Madras to Manila

Looking back at the past week, it has been quite eventful for me. In fact the week prior to my travel was the most confusing time I have spent shuttling from Philippines Chennai Consulate–Satyam's office locations....in the course of which I found that I have to take a round trip via Delhi to Manila just for the sake of Visa.

The flight to Delhi was very pleasant and little did it offer any clues about the impending twists in my tale.

This has to be one of my most ill-planned trips and I shudder to think that I was en route to an international travel and would return home only three weeks hence.

My first mistake was not to activate roaming in my cell as I completely forgot my migration from prepaid to post paid since my last Delhi visit. This forced me to take a new prepaid number with HUTCH. Thanks to new user friendly rules of TRAI activation takes 24 hours which is close to 60% of my planned duration in Delhi.

Before even this I had gone straight to the Philippines embassy from the Airport on Monday morning but was politely told to come the next day as I had missed the token issuance from 8:30 to 10:30. I panicked that I made a mistake of taking the Monday morning flight instead of Sunday evening, as they already quoted two working days for issuance of Visa and it really looked like my travel would be postponed to the weekend.

I could not wait for the next day to dawn and was anxious to see the Visa officer face to face as no matter how important a document on which my VISA was going to get issued I only had the Security to contend with who could only see me as a valid / invalid Token No :-)

As I waited I went searching in and around Delhi for a internet parlor and a Reliance Web World in the least. I guess Reliance should change their Ad Quote to “Karlo Duniya minus Delhi Mutti mein”. Fortunately my attempt led me to a Saravana Bhavan where I recovered partially with a mini-tiffen and madras kaapi.

I was forced to go back to the PARK to use the business center, which I was desperately trying to avoid, for browsing the internet at a measly rate of 300 Rs to an hour. The lady at the counter offered me lessons in Mathematics saying I could use it for 15 minutes and pay 75 Rs/- :-).

Maybe she was just trying to be of help seeing my popped out eyes but I was seeing everyone as operating against me.

I went to the embassy site for any further hidden surprises as they never told me about the token system. I found that the VISA fee was expected only in a local DD and not cash. So I rushed to the ICICI bank and cut a draft for 1500 came back to the room and in the idle time cross checked if I had missed out any documentation. The checklist noted down by me said Rs 2000/- for single entry VISA fee. The damn website was outdated.

So I had to rush to the ICICI bank to cut an additional draft for Rs 500/-. In my effort to not get into further trouble I asked the ICICI bank officer, who had changed by this time, to make the payee exactly similar to my previous draft so that there is no rejection due to such issues of carrying incompatible drafts.

The girl kept smiling at me and I was wondering whether I blabbered something.
I was sure she was going to curtly tell me “I know my job mister” but in hindi she said “Uske Liyae humko aapki pehli DD Dekhna chahiyae naa”. I sheepishly handed it over from my bag.

To my surprise I found the Payee was misspelt in the first DD itself so I hurriedly asked her to cancel the first DD itself and give me one consolidated DD for Rs 2000/-

A tired day came to an end and I cancelled my plan to go to Saravana Bhavan for dinner and had a quiet dinner at my room itself.

Next day at the embassy I became token no 6 for an hour of my life anxiously waiting my turn to get into the "Pearly" Gates to present my documents and get to know when I can get the Visa.

Once the Visa officer saw my tickets were for the same night to leave to Manila he was shocked and asked me how come I came so late as if it was my wanton delay or laziness...

When I told him the communication has come from Ministry of Foreign Affairs he picked the fax communication and said “Sir, Why did you come all the way to Delhi. We could have authorized the Chennai consulate to issue your Visa”. I was about to faint but gathered back my composure and got enough courage to ask him whether I will get my Visa that day itself and he told me he would call me on my local mobile around afternoon to tell me when I will get the Visa.

So unable to bear the tension of idling in the hotel I went to the Ministry of Statistics to finish some project work related to my travel to Manila and blindly checked out of the hotel and kept my luggage in my elder brother’s in-law’s place.

I got a call on my mobile as promised from the embassy asking me to collect my Visa at 5:00 PM and I traveled on schedule as per my itinerary.

I took a momentary pride in my quick decision to get a local mobile card as only that helped me keep in touch with a faceless consulate officer as each time I get turned down by a security officer asking for inputs I can never think of possessing till he mentions it to me

Till that time I had very little imagination that I would see the dawn only in Singapore’s Changi Airport. More than a dawn it was an awakening of sorts. I was like transfixed into a new world. Something straight out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon where Tom takes an escalator to heavenly abode and keeps looking around at everything with so much of awe.

For the first time I saw the convenience of escalator belts being used for horizontal displacement of people and made maximum use of it instead of walking around

But my funnier moments were in the airplane from Delhi to Singapore. Its been quite a while since I took an international flight and the gizmos attached to the seat are always state of the art and often make you appear wanting in common sense to make use of them.

There was this cute LCD monitor in front of me but with only two buttons to increase and decrease the brightness and I was wondering how to turn it on. Then I remembered that the remote was quietly concealed in a cavity on the side of the seat armrest attached with a spring cable.

I would not have been so unsettled had the old lady who was next to me smiled back as I took my seat and smiled at her. Somehow she gave me a feeling that I was Mohammad Atta himself. From that moment I started fumbling around for things and took quite some time to settle down in my seat.

The best part came when the air hostesses were distributing head sets to be used for the TV sets and I was again lost on how to connect the damn thing. I could see two hole-like cavities at the bottom of the LCD monitor and for a good five minutes was trying to attach it under the monitor but the thing would just not fit in.

I desperately looked around to see if somebody connects it so that I can learn the trick without asking a stupid question to the air hostess. To my dismay everyone was pretty much at ease and did not want to even open the headset from its plastic cover.

Sometimes I feel frequent travelers have a very pompous way of settling down in the air craft by doing things in a particular sequence and giving you a complex by sneering at you as if you are straight out of a village if you don’t know your way around.

After all it is not rocket science and for all I know the other guy has just traveled a couple of more times than me. In fact you travel once and it is all the same except for your anxiety to not look foolish if you are traveling after a long gap.

I waited patiently for the take off for someone to start using the TV set so that I can simply ape that guy and was pleasantly amused()to see some of the pompous looking travelers making the same mistake I was trying to do with the headset.

When I glanced across the aisle to the farthest window seat I saw a guy who was in full flight (I mean with the TV set) and the wire was not going across his seat to the LCD but was hanging by his side. When I also looked around the corners of my armrest I found that my own thighs were hiding the socket plug-in for the headset....

Slowly one by one I recalled from my earlier experience of traveling in Air France 5 years ago and was soon merrily surfing the channels. One improvement that I could see was that there were on demand movies that you could start and play any time you wanted and much to my relief there were two Tamil movies (Vasool Raja and Gilli) and I gleefully watched both of them.