The Advisory Boar (page 23)

Renewing my passport, part 2

November 04, 2009

Towards the end of August, I applied to renew my expired passport. I stood in a queue to submit the application, and returned home to wait for the police to verify that the residential address I put on the form was indeed where I lived.

A month later (to the day), a Sub-Inspector of police called to tell me he was on his way. He wanted to see two separate documents proving that I had lived at the specified address for a year or more. I showed him an old lease deed and a recent phone bill for my MTNL land line. He was happy with the deed, but wanted a phone bill that was more than a year old. I didn't have one (because I send the whole year's bills to my accountant at the end of the financial year), and I happened to not have any other documents (e.g. bank statements) that he would accept instead.

He said I had three options: to produce the requisite proof somehow, or to accept that my application would fail, and to apply again later when I had all the right documents, or to "spend a little money" to ensure a favourable police report despite my (partial) lack of documentation. "A little" money turned out to be INR1000, and I didn't feel like spending that on our friendly neighbourhood SI.

I had resigned myself to failure when Hassath suggested asking MTNL for a copy of an old phone bill… and I suddenly remembered that the MTNL web site (bless its soul!) allows me to download PDF copies of all the bills I've paid in the past. I downloaded one, printed it out, cringed at how unconvincing and unofficial it looked (even in colour), and called the SI to tell him I'd found some proof. He accepted it, and went away to file his report.

Today (about forty days after the police verification), I received my new passport by courier.

But all is not well. The "7B" in my (independently verified!) address has been printed in the passport as "73". But that's not all! There's an "Emigration Check Required" stamp on the first page, even though I am (explicitly and unambiguously) exempt from that particular restriction by virtue of paying income tax and having studied in India past the secondary school level. Oh well, at least they got my name right.

I wonder how many queues it will take to get this sorted out.

Update (2009-11-23): The incorrect address has been corrected after only two trips to the RPO.

I still miss Bertie

October 27, 2009

It's been two years since Bertie died. It still feels like yesterday.

Bird watchers and purple prose

October 25, 2009

Speaking of bird-watching and poetry, I've noticed that bird-watchers, at least on the few Indian bird-watching lists I subscribe to, adore ornate, flowery, Victorian-sounding prose. They applaud it when they see it in other people's reports, and do their best to put it in their own.

My first Rajnikant film

October 19, 2009

Last week, Hassath took me to the Siri Fort auditorium to watch my first Rajnikant film, “Sivaji, The Boss”.

Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher

October 16, 2009

I came across a quotation from Nissim Ezekiel's poem, "Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher" in a book, and the title was so interesting that I just had to look it up. I found it in the minstrels archive, and it's such an intriguing poem that I'm quoting all twenty lines here.

Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher
To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering—
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.
The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart's dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.
— Nissim Ezekiel

I have read some other poems by Nissim Ezekiel (one was a part of my high school English curriculum), but I can't remember another one that made me sit up and pay attention. I love the idea of tying poetry, love, and bird-watching together through the patience and caring that each requires; and I love the unhurried, graceful way the poem segues between each activity and the feelings it evokes. I think the ending is a bit forced (did anyone mop the heart's dark floor or were they too busy eyeing up the slowly turning women?), and detracts from the light tone established by the first stanza. I notice, too, that poetry, love, and bird-watching are presented as implicitly male pursuits.

Myths of light with darkness at the core? Not so much. But patient love relaxing on a hill is a different feeling, one that I can recognise and will remember.