "Is this really the American Consulate?"

Finally my documents turned up and I was given the go-ahead...into the main Embassy. I had no idea what the time was since I didn't have a watch and had to leave my cellphone at home, but I must've spent around three hours there already. The Main Embassy was thankfully air-con (the Yanks would have surely melted otherwise). After I got my fingerprints taken I was told to sit...and wait. Here too, i was lost amidst a sea of people. The monotony was temporarily broken when the Charge d' Affairs of the Consulate (or simply 'the boss' as he prefers to be known as) came and gave us a five minute lecture on how to conduct one's self during the interview. The interview dosen't take place in a separate room, instead you have about ten counters each having an interviewer behind it, with about ten candidates in a row for each counter. The boss was doing his best to be funny, and good on him for effort at least. "You think it's a pain doing this interview thing for one day. These people do it everyday for four months nonstop. I try to tell 'em its a great job, but they just don't agree."

I eventually got fed up of waiting and got myself into one of the queues on the pretext of my 1045 appointment (it was already 230). It would be another forty five minutes before my interview began. Now every interviewer is equipped with a mike, to enable the applicant to hear him clearly. It also means once you're in the queue you can quite easily hear the interviews taking place. I'd have to say this bunch of Americans were among the rudest and nastiest people I've seen. They seemed to be probing every detail possible, particularly when it came to elderly couples planning to visit their children in the states. There seemed to be mass rejections all around. A very unpleasant atmosphere, on the whole. They almost rejected a techie from HP who had an assignment onsite (on the grounds that the nature of his work was not 'convincing' enough) and eventually granted him the Visa after making him compile a list of each and every project and platform he had ever worked on, signed in triplicate, et al. The student crowd was not spared either. One guy was rejected because of two backlogs he had early in his degree, while another was refused because he quit his job early and had been doing nothing for around six months.

For my part, I was simply tired and wanted to get it over with. Finally my turn came...and what an anti climax it turned out to be. The interviewer, a stout bald man who appeared to be in his forties, looked at the documents and murmured to himself "UT Austin...hmmm", and started the questioning. "When did you graduate?", "How long have you been working with CTS?", 'Why are you leaving your job?", "What do your parents do?" and a couple of other queries. After he took a quick look at the CA Statement and said "Your passport will be mailed to you in approximately three day's time, have a good day..."

And that was it. The interview took all of two minutes. Instead of reflecting on the fact that I finally got the Visa, I rushed out of the place immediately. I don't think I've ever been so glad to leave a place before..