The Startup Journey

“I had to apply for a new passport booklet as I had run out of pages. Having applied online – an altogether different experience - under the tatkal scheme, I was hoping to receive the passport in under a week as I intended to travel for a conference soon. I then was confronted by this uniquely Indian phenomenon of a “police verification”. There was a change in my address since the last passport and my new address had to be verified by the police. I was therefore visited by a constable from the local thana. A few days later, upon enquiry, I was informed that the police verification process was still underway. Surprised, I visited the local thana. To cut a long story short, I was told by the constable that it would help if I paid some “speed money”. I refused and demanded to see the officer who, I was told, wasn’t available. I waited for some time and left. I returned much later in the evening and met the officer and complained. The officer immediately called for the constables and admo...

I recently had to renew my passport and learnt that “everything could be done online”. I then went to the web-site (passport.gov.in) and learnt that for a resident of Bangalore (and some other cities) one had to “refer” to the home page of the Bangalore passport office (rpobangalore.gov.in) and there was no way to get to this from the home page. Anyway. Filling in the application form is certainly a test of patience requiring intuition, guess work, luck and prayer. And to think that India’s largest IT services company designed this! Anyone who has filled in forms (and there are more than plenty of those to fill in our great land) will certainly, more often than not have had experience in micro-calligraphy since the space allotted for entering names and addresses is miniscule, while that for entering say a 6 digit number will be an inch wide. How many times have we stood in a queue not knowing information might be sought by the clerk on the other side, many times not knowing if one is i...