12 Seven Visas and a Honeymoon

Many things happened in 1989. I got married to Indira in March and I joined Tata Steel in September. In between I defended my PhD thesis at UT Dallas and  finally we went on a truly enchanting honeymoon in Europe. The first three events were of course no doubt significant,  interesting and memorable, but a honeymoon in Europe was something unimaginable for middle-class Indians in the 1990s.

Europe was where Amitabh Bachchan cavorted with the oh-so-delectable Rekha while we, the humble aam-admi people could only follow their capers on screen or in print. The Tata-Birla crowd -- the Adani-Ambani types hadn’t yet entered the Indian imagination -- would of course travel to Europe,  but then, they were Tata Birla, not the Mukerjee-Banerjee or Ghose-Bose-Mittir of Calcutta for whom Digha, Puri and Darjeeling was the norm.

Even among those of us who had reached the promised land on F1 visas -- and we were the first real wave of what would later become the backbone of the NRI population of the United States -- the first priority was the coveted Green Card and becoming acceptable to the natives. The short vacations that they were entitled were carefully hoarded for a trip back home, loaded with 'phoren' goods for star-struck, and sometimes jealous, aunts, uncles and cousins. Europe was for rich, 'white', retirees. Not for the desi crowd.

My case was different. I was not looking for a Green Card to stay on in US and I also had a fairly decent job, by Indian standards, back home. That meant a princely Rs 4400 per month -- and a flat on the banks of the Subarnarekha River! By Indian standards, I could afford some luxuries..

This was summer of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of communism, was still six months away, quietly waiting in the wings of history.. The travel company Globus Gateway was offering a 14 day bus tour of western Europe for US$ 1100 per head and after calculating the money that I had and the money that I could get by selling my beloved Mazda 626 I decided that we will go. Perhaps, a once in a lifetime trip to Europe. Little did I know that in another fifteen years -- and thanks to Narasimha Rao's liberalisation and the Y2K driven IT boom -- every Ram-Shyam-Jadu in corporate India would be holidaying abroad. But this was kind of unimaginable in the late 1980s.

Having decided to go to Europe, we started the hunt for the visa. Unlike US citizens who did not need a visa for any country in Europe, poor Indians had to have one to cross every eff*ing international border. There was no unified Schengen visa in those days and we had to get separate visas stamped on our passport from Britain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, West Germany and Holland. There was no email, no internet, no electronic visa. So for each visa we would have to send the two passports by courier -- Federal Express -- along with filled in visa application that had to be requested for in advance. Also the visa fee and the cost of the return courier had to be sent in along with the application in the form of US Postal Service Money Orders. 

The order in which we would have to apply for the visa was important. From Britain, we would be flying to Calcutta -- via Abu Dhabi and Dacca -- so they would issue a visa without question, but France would need to see our British visa to know that we could enter Britain from France. Similarly Switzerland would need to see our French visa, Italy would need to see our Swiss visa, Austria would need to see our Italian visa, Germany would need to see our Austrian visa and Holland would need to see our German visa. So, ironically, we had to apply for the visas in the reverse order of our travel route through Western Europe. Since American did not need visas and since hardly anyone from our Indian desi crowd had never travelled to Europe, there was no one to guide us -- and figuring it all out took time, trial, and a lot of guessing.  By the time we did, we had two month or barely eight weeks left and seven visas to get!  That meant that if we at our end could turn around the passports on the same day, that is send them to the next consulate on the same that we received them from the previous one at our home in Dallas,  we should be able to make it.

Fair enough, Britain went through in time and so did France and Switzerland. But Italy threw us a curve ball. They said they would need two weeks to issue the visa and when I called the consulate, in Houston, the fellow at the other end, very, very rudely told me that "If  you want to visit Italy, you have to spend two weeks for the visa. Period." Well, what to do? We gritted our teeth and patiently waited for the Italian visa and when the passports finally arrived we rushed them across to the Austrian embassy almost immediately. 

Next morning, I called the Austrian embassy in Washington to request them to expedite matters and was very pleasantly surprised when the lady at the other end told us that not only had the visas been issued right in the morning itself but the passports too had already been dispatched. We should be getting them the next day. That was the difference between Austria and Italy and that allowed us make up for the delay that we had suffered in the Italian consulate. We heaved a sigh of relief but that was shortlived.

The next hiccup was Germany, who insisted on seeing our actual flight ticket back to India. We had booked the ticket but since we had not paid for it, we did not have a ticket in hand. So we rushed to our friendly Gujju-bhai travel agent and paid him for the tickets with a cheque. He in turn paid someone in New York with his credit card and then wonder of wonders -- a magic happened. The ticket was issued in New York and immediately an image of the ticket was sent by ZapMail -- that we know today as fax -- to the German embassy in Washington DC. Based on the this image, the German visa was issued and the passports sent back. The last visa of  Holland came through without any further excitement and finally we we were ready to board with actually two weeks to spare.

One more big task was the shipment of some of our household goods. These had to be sent to by courier to a shipping agent in New York to be loaded on a freighter ship, yes a sea going ship, that will someday reach Calcutta [ Actually it did and my meshomashai, Dr Santosh Kumar Mukherjee, helped unload it, free it from the dockyard mafia and brought the stuff home, after many many months.]

But there was one important step left. While we had paid for the air-tickets back home, I really did not have the ready cash to pay for the US$ 1100/head for the Globus Tour. That is when I finally sold my Mazda 626, two weeks before our departure and got exactly US$ 2200 in cash that I walked across and paid to my Gujju travel agent to close the deal.

So that was how we visited Europe in 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I do not wish to go into a detailed story of what all we saw because this was a typical, touristy trip where we visited all the usual tourist spots. Indira has written about this trip in her numerous travelogues and there is little point in repeating it once again here.

 However there were a few things that stand out in my memory

• The ferry ride from Sheerness, UK to Vlissingen, Holland that we took over the North Sea. Later on, I have travelled on far more luxurious cruise ships in Alaska and Singapore but this was the first and it was memorable.
• Equally memorable was the hovercraft ride from Calais to Dover. The Channel Tunnel - Chunnel - was still in the future.
• The cabaret at the Pigalle district of Paris after which Indira had a bout of remorse for seeing such immoral activities, when all that we saw was a bevy of topless beauties dancing on stage
• Jeanine our tour guide was a really friendly soul. Since Indira was not eating beef, she would arrange for a gigantic egg omlette for her -- equal in cost to the beef dish that she was skipping.
• In Paris, the Louvre was not on our itinerary. Yet we managed to leave the tour bus, managed to find our way across the city using the underground, enter the Louvre, see the Mona Lisa and sprint back to our bus! In retrospect, quite an achievement since we did now French and the French are notoriously rude to those who speak only English.
• The visas that we had so much trouble to get was a source of wonder to the other tourists in our bus. At each border crossing, the two of us would have to step out and get our passports stamped and we collected so many stamps that some of our fellow American tourists felt jealous about.

11 Border Crossings | No Visa, No Problem

Most of us have crossed international borders and we all know the standard protocols that are followed there -- passport, visa, immigration, customs and possibly a security check. As a student, as a professional and as a tourist, I have crossed many borders but some borders were very different. Let me talk about two very unusual borders that I have crossed..

This would be sometime in 1986 or 1987 and I had just sold my first, truly ancient 1979-era Honda Civic to buy a relatively "newer" Mazda 626 which was a great hit in the Indian student community at UT-Dallas. This car was perhaps the only car in the community that could safely be taken on long drives on highways without fear of it breaking down. So I decided that we will drive down to the Big Bend National Park. We were a rather eclectic group. There was Paddy Padmanabhan from my own UT-Dallas and there was R 'Korak' Sivakumar and Abhay 'Madu' Maheshwari from Albuquerque in New Mexico and so the route was rather complex.

Paddy and I would head West from Dallas Fort Worth in my Mazda 626 and Korak and Madu would drive down from Albuquerque -- in Korak's 1978 Honda Accord --  and we would meet somewhere in the middle of the White Sands National Park -- close to where the nuclear bombs were tested during the Manhattan Project -- and then we would drive down South towards the Mexican border. Which was nice except that we had not planned for the fact that the White Sands desert was a HUGE area with hardly any landmarks and there was no easy way for two cars arriving from two different directions to find each other!

This was before Google Maps and even before the era of mobile phones. This meant that once we hit the road, there was no way to communicate. The only thing that we had was a Rand McNally road map with which we were expected to find each other and the way to Big Bend. Our first waypoint was Alamogordo, a fairly big city in New Mexico. Here, from a public phone booth, we placed a long distance  call to Korak and his apartment mate told us that he and Chandru had already left Albuquerque and were heading for Las Cruces. This is where things became very difficult! Between Alamogordo and Las Cruces lies the vast, vast, VAST White Sands desert and two cars trying to find each other here is a very difficult task. Once again each of us called the other's apartment mates and used them to pass messages to the other party, if and when they called. In hindsight, this was an utter failure in our planning process and we had no one to blame but ourselves, but what to do? Eventually we ended up parking our cars with the headlights on and standing on the bonnet and the roof to see if we could spot the other car -- and eventually we did! Whew what a rendezvous! 

Now that we had found each other, it was a relatively smooth drive down to the campground inside the park and I remember that we ate our rather cold dinner in the light of the headlights of our two cars.

Anyway, now that we were in Big Bend, where is the border crossing that we were talking about?

The southern edge of the national park is bounded by the Rio Grande -- the Grand River -- that forms the boundary between the United States and Mexico. Our camp ground was at a little distance from the river and we went to see it next morning.

And then ...

We decided to swim across the river and "visit" Mexico. All without a single document in hand!

This was of course in an era well before 9/11 and America was a very relaxed place. Other than our driver's licenses, we had no other documents and neither was there anyone to check them, even if we had any documents. It was all fun and games. We swam to and fro across the river, which was not as great a feat as it seems to sound because the Grand River was not much wider than our very own Kangsabati in summer!

There was one more interesting event during this trip. On the way back, or perhaps we were just moving around, one of our cars -- and I do not remember which one -- had a puncture! Now this would not have been such an issue because we both had a spare tyre each but the problem was the wrench with which we had open the lug nuts. Both our cars were Japanese made and to metric dimensions while the wrench that we had was that of an American car made to Imperial British dimensions. So there was no way that it could be used to open a metric nut! After struggling with this for a nearly half an hour we saw a Park Ranger driving past and fortunately he had both kinds of wrenches in his car -- apparently this was a common problem with tourists -- and he gave us the correct one. Having struggled on this nut for so long, we were so delighted to get the right wrench that we changed the tyre in record time and I distinctly remember the Park Ranger telling us "Do  you guys work at a Formula 1 pit-stop?"

But yes, we did cross the border!

04 - Telegram Tales

1984 was not a very happy year for me. Even though I had successfully completed my B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, the fact that I could not get a 'schol' or an assistantship at a US university left me in deep sorrow. My disappointment was even greater because I had scored a phenomenal 96 percentile in both Verbal and Quantitative sections of the GRE, and many friends with lower scores had made it through — but not me.

Of course, I had admissions from many top schools like the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and even Cornell, but without financial aid, there was no way for me to go to the US.

While I did have a job offer from ORG Systems, my Boro Mama advised me to join the PhD program at IIT Kharagpur itself, because in his opinion, a PhD was essential — a piece of advice that has stood me in good stead till today. Accordingly, I joined the Mech Department again under Prof. P. K. Nag in the Steam Lab to work on Thermodynamics.

Here, I was remarkably successful and, much to the surprise of my guide, delivered two very innovative solutions on fluid flow in the first year itself! Faculty in the department were stunned by my results and said I should be able to finish my PhD in three years. However, things took a different turn.

One fine morning in the spring of 1985, a poster appeared on the Mech Department notice board inviting PhD students to join the Operations Research program at the University of Texas. This was accompanied by a letter from Prof. R. Chandrasekharan indicating that financial aid was available for qualified students.

I had done one course in OR taught by Prof. K. C. Sahu from the Industrial Management Centre (now a Department), as part of the mandatory requirement to take a management subject. So, then and there, I decided to give it a shot. My guide, Prof. P. K. Nag, was also planning to move to Canada and had no issues with me abandoning my 'ripe' PhD work and aiming for the US again.

Once again, I put together my application package and sent it to Dallas with high hopes. Airmail was, of course, the only way to communicate in those days, and that is how I sent my application, the “transcripts” from the Students Section -- photocopies of my grade card, duly stamped with ink -- and the all-important three recommendations from Prof. Amalendu Mukherjee (my B.Tech guide), Prof. P. K. Nag (my current guide), and Prof. K. C. Sahu (who had taught me OR).

Then I waited and waited and waited with bated breath.

At IIT, the spring term ended and the summer vacations started. The campus emptied out as most students went home or for summer training. Of course, as a PhD student, I did not have summer vacation, so I continued with my thermodynamics -- with one eye cocked for the postman, who was the only one who could bring me any news.

And when the news came, it was devastating.

The Admissions Office of UTD had written to me stating that my application was not yet complete. Everything was there except the recommendation from Prof. K. C. Sahu, which had not yet arrived. Without it, the application could not be processed -- even if Prof. Chandrasekharan wanted to. The letter urged me to ensure that the missing document reached the university before the application deadline — and that deadline was just two days away from the day I received the letter.

Unfortunately, in those days, there was no way to track where exactly the recommendation was stuck, nor was it possible to send another letter from Kharagpur to Dallas within two days. What to do?

The campus was nearly deserted, so there was hardly anyone I could consult for ideas. My father was in Calcutta and, by then, had begun to fall into the grip of the Alzheimer’s that would finally take him seven years later. I was panicking and in deep despair. So near, yet so far -- and all because of a missing letter.

Then it struck me! The only way a message from Kharagpur could reach Dallas in time was by telegram -- the then-not-so-ancient technology that was still widely used in India to send short, cryptic messages almost instantly. But would this work?

A recommendation letter could not be cryptic -- it had to have content. That would make it expensive. Also, recommendations were supposed to be signed and sealed in confidential envelopes. Would UTD accept an open, non-confidential telegram? There was no way to know. There was no one to ask. In any case, I decided to give it a shot.

I ran --  or rather cycled -- to Prof. K. C. Sahu's residence. He kindly and readily agreed to help me, and for that I would always be grateful. Not only did he agree to send the telegram -- at his own cost -- but he agreed to refer in it to a formal sealed letter that was being sent in parallel. So, armed with his “staccato” recommendation -- full of STOP words, as was the case in all telegrams -- I rushed to the Post Office to send it off.

The telegram clerk had never seen such a long message before, but on payment of the rather large fee -- it was something like ₹5 for 30 words for foreign telegrams -- the message was accepted and sent. This was, of course, followed by the formal, signed, and sealed recommendation letter as per protocol.

Then began the wait again -- for the postman to knock, or rather, to leave a foreign letter on the mess table at B. C. Roy Hall, where I had moved from Azad Hall after joining the PhD program.

This time, the message was good! I had finally landed an admission with full financial aid to the Management Science program at UT Dallas under Prof. R. Chandrasekharan. My joy knew no bounds — thanks to the timely gamble with a telegram.

But that was the second-last telegram. What about the last?

When I finally reached Dallas in the fall of 1985, I needed to inform my parents in Calcutta of my safe arrival. I thought -- once again -- that a telegram would be cheaper than an international phone call. So I asked my roommate Venky where the nearest telegram office was. By that time, telegrams had become obsolete in the US and hardly anyone knew how to send one!

Finally, after asking around quite a bit, we discovered that the only way to send a telegram was to call Western Union and dictate the message over the phone -- which is what I did.

But I still don’t know how I was charged. Was it on my friend’s credit card? Or was it added to our phone bill from Southwestern Bell -- the “Baby Bell” company that had just emerged from the breakup of AT&T the previous year? I have no memory or record of that.