God Bless India!

As I went to go through immigration at Bengaluru airport last night I was a bit stunned to be stopped and whisked off to a side counter. After much babbling in Hindi between two immigration officers it seemed that there was a problem with my passport. It transpired that I had gone through immigration in Bombay (Mumbai) on Monday morning before getting my internal Air India flight down to Bengaluru. On arriving I was erroneously pushed through immigration for a second time – two stamps for the price of one in my passport. I thought absolutely nothing more of it – I was more focused on finding Smiling Satya before starting my 90 minute taxi ride to the hotel. However on the way out of India last night, immigration weren’t happy and I got to see firsthand how escalations in the Indian bureaucracy are done....Low level first line refuses to take a decision and pushes you to his boss, his boss gets very angry very quickly and tells you to sit down, he draws in his boss and the two proceed to get rather confused and hot under the collar. They rope in a third obviously more junior individual to go away and check the computer systems and make numerous photocopies of my passport, “again, please sit down again sir”.... the passport in triplicate comes back with the third Indian and the three proceed to have another pow-wow in Hindi. And then, as if by magic, two big bosses wander by and get drawn into the conversation. One walks away very quickly and the second, rather placidly, shakes his head before turning to me and says the Air India are a bunch of jokers and that I need to get the second stamp cancelled the next time I come back to India. Job done and I am suddenly no longer facing the rest of my life becoming the Indian equivalent of Tom Hanks (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362227/) destined never to see the family and Pich again. I suppose I should just be thankful I wasn’t dealing with US Homeland Security....