Red Tape Alert.

Wow, today was pretty exhausting. Besides the usual – horrible weather and all the other ‘perks’ of living in Mumbai – we had to fill out our examination application forms in college.

Alert! Red Tape Ahead!

Bureaucracy and I don’t get along very well. He/she/it has been pretty nasty to me in the past (ask me about the passport incident) and so I like to avoid it as much as I can. But today was pretty unavoidable. Generally I’m never available to fill out forms and one of my wonderful friends does it for me while I’ve escaped home. Today we had to fill out our University Examination Forms which is a pretty serious thing because it’s the University and you have to be perfect because they are far from it so you can’t give them any chance to find fault because they will and then you’re pretty much in a pickle.

[Enter frustration.] It was pretty unorganized and I thought we’d get some sort of spoken instructions but that didn’t really happen and it was confusing and chaos.

I guess this was a unique experience for me in a sense. I’ve never had to fill out a form for an Indian exam before and this will be the first time I will ever give an Indian board examination. So picking centres and filling out codes and all that is new. (We all picked South Bombay centres because we’ve heard horror stories about some of the centres in the suburbs...)

Everything was different for me because my school mark-sheets don’t have a lot of things that my friends’ do. For one, I have two mark-sheets for my final year of school because my German exam was Edexcel and not Cambridge. Secondly, my mark-sheet has my name on it. That’s it. Not father’s name/mother’s name or anything else. Priyanka Nandi. That’s it. So I had a bit of a dilemma in the part that asks,

Father’s/Husband’s First Name:
Mother’s Name:

(Yeah, let’s not even start on the ‘husband’s name’ part.)

Because apparently what you put in here is what you get on your degree and I’m Priyanka Nandi everywhere. My passport, all previous exams, probably my birth certificate… (except maybe my driver’s license but that’s a joke anyway) So I decided not to fill out that part at all so I am just Priyanka Nandi.

Anyway, it’s done. (And now we just have to hope they don’t find some other nitpicky problem with anything...)

..and to wash away all the stress, Antu and I went and had a refreshing plate of Pani Puri each once we reached Andheri. Works like magic, I tell you ;)