Innovations, Inc.

Yesterday was the much dreaded but extremely crucial day that every resident alien encounters on her traverses back home: the visa day. After going through my papers for roughly the hundredth time I headed to the consulate. If the sheer magnitude of the task at hand has not succeeded in scaring you out of your wits end then the stringent entry restriction at the embassy certainly will. I was told that my zippered black messenger bag was too ominous a piece of paraphenelia to carry into the consulate grounds. And that was not all: I was stripped of cell phone, pager and basically every piece of communication except my larynx before I finally stumbled in carrying about ten armfuls worth of documents in two weary ones.

If the entry restrictions are stringent anything that goes on the forms is even more so. Within minutes, I was sent right back outside because the picture was not of the right size, shape and color (thankfully the shapes and colors of the visages themselves are exempt from this scrutiny, because what usually ends up on the form in such circumstances is a countenance with one too many tense facial muscles and profuse sweating).

I walked out in a daze with less than a half hour to get the job done before my 1 pm interview. Now to first find a public telephone to make a desperate plea for help and then a studio would take about a half hour in the crowded area of the city that harbors the embassy; I wasn’t even thinking about picture taking and development. But much to my glee (or whatever qualifies as glee under such circumstances) no sooner had I exited, than a bunch of autorickshaw operators came at me yelling “photo, photo?”.

In heart-racing-thriller fashion, I was whisked away to an obscure photo studio where the picture taking, development, drying and gluing took less than 20 minutes. I was brought back just shy of 1 pm, enough to make my interview.

It took one innovative auto~driver to connect the dots, literally, from the young and aspiring US-hopeful (of whom there are millions) to the very poorly elucidated instructions on the consulate website (that change at the rate of a thousand bytes a second) to the photo studio that is willing to devote its time to rapid-fire picture taking that no other in the vicinity is likely to do. In any other time and place this might have been an excellent business strategy and millions of dollars might have been involved. I got away with a measly 600 Indian rupees, a couple of pictures that I clutched close to my heart as I returned and a visa that’s hopefully on its way soon…..

In a place like India people can often dream up brilliant ideas without that quintessential B-school class and often times before being able to afford that self-improvement guide on the New York Times bestseller list. To use a paraphrased but much overused and clichéd phrase, “Necessity is the mother of in(ova)tion.”