Adventures of an #Ex-NRI: The #RTO (DMV equivalent)

It's 11:30am on a summer day in #EverSoHotChennai. I write this on my trusty smartphone as I sit in line for a learner's licence test at the Meenambakkam Regional Transport Office. The bad part is that I received no advantage by booking an appointment online. I was promptly asked to go to the end of a really long line of applicants. I'm pretty sure most in this line did not book an appointment beforehand. I had looked around for another 'appointment only' line; by habit, and ofcourse, in vain. The good part is that I am sitting, and not standing. Great improvement, if you ask me. This corridor in which we are seated as a group of like-minded individuals hoping for nothing more than a quicker queue movement, has no windows. Architecturally so due to it's position between office spaces on either side which lay claim to all the windows on this floor. Oh, forgot about the windows on the stairway. Unusually large stairway with unusually large windows suggesting a really old style of construction; a trademark of government buildings here in #GoodOldTamilNadu. I'm going to go ahead and guess that this corridor was never meant for holding queues of sweating people in a humid climate. Again there is a good part; it had rained pretty heavily two days back bringing the temperature down a bit with it. God bless the rains for reducing the strain on my perspiration capacity. I have been sweating the bejesus out of me for the past few weeks due to steady highs of 102 degrees every day. Can't wear my around-the-ear headphones for more than 2 minutes. Have to take baths so often you'd think I was a sea creature. Clothes get soaked so soon that it feels like invisible rain is pouring on me 24x7.
I look at my shirt. Sweaty wet in the middle. Atleast it took a while. This corridor has no windows; no ventilation. Two fans rotate unwillingly to disprove that this is a POW holding area. There is even a jail-like gate at the entrance of the corridor, toward the stairway. There are two doorways near this gate, one says 'Regional Transport Officer' atop but actually houses counters to pay fees and to meet the RTO's PA. I had gone here to ask for information about my LLR and was directed to see the motor vehicle inspector. This meant I was supposed to go the other doorway which had the label 'Motor Vehicle Inspectors'. Didn't spend more than a fraction of a second to wonder why I would have to meet a vehicle inspector to get a learners license. Zero bouts of curiosity later I reached the other doorway. An elderly bespectacled man stands there guiding people in. Pure tamil is his thing. He seems to carry it off really well; I could tell by the foreignness of his language. "You have to pay the fee first", he said," in there", he pointed back to the first doorway. No frustration, no regret; I proceeded to the fees counter. Two counters, one long queue and another short one. Opted for the logical. Unsure whether I had enough cash on me. "Shouldn't be more than 1000 rupees", I told myself. Asked the elderly gentleman behind me. He seemed well-mannered and gave me a straight "I don't know" complete with a constipated expression. After what seemed to be enough time to earn a few hundred rupees by manual labour, I reached the counter. A small square window presented itself. Any form would not fit through there unless folded vertically. The few milliseconds I took to make this structural change to my application was sufficient for the elderly "gentleman" behind me to thrust his official looking form into the window. The fees collector gladly took his form and muttered something followed by an instruction to go do something else before paying the fee. An inner malicious smirk bloomed and I quickly sent my application through. A quick glance at my form and he entered some stuff into his computer. A nearby printer spurted out a receipt. "90 rupees"; happily handed him the money and got my bill. Back to Mr.#TamilDePure; he checked my application and asks me to go to the end of that enormous line which started at the doorway and ended at the very end of the corridor. The queue, by itself, seemed like a living being; a formidable demon with multiple heads waiting to devour me and my precious time. Again without frustration I readied myself for a long wait. 6 tube-lights passed over my head which provided not-so-bad lighting and I reached the very end, which was another jail-type gate. there were two rows of benches followed by chairs on either side, one side for each gender. the benches blocked a door off which was understandably locked. The weathered board above it also read 'Regional Transport Officer'. Beyond the closed gate, I could see in the faint light, stacks and stacks of forms of different colours, predominantly white, pink and yellow. There was another doorway near this gate but I know not where it leads.

Act 2 : This part is a recollection

Stood for a while, sat on chairs for some more and then reached the benches; all this while in the same queue where I had started writing. After the wait I was allowed entry into the 'Motor Vehicles Officers' room. Lots of windows, 6 pc monitors along the wall on my right as I entered with a small booth near the door. An officer was sitting at a table on my left who went through my application, looked at my passport for verification and ushered me to the booth. It was apparently a photo booth with a web cam for a camera. A cfl bulb was hanging from a wire to provide strobe and a sheet of navy blue cloth made the background. Picture taken and form submitted, I went to the seating area that covered most of the rest of the room. The seats were largely empty and so I chose one under a healthy looking fan and began what was a mini in-head prep talk for the oncoming computer based test that I was to take to get my LLR as indicated by the RTO website. The room was bright with afternoon light and had a very lazy feel to it. A wash basin at one corner, piles of forms between the desktop PCs, a wide table for the officer and one large LCD TV opposite the seating area. The TV was playing one video, over and over again. It was an infomercial about how not to ride your motorcycle. I caught myself watching it for over 3 times in a row. Before I could restart typing, someone perched on the seat beside mine and this made continuing my written monologue an awkward proposition. You see, it was a typical RTO office where licenses were also given out to people who the officers there didn't even set eyes upon. Agents were all over the place all the time bringing bundles of applications of people who had paid enough to get through all the legalities like test-taking etc. This, obviously, was illegal and thus if someone where to see me continuously operating a smartphone in these premises, a few doubts might have popped-up in his/her mind that could have proved unfavourable to me. Sometimes analysing my own thought process leaves me thinking whether I was being super-intelligent or just plain dumb.
Thirty minutes later, two of the three attendants had retired for lunch and the officer left the room.  I was left clueless of what to do next as there so may in the queue back then and yet none around me now. I caught an attendant's eye and he asked me what I wanted. I said I had submitted my application for an LLR.
"Did you get your picture taken?"
"Yes sir. I am waiting for the test." I heard the attendant behind him chuckle.
"then come back at 6." I understood that there was no test to be taken.
What a waste of 30 minutes! "You should have asked him earlier and not been so timid." I chided myself as I left to meet my Dad whom I had kept waiting outside unnecessarily.

'Order in chaos' was the unofficial moto of every government offices here in India before I had left. I must say that not much has changed. A deep understanding is necessary to know why change takes so long to happen in my home city. Is it the negligent government or is it the docile people? Or maybe I'm just overreacting.

Why is India ...?

I think I have cracked it!
I presume I have found the answer to that ever pervasive question.
"Why is India like what it is?" The answer is fundamental.
It is 'choice'. Like Neo says in the Matrix - "The problem is choice."
How?
Here's my derivation.
It starts from 'freedom'. Something that everyone wants. But like most other things, it is relative. What is true freedom? Freedom TO choose .. or freedom FROM choice?Which would you prefer? The towering accountability of a wrong choice (there is a non-zero probability of a negative outcome in almost every decision), or the so-called 'shameful' submissiveness to another's choice with perks such as zero risk?
My guess is - you chose the former. Lets delve a little deeper to deduce the optimal choice.

Consider this basic question - "What would you prefer - a vacation by the beach or the responsibilities of a high-stakes managerial job?"
The answer , based on universal human tendency, would be "a vacation by the beach". This can be extrapolated to the statement -
"Humans find peace in the state of being care-free" - no strings attached. This is ,by and large, a pure conclusion.
Thus, by default, an average human wants to reduce the number of choices s/he makes per day to maintain a level of peace-of-mind.
In a case where number of choices available > threshold of choices to retain the lower limit of peacefulness, the eligible, remnant choices are made
by someone else. In this equation, if the trivial and immaterial aspects i.e., thirst for choice and hesitation/unwillingness to give up choice, are removed then everything is balanced! And this is what we see everyday.

An average guy like one who runs a autorikshaw, has given up his 'freedom-of-choice' when it comes to choosing the most productive minister for his state.
Because, he can be blissfully ignorant about the details of the state policies and administration and instead, devote his thought to solving the problem of how to pay for his son's mid-term school fees. A democratic government is always 'for the people and by the people', but if the above is largely true, it is rarely 'of the people'. Note that this does not prove anyone (or any group of people) wrong or right.
What this illustrates is that democracy is a utopian concept. One in which each and every citizen is well-informed and actively takes part in the machinery of society. In such a case, there would be adequate fairness as each individual is looking out for her/himself and takes completely responsibility of the outcomes of her/his choices.

In our current democracy, individuals do look-out for themselves, but in a smaller framework of events.
Consider a road-laying contractor vying for a large government contract.
Lets assume his profit is constant. But the probability of him landing the contract is dependent on the bribe he places for the deciding officer.
The contractor could place a margin of his expenditure as the bribe and retain enough to build quality roads. Or, he could place a large bribe and reduce
the quality of the roads to be laid. The probability of winning the contractor is easily more in the latter case.
The deciding officer, on the other hand, could either choose the best-quality contractor while taking less bribe and avoiding re-laying of the roads in the
near future or could choose the highest bribe and wait for the roads to degrade soon for the next contract dispatch. The obvious choice is the latter.
This is pure logic and is devoid of any human abstractions like sincerity to the job or altruism.
Therefore, the Nash equilibrium is 'bad roads' and 'richer officers'.


Moving on to a more controversial topic. Oppression of women.
Logically, an average Indian woman prefers NOT to take the 'big' decisions of her family rather than fight for her 'voice'.
Why is this? Purely based on the previously illustrated logic, she would rather accept a man's decision than bear the brunt of a wrong choice.
It may outwardly seem like an unjust and unfair predicament, but upon close inspection, we see the duality to it. It can also provide the comfort of absolute inertness and many-a-time provide the power to blame. This sounds unparliamentary, but it becomes very obvious if you keep your prejudices aside and retain only pure logic. Women are in no way cerebrally-unequal to men. They could easily stand shoulder-to-shoulder (if not higher) with men when it comes to cognitive thinking and decision making and yet they do not. The only probable advantage for men is the fact that the average Indian male is physically stronger than the average Indian female. But this is highly inadequate to single-handedly create a male-dominant society.
Logically, if men were to be in a similar position where they could either choose strategies of regaining their freedom of choice or choose to believe that they are generically bad decision makers, the equilibrium would be the latter.

The same principle can be extended throughout the socio-political construct of India.

So, I believe that up until now I have had a wrong notion of what 'true-freedom' means.
I have come to a conclusion that what we all truly yearn for is what we had when we were kids - Absolute freedom from choice!

P.S: Please enlighten me with your comments.