One of the most profound legacies that the British rule left in the Indian subcontinent after their departure since India's independence, was the full blown bureaucratic network, that laid the basis of Indian public administration up to this day. Over the course of years the system has mutated into a strange Chimera of archaic, rigid bureaucratic conventions in the rapidly changing Indian society. This framework has permeated itself to all levels of administrative work in India evoking pure dread in anyone who may have to take care of any formal matters. I had heard warning tales on how hours of queuing, obtaining certificates, signatures, stamps and other obscure documents, depending on the moods of the clerk responsible, put your patience into an ultimate test. However, I had always thought of these anecdotes to be slightly exaggerated. Unfortunately they did not fall short in accuracy.
The machinery is run by an armada of clerks, sometimes called babus, which is a formerly derogatory term referring to Indian civil servants working for the British Empire, and would later to be used to refer to any Indian administrator buried behind his/her mountains of papers and office supplies. These are men and women equipped with an unflappable sense of authority and self-importance. Having passed the highly competitive civil service examination and granted a job for life in a government office, they have terminally entered a world where reality and validity of things are determined by certificates, stamps, signatures, fee slips and other obscure documents. It seems that to these people, things do not exist if they haven't been validated through emblems and stamps from other authorities first.
Dealing with babus is, unfortunately, a necessary evil, if one wishes to become regarded as a proper resident of Delhi. One ordeal that a student has to go through is to apply for accommodation in a student hostel, which of course involves dealing with the hostel office - a haven of babudom.
After a month in Gwyer Hall, the international office had promised us affordable student accommodation in the campus area from the International Student House. The only catch was that we had to take care of the application ourselves. Thus, as my contract in Gwyer Hall was expiring, I had to take the bull by its horns and sharpen my pencils for another stack of forms to fill. Outside the office, I was greeted by a huddled mass of international and Indian students with their own stacks of passport copies, letters of admission and passport size photos. Indian bureaucrats seem to have an obsession on passport-sized photos, as every single document must be equipped with one. It's not valid if it does not have your face on it.
I knew I had already been admitted to the hostel and now all I needed to do was to pay the deposit and a the rent for the first two months. Pushing my way through the crowd, I entered from the heat of the sweaty noon to a freeze of the air-conditioned bureau. Two men were hunched over their desks with enormous piles of files, forms, notebooks, stamps and other apparel. A young boy was serving chai to the clerks, carefully trying to place the cups to the clerks' desks without touching the papers. The men acknowledged the boy's gestures with a chorus of grunts. Without knowing whom to turn to, I randomly picked one desk on the corner where the other was meticulously studying a ledger about the size of the clerk himself - a small man with massive eyebrows,a greasy combover, face frozen in a constant frown, chest hair bursting from his shirt collar. After standing in front of the man's desk for a few minutes, without him paying the slightest attention to me, I finally opened my mouth and asked whether I could pay the deposit and the rent for the first two months. As I was clearly disrupting the clerk's routine, his eyebrow started twitching:
Me: I would like to pay the deposit and the rent...
Clerk: Aff....Affidavit?!
Me: Umm....No, I wanted to pay the deposit...
Clerk: You have the Affidavit?!
Me: No..?
Clerk: You come back, one hour! (pointing to his colleague's desk)
The man turned back to his ledger. Confused by what had just happened, I decided that it might be best to come back later. An hour later I returned to the office and went to the desk I had been pointed towards. The man behind was going through the applicants' papers with robotic precision. As I had already been admitted to the hostel, I thought that the rest of the application process was only about paying the required fees. It soon became clear to me that I was assuming too much. The clerk handed me a stack of papers, all of which had to be filled out duly and attached with the proper signatures, stamps and of course, passport size photographs. After submitting them my application, a letter of admission from the university, a student exchange certificate from my home university, a copy of my passport, a copy of my visa and three passport-size photos, they still demanded me to fill out and submit:
- A hostel membership card
- A membership application to a health center nearby
- An affidavit stating that I will not engage in an act of ragging
- An affidavit from a parent/guardian/embassy stating that I will not engage in an act of ragging, stamped and signed by an official from the Finnish embassy
- Three passport-size photos
The affidavits were apparently part of Delhi University's anti-ragging campaign (see the post "Snapshots"), which for the locals may be a serious thing, but obviously I was not going to go all the way to the other side of Delhi to pay a fee to obtain a signature for a paper that confirms that I will not bully my fellow residents in the hostel, that was out of the question. Instead, me and Dan, who was with me in the office, decided to circumvent the trouble by taking advantage of the vague definition of "guardian". Hence, my official guardian in India became Mr.Daniel Gregson from England. I handed the filled out forms to the clerk, who studied them for a good while thus increasing the suspense whether my scam was going to backfire. He stared at Dan's smudgy signature for a while, and asked who he was, to which I innocently replied "my guardian". The man looked at me askingly, shrugged and moved on the next application, which was Dan's. It did not seem to bother him that he had just read Dan's name in my application as the guardian and was now studying an application of a person of the exact same name and nationality. Either western names and faces look all the same to him, or the clerk could have not cared less what was in the papers. Finally, the clerk closed our applications to a folder and told us to go buy a lock for the room door and then come back to show it to him.
This was merely a tip of the iceberg of the bureaucratic ordeals one has to go through to get things sorted here. Most of the formal matters I have had to take care of here have involved endless form filling, signatures on every side of paper, stamps of all colours, shapes and sizes, certificates, passport copies, visa copies, affidavits, fee slips, dodgy signatures and vague information given and, of course, an indefinite number of passport-sized photos.
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