April 20, 2012
Most of the week went in clawing myself into my cousin's company and getting its website going. To be in the director board of a firm in India, one needs to have a Director Identification Number. Like all other glorified numbers in India, to obtain this number one needs to submit other numbers. My PAN card number and UIN card number were used in the plea for the DIN number. I say plea though the application calls itself an application. May be it should be called a prayer.
You kindly see, Dear Sir/Madam, that India has managed to carry over its entire lethargic, bureaucratic red-tapism into the cyber world. Visit any government website and most of us in our 30s will get a flashback of old school textbooks. Crammed with the most useless information, squeezed in illegible fonts all over the place and written in obscure, mind-numbing, flowery, bombastic, scholastic language that is rejected even by the esteemed Journals of Statistical Analysis of Most Boring Mesopotamian Tablets. If you are ever tripping from psychedelic drug, please logon to some ministry's (governmental not church) website and watch the drug retreat in shame.
Among the numerous columns of texts of varying sizes, boldness and slant, there are snaking "feeds" and slideshows zooming past. As I grow dizzy, the accountant manages to find the small box for logging in. He is used to finding right slots among chaos. That's what he gets paid for. "With e-filing, things have actually become more costly," he reveals to my surprise.
We spent 15 minutes trying to get a digital signature to work. "They keep changing the format and now everyone is supposed to renew the digital signature every year at a cost of Rs. 500. There is a firm contracted by the government that does this." The pen drive provided by the firm doesn't work. We call them up fervently hoping that someone has made the mistaking of staying back in office after 5 pm. Lucky break. They promise to email the new signature in an unheard of format shortly.
Signature arrives. Application gets loaded. The site rejects it with a tantric message appearing in glaring red font. I am perplexed but the accountant is undeterred. "It does that a few times!". I admire the great Indian web designers who have managed to capture the arrogant, soul-less soul of the proverbial "desi-babu" into html format. The website behaves just like the disinterested, soporific clerk one used to run into any government office. Now the clerk has arrived on your desktop at home.
"Don't worry about it. I will keep trying," the account reassures me. I stand terrified that any time now a hand will stick out of the cd drive, Ring-movie style, asking for a bribe to get the application through. 15 more attempts and a new mantra appears in green. 6pm, I leave his office.
Next day 6am, I find that an email with the holy grail number has arrived in my inbox at 4am. That is 10 hours of processing time for a single page application. It is better than 10 months anyways. And fortunately computer servers seem to be OK with working at nights...so far. Any day though, they might form a union!
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