Patience

For the past one month of my stay in India, I have found that this country offers numerous ways to develop your patience. Here I list a few which I encountered or I have heard from my friends.

1. Getting a passport: Getting a passport in this country can really count as an accomplishment worthy of being cited in your CV. First hurdle is to submit your form which itself can take one full day. And in this total day you can encounter anybody from touts to rude passport officials. After this comes the guys for inquiry. The local police and the intelligence who will invariably require some tips for expensive tea and sweets. After this if you are lucky we will get the passport and when you get it it is already three to four months since you submitted the form. But wait, your chance to gain a little more training is not yet over. You can get a passport where your father's or mother's or both names can be of a person you have never heard of. So, you again go back and forth few times to get it corrected. At the end you are one frustrated, pissed off patient guy.

2. Get your Voter ID: A small piece of laminated paper needed to exercise your democratic rights. Well what to say? It is also a wonderful training opportunity. First you have to submit your form, the mandatory first step. So, you have to go to some center where they will collect your form. You queue up for your turn. The office will invariably open half an hour to one hour late. By this time the queue is a mile long and you are probably half a mile from the office gate. Generally if people don't jump queue your turn should come after an hour or so. But, this won't happen since every other person in this country is VIP. So, these VIPs will come with some VVIP and try to get their forms submitted out of queue. So your time needed get upscaled by a factor of two or three. Now, this process has to be repeated twice or thrice depending on your luck to get your ID. Twice or thrice I say since after your form is processed you have to submit your photograph and then still mysteriously if your card does not arrive you have to submit your photograph again. Lets move one to other methods now.

3. Sending a registered letter through Indian Postal Service: Over here the queue jumpers are less in number but still it does not deprive you of your chance to test your patience. Over here you will encounter many times people who are given a computer to speed up the process but they are so inefficient in handling the device that sometimes you might feel that the computer is a devil which you should not install in government departments. I don't want to elaborate here the real challenge since they are similar to the ones above this one.

4. Traveling in suburban trains during rush hour: Well this one is not only the test of your patience but also the test of your ability to squeeze yourself in a volume half the total volume of

your whole body. Believe me this is possible. And on top of that the time you will take to reach your destination will go up exponentially as you get closer to your destination. How this is possible, is still a very difficult question to answer for me.

5. Doing a PhD: This is probably one of the best patience training ground. People have written numerous treatise on this subject hence I am not able to add anything to this subject.

6. Having a Tata photon whiz in non metropolitan city: I am not able to comment on other service providers of wireless internet but this one is really amazing. In the advertisement of another similar product from the same company on TV they show the sign of infinity in the end meaning it is infinitely fast. But believe we should not miss the point its not infinitely faster but the opposite. INFINITELY SLOW. Infact it is so slow that probably I should put infinite "O" s in the word "SLOW" before I even think of putting the "W".

Of all the above you would see that except for the last one all others have to do something or the other with the Government. So, you want to improve your patience just deal with some government department. Here I end this post with due apologies to Indian Judiciary System.

Yes Professor....

To start with I started writing this piece long back and at that time I did not complete it which still is unfinished but still I post it here with an ending not intended at that time.

Well for the past few days I had been thinking how best to describe the day to day life of such a student who is doing a PhD and then again not doing it. I had started this business of doing PhD and not doing it a little earlier then my peers not quite understanding what to expect. I say a little earlier because I happened to take a wise decision of taking a package deal which gives you both masters and doctors bunched together in one. Well lets call this bunched together entity as moctors. If you stretch your imagination a little more you might chance upon the fact that moctors can be like mock + actors with k and ac missing for the two words. Oh! my my, first you are an actor and above that you are a mock actor. With my limited wisdom I can see the Khan's from Bollywood or the numerous names from Hollywood being real actors. But the moctors are the ones who do the acting in the mock but never get to play a part in the real movie. Now I am confused. If one is playing in the mock then why the hell is he not in the movie or what the real actor is doing when the mock is being played? My dear friend that pretty much sums up the thing I am doing for last few years. Now I leave this open to interpretation as to who is the mock and who is the actor when a moctor is concerned. By now I am pretty much confused as to what I am writing, well not to worry I don't even know why I am writing. When I took the deal I hadn't yet had the opportunity to chance upon the famous British TV series `yes minister'. Had it been the case I might have taken a second look to the package. Well its a very simple package only the rules of give and take apply. The beneficiary of the package or in other words the acceptor of the package, since it may not be quite true that the acceptor is always a beneficiary, has to commit or give few years of his life to the package regulators and the regulators in turn will take whatever is left of the acceptor. So you can see a simple give and take. Well, after this give and take business I started my journey to the end of a long tunnel which after few years I realized doesn't have an end. It does not mean that it does not have an end at all, its just that the end is created when the regulators wish to do so. So, its kind of like this, I am a trying to be a moctor for movie named "The Eternal walk" with Count Dracula being in the lead even in the mock. Now, you are confused, so am I...