The Indian Circumlocution Office

A post born primarily of sheer frustration - but I hope with some anthropological apercus thrown in.

"My Bengal of red tape, I love you! Forever your majestic piles of ancient application forms and the intoxicating smell of musty paper will play upon my heart like the rusty keys of a thrice-repaired office typewriter..."

...as Tagore might also have written! I hope any Bengalis reading this will forgive my sacrilegious parody of the opening lines of Tagore's "Amar Sonar Bangla" (now the Bangladeshi national anthem); but a foreigner coming to live here does not only feel the magic of the open air and sky penetrating his breast like the sound of a far-off flute (though he surely does feel that too), he also sees a great deal of the inside of administrative offices and their pen-pushing inhabitants.

For here, bureaucracy is a way of life, and as with the slow pace of rustic existence, one must attune himself gradually to its gentle rhythms. There are no appointments; there are, it often seems, no "office hours" that anyone cares to observe with regularity; but there are very, very many holidays. Kalke ashun, "come tomorrow", is the eternal refrain. It does not mean that anything will be done tomorrow; it is not even a guarantee that anyone at all will be in the office tomorrow; it is usually no more an admonition to patience (but as such very salutary, since nothing is needed more than patience). Computers and electronic mail exist here, but officials avoid using them: they infinitely prefer transactions involving the inscrutable West Bengal post service, who have never successfully delivered a single document relating to me, or telephone lines which run through overloaded and intermittent exchanges and are answered, if at all, by people who speak no word of English. If they have an official email address they will not make any advertisement of the fact: why, that would mean answering so many enquiries! and from the General Public! And this would disturb them in their eternal circumlocutory task of establishing - to adapt Dickens' immortal description of nineteenth-century British bureaucracy from Little Dorrit - "How to Do It as Slowly as Possible"; an aim recently quoted in a Calcutta Telegraph editorial as the fourth "inbuilt Indian principle" of officialdom. A cartoon by the great R. K. Laxman analyses how delays can be introduced into the simplest office communication:an irate administrator turns from a virtually empty desk, decorated with a single memo, to berate his secretary - "You mean to say that you placed this note here a month ago? And yet you never bothered to draw my attention to it?!"

Now, inefficiency alone is not a necessary ground for complaint, as long as the administrative machine in question does not also set terribly exacting standards for the completeness of its own procedures. I have been told that in Spain and South America one is often unable to get anything done, but that at the last minute some official will summarily ignore the proprieties, stamp all your forms, and give you a free pass to whatever it was you were after. A certain amount of palm-greasing would have the same function. Conversely, the German or Swiss approach - as the complaint runs, "Von der Wiege bis zur Baare/ Formulare, Formulare" ("From the cradle to the grave/Forms and still more forms they wave") - is at least smoothed by famously ruthless efficiency and precise timekeeping. Stony-faced, the handsomely paunched official comes back with your notarized documents and bids you go free, out into the sunshine to enjoy your lunchtime Bier and Wurst. There, bureaucracy may not be fun, but it is dispatched as quickly and clinically as it can be, freeing the rest of your time for leisure. And the Germans have some very good ideas of what to do with that.

In contrast to both of these approaches, the Indian system seems to have been born from a truly perilous desire to make bureaucracy itself enjoyable - without however making it either any more efficient or any less demanding in its procedures. There you stand, apprised of some new setback to your application, and the official who has just dealt you this blow will try a little joke in English, or draw your kind attention to the interesting similarities of certain root words in Sanskrit and Latin, or enquire how you are liking India? or invite you to take a seat and have tea and sweets brought in. And really, the only polite and practical thing to do is to accommodate yourself to this. Make sure you have no subsequent appointment, but bring a book, accept any tea and conversation overtures that are proffered, and make yourself comfortable. At least the office ceilings in India contain an unusually high density of fans. For you will probably be back again in the same place another half-dozen times, and it pays to make yourself amenable to those you are dealing with.

In fact, it pays to make trips to the office even when you know there is little hope of seeing any progress - just in order to say hello and "pay your respects", as it were. In this, dealing with Indian administrators rather resembles the ceremonies of the ancient Roman system of patronage, the morning levy at which clients assembled at their patron's door to see if there was any service they could render him. Your service is required since, when the time is right for the next stage in the process, it is you who will be required to expedite the documents for the necessary counter-signatures - and a good thing too, since the official peon (internal postman) would probably lose them if they were ever entrusted to his care. Moreover, form-filling is done on the pre-Xerox principle that multiple copies must be handwritten by the applicant. Since a submission in triplicate is the bare minimum - quadruplicate more common - this is a task in itself. (One can be thankful that a classical education in India signifies Sanskrit; for it can only be ignorance of the higher Greek ordinal numbers that prevents the stipulation of "dodecatuplicate" submissions, or some other such monstrosity.) Also not to be underestimated is the provision of the necessary number of passport photos. Rather than containing photo booths, district administrative offices are surrounded by freelancers, each with a digital camera, printer and a stained patch of wall or background curtain. They would scoff at providing photos in the UK standard four copies - that would be used up on a single form! Here you are best advised to order forty at once: it will save you trouble, and they will all be used up within the year.

On occasion you may be required to perform other, more altruistic tasks, such as burrowing on hands and knees through piles of old forms in the backs of cupboards - filing cabinets are a rare item here - catching the occasional glimpse of a disappearing rat's tail or some small adventurous frog that hopped in with the last monsoon shower, in order to locate a misplaced application. (This is a perfectly bona fide anecdote, relayed to me by a seasoned foreign applicant for Indian university courses.) If you have been through it all before, and there is some newcomer unfamiliar with the system, then it is best to make a formal introduction; if returning to the place after a long absence, you will enter the office door and greet the clerk like an old friend. You will have his mobile phone number and know his home address, so that you can call out of hours to get a form signed, or have a cup of tea, in case of need. If he has taken a liking to you he will turn to your case promptly, make suggestions, and ensure things run smoother; if you have got on the wrong side of him, then documents will be lost or buried, signatures delayed, memos left unsent. Your responsibilities to him are never entirely discharged: he has become a semi-permanent figure in your Indian existence.

As I said, here bureaucracy is truly a way of life.