Visa for India

I went to the Indian embassy today to get my visa for the International Conference on Digital Libraries. The embassy is a modern building near the philharmonic and the art museum and right next to the embassy from Baden Wurtemburg (not really an embassy, of course, since Baden-Wurtemburg is just another German state, but it looks like an embassy).

The waiting area for visas was actually handsome. Comfortable seats, little tables, and a sense of art and style that German bureaucracies seem deliberately to remove from public areas (though the private ones are often handsome). The process went quite efficiently too. A machine issued numbers to people coming in. The clerk processed people with less fuss and more dispatch than I had expected. He asked me about the conference with what seemed like geniune interest. Then he charged me 75 € for the visa. The posted rate was 50€, so I asked why. American passport, was the answer. Rates for US visitors are higher. Since I had been to the ATM just before going to the embassy, I gave out all the money I had just acquired.

The one part of the process that was not efficient was actually issuing the visa. They had to process it for some hours, so I had to come back later in the day when the weather had turned anything but friendly (hail, wind, rain) to get my passport with the proper document glued to a page.