A day at the passport office. (Entire day)

It all started on 19^th February June 1990, the day the author was officially born to his proud parents. His parents saw the cute baby and based on the skin colour immediately decided that he should go to the USA for higher studies so that he could be amongst people of the same colour. To go abroad for higher studies, the author needs to write the GRE for which he needs his passport as a primary ID. Funnily, the mess card from the 6th semester, the 12th standard library card, the Genilia D'Souza fan club membership card and even his facebook profile doesn't serve the purpose as a primary ID, all of which used to work perfectly fine everywhere else. The author had to apply for his passport and hence he writes this blog to tell the readers about the wonderful journey he took to get his passport.

Two days after the author was born

First of all the following details need to be given with proof to a passport officer before he approves your passport.

• Date of birth
• Current address
• Educated/Uneducated
• Student/Working
• Smoker/Non-smoker
• Alive/Dead
• Terrorist/Non-terrorist

The above details have to be furnished. It may look simple to your eye at first but several complications do arise.

Usually your matriculation certificate will be good enough as a date of birth proof but if you happen to be unfortunately born to an evil mother who on purpose delayed your birth so that you are born after January 26th 1989, you will have to compulsorily furnish your birth certificate. This may also be simple but if you happen to be born to an evil father who thought you were too intelligent to stay home and made you join school a year early and also happened to change your date of birth given at your school later on, resulting in a conflict between your birth certificate and your matriculation certificate, things can get tricky.

In such cases, you may have to apply for a for a fresh issue of birth certificate making an embarrassing statement that you were born at your residence and your uneducated parents didn't know how to register your birth. All these happen only in hypothetical scenarios and no one really has to give much thought to it. The readers are however advised to make sure that their birth certificate is in English, birth certificates in any other language are considered to be that of a terrorist and immediately rejected. The author's sister has a unique hobby of changing her date of birth and she has managed to re-register herself in the office so many times that she contributes to 0.007% of the Indian population.

When the author went to the passport office to get his passport, he was asked to get his spouse's passport as an additional document for proof. The author tried explaining that he wasn't married yet and showed the officer an earlier post in this blog as a proof in vain. He had to wait for a year to turn 21 and be eligible and get a passport as proof but he decided to wait for the retarded officer to leave and he silently sneaked in to the next level.

For the address proof, you need one of the following

• Electricity bill, water bill, telephone bill of a house in your name
• Electricity bill, water bill, telephone bill of a house in your father's name + paternal identity proof
• Bank pass book which shows at least 7 transactions in every month in the past one year.
  (Clearly a person who uses a bank at least 7 times a month is unlikely to be a terrorist.) Also terrorists don't live in the same place for more than a year and this fact has been used effectively to filter out terrorists. The applications of people (like my good friend Rikin) who haven't lived in the same place for over a year are immediately rejected because they are very likely to be terrorists.

For the paternal identity proof, one has to get his and his father's DNA sampled and a DNA comparison should be made and the relation should be established. The report should be attested by a gazetted/government officer. Since government officers are not usually corrupt, they are required to approve the report. Since the author hadn't sampled his DNA yet, he had to go to the bank and make a few transactions to raise the number and then get his passbook updated.

The passport system in India has been designed to minimise the number of terrorists who get passports. The current system will soon be changed to nullify the terrorist intake percentage to 0. The modification requires a passport applicant to have a valid passport in his name in order to apply for a passport. This will ensure that only non-terrorists will get a valid passport.[Proof by induction, base case left as exercise] All the readers are urged to get a passport as soon as possible before Arjun Singh makes sure the new system is implemented.

For Tatkal applications, one of the following documents are required.

• Ration card
• Arms licence
• OBC/SC/ST certificate
• Voter's identity cardProperty documents
• Pension documents
• Railway cards

Since 8 out of every 10 students have a ration card and the arms licence and 7 out of every 10 students have property documents and pension documents and since 47.2% of the students belong to OBC/SC/ST, the system is considered to be very student friendly. The passport system of India has been nominated as the youth icon and will probably be a successor to Orkut which won the title a few years ago.

The author thought the job was too easy for him and could be given to some one else and took the advice of his best friend (he has many) and approached a passport agent in Gandhi Bazaar. Passport agents save a lot of time by making the applicant stand in queue for several hours in front of the passport office and saves a lot of money by making the applicant pay them a hefty sum of Rs 600/- for the sole job of filling up the application form. [Meaning disambiguation: Agents save a lot of their own time and money]

In fact, one spends so much time in the queue that he makes a lot of friends. The author's number of friends on facebook has grown by 16% after his visits to the passport office. In fact, if one isn't already stuck, he can even get a girl friend or a dozen just by being with them as a support in their time of grief at the passport office.

Once inside the passport office one will have to go through 3 levels, each level tougher than the previous one. A set of passport officers have been sorted in the order of increasing optical power and have been divided into 3 groups, one with the least vision, the one with the best vision and the rest in the other. The one with the least vision does the first round of screening and the ones with the best vision do the last round of screening essentially on the same set of documents. People with poor vision take little time to process the documents and the ones with the best vision take a lot of time actually going through your telephone bill and may even question you about people who you frequently call.

Some innovative industrial engineering principles have been used in the office to boost productivity. The number of people processing documents at each step should depend on the speed of the step and hence the speed of each step is assigned as a weight to calculate the number of people at each step and hence the slowest step has the fewest people and the fastest step has the most number of people. An adobe flex based software which runs on Internet Explorer 6 which crashes every time a photograph of a guy with his eyes closed is taken. Thus such loss of productivity is balanced by the other measures taken to boost productivity.

Some of the emerging businesses because of this system are Passport agents as mentioned earlier, Passport trauma care centres to treat people who undergo trauma after their visit to the office, Passport office Cupids who play the game of match making at the passport office and finally facebook like-pages. A few friends of the author yesterday liked "standing in the passport office for several hours and not getting a token and coming back", "trying to fill passport application, first page done .... 5 minutes later slept zzz ..." and played facebook games like "what kind of a passport are you normal/tatkal/rejected?" and "What kind of a passport rejection will you face?" and so on.

Any way by the end of the day after 12 hours of hard work, the author got his ACK at the office and only a police officer dude stands between him and his passport. The master of pain has mastered pain and managed to keep his calm all thanks to a small tune that kept running in his head.

The readers are requested to comment if they feel the pain of the author or have been pained by the author at some point of time or hates it when the author uses "the author" instead of "I".

Welcome to the Jungle - IITM survival guide

This post is intended for freshers at IITM. If you are not a fresher, please do read it and also encourage freshers you know, to read this post so that it can help as many people as possible. This post is a survival guide for freshers at IIT Madras. The following are the various issues where freshers need orientation.

Rooms:
The rooms at IITM are just awesome, they are neatly tiled and well furnished. A cot, a chair, a spacious wardrobe, a computer table, book shelves completely fill up the 3.5'x5' room you get. 3.5 and 5.5 feet may seem small but the rooms are spacious as they are 14' high. The room can accommodate up to 4 people on chairs.
Watch-out:- There have been incidents where snakes have been seen at the windows of rooms. Only 68% of snake bites are fatal and hence this need not be a major concern.

Food:
The food in IITM is so awesome that it requires an entire post to describe it and hence here is the post that will answer all your queries. For people who don't like mess food, there are alternatives. The author doesn't know much about the quality of mess food these days because his lunch has mainly been in the fruit-shop consisting of water-melons.

Night-life:
The LAN gets cut at 12:00, that being the only source of your entertainment for freshers, the seniors of IITM considering their needs have arranged for an alternate way of entertainment. Every night seniors delightedly invite them to their rooms for the first few days when they miss normal life the most. Other seniors are also invited for the party. The seniors usually dance in a group or sing funny songs to entertain you. Sometimes they sing and dance at the same time for the song that freshers suggest. There are question answer rounds where seniors answer your questions. That is when you find out important things like their AIR, their room-wife and so on. Some times, educational videos involving biology, chemistry, physics etc are shown. At the end, you get to give a cute name to your senior for example instinct, duck, C-Pro, lighter, Juga, KP, monkey etc.
watch out:
Sleeping for less than 6 hours a day turns you into a zombie. Make sure you use your class-timings [refer paragraph below] wisely.

Classes:
IITM is known for its huge classrooms and some classrooms can accommodate over 1000 people at a time. Such classrooms were built because the number of students coming in are rising every year. Currently the class strength is around 200 and the freshers end up making a lot of friends in their first year.
A few courses have remote learning programs where a professor teaches 3 huge classes at the same time. The prof stays and teaches in the centre room and a video of the prof is played in two neighbouring classes. Teachers assistants however are present everywhere looking out for students who talk to each other in class. They are then dealt with seriously.
watch-out:
Catch a seat early, you may have to with a girl otherwise. How is that bad? You will know soon.
Do not talk in the class, the professors give punishments and you will be made to kneel down before everyone.
95% attendance is compulsory. This means you can skip at most one class.
Workshop:

Usually IITians end up being in big companies and they sit in their cubicles in front of a computer with a cool chair. They don't realise the value of hard-work, hence there is a workshop that students can use to realise what hard work is all about. Most of the 'professors' at the workshop take it too seriously and insist the students on writing notes, reports and manuals. By the end of the course, the student will be a qualified construction worker, painter, miner, carpenter, electrician, moulder, musician, beautician, lift-boy and of course badly injured. All the things that you will ever need in your life are taught in the workshops.
Watch-out:
Before hitting the nail, take your finger off it.
Do not make fun of the electrician in English, he does manage to understand.

Sports:
Most of the evenings are spent playing sports. Wall climbing, bungee jumping are the most famous ones at IITM. Skating (pipe and rails), wave surfing, mountain climbing are less preferred. Sports are compulsory for freshers as 2 years of IIT preparation would have made them unfit. The sports are quite safe in IITM. Very few fatalities are reported every year.


Here are something you will have to really watch out for.
Inter-hostel violence:
Some IITians are really aggressive, they go to the extent of scolding a hostel's mother even if that didn't make sense to a sane guy. Usually fights break out in the hostel zone over who gets to win Shroeter although the winner of the fight doesn't really get anything except a victim or two. Many innocent people from Ganga were slaughtered by people from Tapti after they cheated in a wall-climbing match.
Watch-out:
Carry a weapon with you always. You can convert to Sikhism, that helps. You can defend yourself with a Kripan.
Always attack first, do not defend!

Forests:
As you may know now, IITM was established illegally on forest land. There are a wide range of creatures like monkeys, black-buck, mongoose, spotted deer and of course their predators. There are just 12 tigers left in the forest now and the numbers are fast declining but since the number of students have gone up in recent years, their chances of survival have improved.
Watch-out:
Wear anti tiger masks, always travel in groups and always take an adult with you.

Girls:
The girls in IITM the most beautiful ones I have ever seen. You will enjoy your stay at IITM. In fact you will have so many options that you will start singing "Kisko pyaar karoon, kaise pyaar karoon, woh bhi hai, yeh bhi hai, tu bhi hai, haye!". Although endangered, the numbers are rising each year. Writing any further about them will probably result in an unprovoked attack and hence the author stops at this stage.
Watch-out:
The author has to watch out now, the wrath of the goddesses are about to follow him, enjoy! you are safe.

Apart from the above topics, there are a few more that are worth discussing like festivals (Shaastra, Saarang and some unknow management festival), the labs at IIT Madras, the library, Schroeter, Tech-soc, Lit-soc, Centre for Innovation, Sustainability network but the author just ran out of ink and hence won't be writing about any of the above insignificant topics.


No matter what happens, always be proud of yourself and remember, you have cleared the JEE and you now are an IITian, just like every one else there.