Not sure how to digest this. If you use Air Indias international flight from Chennai to go to, say, Goa, you go thru the international terminal. (This I found it by accident and had to walk thru the concrete emptiness of our airport. I got to see the entire old airport sitting there, wasting away. It could have been a convention center or some way to recover all the tax payer money sunk into the new airport. But that is another topic.) At the Air India counter - by the way the staff are polite and professional - you are asked to fill out a form and give it to the customs official. And I am not kidding about the following. (I took a photo of the form with my outdated smart phone and captured only a portion of it.) The form wants to know if you are in possession of Watches, watch movements or parts thereof. Transistors and diodes. Photographic Cameras including Video something. VCRs, VCPs and Video Tapes. Zip fasteners. Any other electronic items. Gold bullion and gold jewellery. Some more stuff which my camera didnt capture. The capital C in Cameras is in the form. I didnt make it up. You are to stand confused for few minutes since the truly foreign travelers goes thru passport line, and you and other domestic ones stand wondering what next? Then they send you to a Customs Officer. This is actually a young man - in his late twenties. I guess he joined Customs to serve his nation, protect it from bad stuff and people - like nukes and terrorists - from coming in. Or national treasures and innocent people being smuggled out. This young man takes this form, your boarding pass and scribbles something. Returns your boarding pass. That is the purpose of his current life. You proceed to security. Think about it. This young man is wasting his life fiddling with a form that was outdated and mostly unnecessary even in the 1980s. No one has bothered to read this form but lakhs of passengers are asked to fill this and sign swearing that they dont possess diodes, transistors, VCRs, VCPs, Video Tapes, Zip fasterers, watches, etc. Or that they have proof of purchase. Every day. Every week. Year after year. Every smart phone has a Camera and a Video. Now, do I lie on the form. Of course Yes. Do most people - young ones - even know what a VCR or VCP is? What are they trying to prevent? Are they preventing embarrassment of some middle aged guy carrying around his wedding video from the 80s or 90s? What is a watch movement by the way? New form of modern dance? Watch and move? Or are they preventing us from watching someone elses movement? And whats up with Zip fastener? Why was there a Central Govt obsession with zip fastener in the 80? Was it a benevolent act of preventing body parts from getting caught in zip fasteners? Should the form read Zip fasteners and parts caught in it thereof? Now filling out this form for few mins is not going to kill me. In fact it is entertaining. Hilarious. But that is not the point. It just shows that there is never any review of what is. There are cities and countries that review their processes. Change with time and technologies. All with citizen and customer in mind. Making life easy for passengers, citizens. Not to mention officials themselves. Making better use of our officials and their time. I think it was Letterman who said this about Andy Kaufman (I think.) Kaufman was a comic genius. But people were never sure if he was joking or a borderline lunatic. He did seem very disturbed. Letterman said something like: When you look into Andys eyes you know that there is no one in charge in there. Similarly, when you deal with Central Govt institutions in India and you get the feeling that there is no one in charge. Borderline lunacy. :-)
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 08:48:15 +0000
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