Tedious task

If you are a person of the opinion that ‘process of passport renewing’ is a pretty simple procedure, then it’s time you revised your opinion! To me, scaling Mt Everest by shinning up is much simpler than getting one’s PP renewed. I discerned the deadly difficulty involved in the dreadful PP renewal procedures, only when I decided to get mine renewed recently.

First of all, getting an appointment at the PP centre is one heck of a gargantuan task. It all starts with creating an account by filling up sundry details and uploading several documents. Then you log in at sharp 6pm, as you try booking for an appointment. At three different stages the security code flashes asking for the choice of PP centre, date and time. Mind you, all these are done within a time span of just one minute.

You are amazed at the celerity of your mind, and swiftness of your supple fingers, (which are bereft of nails. For, you’d have chewed them off in your anxiety). Here invariably, the date and time picked by you, would have been picked by someone else too. If not, something else goes awry midway, and you’re brought back to the homepage. Which means, you are back to the drawing board, going through the same rigmaroles the next day.

And then the next day, you wait for 6pm with trepidation coupled with excitement. (Just like on an evening-out prior to your wedding, you’d have waited for your betrothed - twiddling your fingers, crinkling forehead and feeling jittery). Apparently, on finally grabbing an appointment, you feel so damn exulted that such ‘frisson’ you wouldn’t have felt even on the night following your wedding!

Now pops up the next hurdle for you. As you land up at the PP centre on the scheduled day and time, you are made to wait for long stretch of time before you are let in a place, where you stand poised in serpentine queue leading to verification counter. Just when you have reached the counter, you realize all through you were in the wrong queue! Finally, as you inch towards the right counter, with a flourish you flash all possible documents. Since, you know those folks have uncanny knack to demand details of things that you don’t possess.

After all red-tapism, you waddle towards A-section, and wait for another indefinite stretch of time for your token number to be displayed on the illuminated board. The way you’d be screwing up eyes and staring at board endlessly, you’d be cutting a sorry picture of a person with a bad case of strabismus (squint eyes). Constant craning of head would have given you crick neck too. At last you are called in, just when you have pulled out all your hair in desperation, and would be about to reach out for others’ hair.

Completing all formalities in A-section, you trudge towards B, and then finally when you come out of C section, you end up with all whacked-out body and jangling nerves. Really, by next PP renewal which is after a decade, I sincerely wish the procedures would be simpler and faster. Wishful thinking indeed…!