A Day Well Spent

I don’t know how I am back writing for the blog, but this seems to be getting onto me.. Writing has become my plank of wood, making me float through the sea of sorrows that is threatening to engulf my life.. You may think I am getting a bit melodramatic, but this is seriously true.. Almost all of my results are out, and believe me it has been a disastrous month for me.. So writing is what is keeping me going right now.. The two hours that i spend writing this daily post is like a tonic...

I have this really peculiar habit of giving two or three dots at the end of each sentence, instead of one full stop... My Microsoft Word editor seems to have an issue with it, underlining every such occurrence with a green line denoting syntax error.. There is an explanation to it... Its not as if its done just for the sake of looking different… It signifies that my sentences are never meant to end.. Its meant to be an endless conversation.. But all this explaining goes in vain, coz the editor still continues to underline the occurrences..

You must also have noticed that I take a lot of time to get to the actual topic of the post.. There is a fully valid excuse for that.. I have been reading Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” lately, and he has this same habit of describing trivial things.. So I can assure you that this tendency of beating around the bush is just a passing phase, soon to be replaced by the writing eccentricities of some other author…

Now I have already told you that I am officially unemployed at this point of my life, and coincidentally I have also turned 18 recently, which means I am eligible to drive a vehicle on the Indian roads (or potholes, to be more precise).. So my father (after a lot of persuasion from my side) decided that the time is right for me to get a driving license… So I end up paying Rs. 2000 to a driving school exclusively for having my driving license made, because, prodigious that I am, I had learnt to drive cars when I was in class 8^th (slight departure from my omnipresent modesty, which is well known to all my friends and other special people)… My father asks one of his clients to hook me up with some driving school, so that the cumbersome process of making a license is made slightly simpler (though later we realize the erroneous assumption).. So basically I end up in the Regional Transport Office (RTO) on the 21^st day of May, 2007 to get my learner’s license done… Much to my displeasure, I was barred from being given the learner’s license because I was 17 years 357 days old… So I had to steel my heart and curb my desires of driving the car legally for about 26 more days, after which my father decided that the time was ripe for me to give it another try… This is how I ended up today in the RTO…

Now let me tell you that the last time I had been at the RTO, I had been made to stand in the queue for about 2 hours before I could get down to having some paperwork done.. But then that was last time… And since all of my paperwork had been completed, I expected that today I would just have to go to the counter and collect the license (and how wrong I was!!!)… All that was to be done was to have a receipt printed and have my photograph clicked by the computer… But like every plan of mine, this one also started coming apart at its seams.. The last time my form had been rejected by the computer only due to the mere technicality of my age not being 18… But this time around, the computer’s human counterparts, the officers at the RTO, considered it as their job to find at least one error per officer in my form… This is one really commendable fact about the officers working under the Government of India… They are always very good at paperwork and finding faults in it.. One officer signed on my document, later realizing that he wasn’t entitled to do so, thus literally canceling the signature on the form and sending me on to a higher authority… The higher authority seemed to have an issue with my address, saying it didn’t come under his jurisdiction… Of course I thought the officer was being strict about the rules, but that doesn’t explain why he immediately signed the form when the driving instructor just made an appearance (I am not trying to point out any unholy nexus between the officers and the driving schools, if that’s what you are thinking)… So somehow I manage to get to the receipt counter, and get a token numbered 210… When I look up at the token machine, I realize that the current number being processed was 88… There was this sudden pang in my stomach, which made me realize that I was hungry… So I decided to give the local canteen a chance, coz my turn was going to take eternity to come… I ordered some food, and then paused to realize that all the waiters were actually minors… There is this silent smile on my face, coz 12^th June was anti child labour day, and on 14^th June I see a government canteen full of minors serving with all the mastery that their young age could permit… The helpless smile on my face soon faded, coz I was back in the waiting room with hordes of people on either side, crazy to get into the photo booth.. And phinally I somehow managed to get my learner’s license…

The day doesn’t end here, of course… I came back home, where my friend Mr. C was waiting for me, and there he told me about his day… He is doing an internship for a society and has to conduct a research about education in India... So he goes to the education ministry and various other government offices to get the essential data, only to be redirected to some other office and then to some other.. Firstly, all the data is manual instead of being computerized… Secondly there is the totally indifferent attitude of the officials.. And the worst point is that when he asks the officials to have the information under the RTI Act, the officials seem to be unaware of the Act itself… Now I wonder…. What is the use of so much paper work and the RTI Act, if the documents can’t be easily accessed??

So all in all, it was a day well spent by both of us… One trying to get his own work done, and the other trying to get some work done for the society… And I don’t need to specify that both of us, with totally different motives, one’s selfish and the other’s social, met with the same fate…