Of all things very much predominant in India or rather the Govt Offices is the Under the table transaction...
The higher the denomination of the green leaves(hari pattiyan...) the faster the normal procedure begins to move...
Last week it so happened that my team mate wanted to get his new born son's birth certificate from the Municipal corporation... After a couple of trips the office clerk asked him to drop in on the following Monday...
To make things easier for us Monday was a holiday (UK holidays are really weird... but sure they come at the right time)... So him n I decided to pay the clerk a visit on Monday to get the Birth Certificate.
As soon as we reached the office (seemed like its still the same British built building just re-painted over the years with the wiring work having re done... ) we marched straight into the Birth and Death Registration section.
There just at the entrance sat the Clerk ... surrounded by people mostly who had come in to register someone's death... i guess we were the only ones to get a birth registered...
Since my team mate couldn't converse in the native language I had to the talking... So after the normal greetings and the salutations (and calling the clerk the Saheb...) things didn't seem to move on at all... Some issue with the date or some problem seemed to have come up while finding the record sent by the hospital...
After all the normal cajoling and the attempts to generate the sympathy of the Clerk Saheb, my team mate who was now frustrated said to me, 'Boss lets get down to business, we haven't got all day to waste here".
After an agonizing wait of 20 minutes the Clerk Saheb walked out of his chamber (a desk and a chair) and was walking past the hall to the computer rooms, i walked straigth upto him and whispered in his ears, "Saheb kuch le de ke nahi ho sakta kya???"
These words were like asking a famished beggar if he wanted to have food... As soon as he resumed his work on his desk people gather round him were detoured and directed to different rooms and other officials to get their documents checked. This was just an attempt to clear the coast. No one being around we just walked straight to him, I had my hand in my jeans pocket and the Clerk Saheb's innocently greedy face gestured it was time to empty the pockets...
Some how I managed to hand him the green leaves my team mate had handed me (before we kicked off on the busniess tour...)
3 Hundred bucks in his pocket and bang in the next 2 minutes we were on the counter with a girl entring the data of the new born kid... and immediately after that we got the receipt for the payment of the birth certificate copies.
Amazing how the currency gets stagnant things moving.
Having got the payment receipt we walked back to the Clerk Saheb who immediately got off his throne and guided us to the printing department...
Call it bad luck or the IRONY of FATE... the printer was out of ink. I still wonder why do these govt office computer people say that the dot matrix printer is out of ink...
Well now these were troubling times for the Clerk Saheb, payment toh ho gaya ... par kaam nahi hua...
Clerk Saheb resumed his position on the throne... the incompetence reflected in his facial expressions...
Still overcoming the feeling of being Vanquished by FATE... He made a smart move...
He asked us to visit the New Regional Office at the part of town and meet some Female clerk there and give his reference and our work would be done...
Frustrated we drove back to the regional office's new head quarters and after an agonizing wait in the queue we were directed to an empty counter to get the print-outs...
lucky here the ink (here they had an ink-jet/laser one i guees) hadn't ran shot yet the girl (who seemed to be pretty much in her late teens) asked us to get the signature of some other official at the new Office.
When we reached the cabin of this so called important official for his Million Dollar Autograph we were motioned to wait... Lo ... he was in a meeting so the wait grew much longer...
finally after waiting for him (the last wait for the day... Thank the Lord...) the Mr Important was done with his meeting... I walked right across the room with the print-outs and asked him for hsi signatures...
So enraged were we , (my team mate n I that we would've slapped someone if we were asked to run around once more) when we saw the signature of Mr Important... It was just a scribble...
even I could've done it...'
Finally having done that and having returned the receipt to the teenaged girl in the new office we were on our way back home...
As we drove by the old building (where we had wasted 2 and a half hours earlier that morning) my team mate said...
"Dekha... Yeh Paisa Bolta hai!!!"... while I hummed the famous song picturized on the yester-year's Comedian Mehmood Ji,
"Na biwi naa bachcha, naa Baap bada Naa maiyaa!!!
The whole thing is that ek bhaiyaa...
Sabse bada rupiyyya!!!!"
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