lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Yesterday I had to go to Chennai for my US visa interview. Chennai is a really sucky city, it sucks even worse than Bangalore . Here is an account of the process.

Documents required

The vfs-usa.co.in site has a list of documents that you require to bring along with you. If you filled the visa form at the vfs-usa.co.in site, you would have received a printout of the forms D156, D157 and an appointment letter mentioning the data and time of your visa interview.

I had packed in all the required documents the night prior to my departure to Chennai. Due to security concerns you are not allowed to carry mobile, CDs, music player or any electronic device into the consulate building. However, you are allowed to carry books and one polybag with all your documents inside. These people are really serious about security - do not bring any stuff which is prohibited. You will not be allowed to carry it inside no matter what.

Since books were not on their Do not carry list, I took along a printout of the MySQL Internals manual for my inflight entertainment.

Reaching there

The American consulate is located in Anna Salai. Once you get down at the airport, you will find a government operated prepaid taxi counter there. They will charge you 240 Rs. (rupees) for a taxi to the American consulate. The people manning the counter were able to understand english.

Since I was returning back to Bangalore the same day, I had not made any reservations in a hotel for my stay. The taxi driver knew the place and he dropped me infront of the consulate gate. The guards there guided me to the gate through which the visa interviewees had to pass.

Passing time

I reached the consulate by 0900 though my interview was at 1230. There was a average sized queue at the gate. I liked the queue managment system at the Chennai consulate. The guards called out the interview time that was mentioned in the appointment letter and people who were scheduled at that time moved ahead in the queue. Since my interview was scheduled atYou will 1230, I roamed around in the streets to pass time.

It is really a hard job to pass time in Chennai. There were no parks or malls in the nearby area. Since I did not know the city well enough, I did not want to wander far off from the consulate.

After killing nearly two hour, I got into the queue at 1100 hours. I was allowed into the consulate at 1300 hours.

Pre-screening of the documents

Once you are inside the consulate, you have to wait to have your passport, forms D156 and D157 verified. The officers check if you are missing something. They are quite efficient. You have chairs available once you get inside the consulate.

By the time I reached the pre-screening counter, it was already 1430. Unluckily for me, the photograph on my form was not of the correct size. The officer at the counter asked me to get a proper sized photograph and come back again in an hour.

There is a market near the consulate and the shopkeepers there understand english and hindi. I asked around and quickly located a place to have my photograph taken. It was a seedy place and the photographer charged me 200 Rs. for four correct sized photograph. My guess is that he charged me at least thrice the price I would normally have paid.

I hurried back to the consulate and showed the guards at the front gate that I had been rescheduled for my interview and I had originally been called aat 1230. He kindly allowed me to go in without waiting in the queue.

This time around I did not have a problem in the pre-screening part and they asked me to go in for my visa interview.

Visa interview

There was quite a crowd waiting for their visa interview. However, the queue managment was again good here and no one was complaining. There were enough chairs around, so waiting was not too much of a hassle.

You first had to get your fingerprint taken and then stand in a queue to have one of the officers interview you. I was quite apprehensive about the interview as I had heard quite a lot of stories about the randomness of the visa interviewers in rejecting the visas. However, I was quite surprised. The visa interviewers gave perfectly coherent reasons for the rejection of the visas. They were direct, but polite in their rejections. They asked pertinent questions and I do not think that hassling the visa interviewees was their aim.

When my turn came, I was asked a few question about why I was going to US and told that my visa has been spproved and I would receive it in 2-3 days . I was quite happy and came out of the consulate. The process ended at 1700.

Back to Bangalore

My flight was at 2125. I killed time till 1830 and then took an autorickshaw to the airport. He charged me 150 Rs. and dropped me at the airport by 1915. I walked inside the airport, found an empty seat and tried to get some sleep. Since I had done lot of walking that day, my feet were killing me. I took off my shoes too and then tried to get some more sleep. Pretty soon the boarding for my flight was announced. I got into the the aeroplane, flew back to Bangalore and was back home by 2300.

All in all, it was a tiring experience, but a productive one.

I am sure I have heard these same divisons some place else, but I am not sure where. From what I remember, the speaker told us that imagine your life to be a circle and allocate each of these areas a portion of that circle. The area allocated to each of the areas should be proportionate to the time and energy you spend in that area. An ideal secenario would be that you have a circle in which all the areas are nearly equal.

Without much ado, here are the eight areas

• Career/Work - In the ideal world, we all love our work. In the real world, we do not. Find a way to be grateful for your job, and useful. You will spend a lot of time at work, better to have a positive experience while there.
• Creativity - This is where hobbies are important. Perhaps you are an artist? Find time to create. A great hobby is photography. You can do it as you walk through your neighborhood. It is also a great way to meet people, and to share experiences with others through your photos.
• Intellectual - This is an area which is very neglected. It is important that you keep your intellect sharp. One way to do so is to read the newspaper on a daily basis. Or, dive into classic works of fiction, or poetry.
• Health & Fitness - Get in shape and stay in shape. There is no substitute for a great diet either. These are critical for living a healthy, balanced life. People who eat right and are in shape have better attitudes than those who do not. If your body feels better, you will feel better.
• Social - You need to spend time with your friends, relaxing and socializing. It is very important to have an active social life, as it keeps you connected and involved with the world. Also, having fun and sharing laughs helps you recharge intellectually and emotionally. Without an active social life, people tend towards depression and isolation.
• Family - This can be sensitive for some people who experienced difficulties with their parents when they were younger. Your family can be a great source of comfort and connection, as well being supportive through difficult times. It is common for people to feel challenged in their family lives. However, growing through these challenges forges character and integrity.
• Companionship & Intimacy - Ultimately, every person deserves a lasting, meaningful relationship. It can be both nurturing and challenging. Ultimately, it serves to help us be open to another person, and understand the nature of intimacy and love. Intimate relationships are important in any person’s development. The result is a greater sense of ourselves, and a more fulfilling and happy life. Most of you reading this are probably looking for this.
• Austerity - Lastly, each of us needs time alone. This is when we recharge and connect with ourselves, and our purpose. Perhaps this is when we indulge in our hobbies, or when we practice daily meditation. Spending time alone helps us reenter the world feeling refreshed and connected.

Link

Small list of stuff everyone thinks is cool, but I did not find them worth the price all the electrons had to pay

• Second life - seriously people, what is so great about it that you are paying real world money for virtual stuff.
• A-list Bloggers - some of them are a bunch of pretentious idiots. Enough said.
• Orkut

My manager made a very good one-liner today (in context of whether we should concentrate on research or on actual implementation)

Think big and implement in small steps.

Seen on one of the mailing lists that I am on

I've heard it said - and find this to be true in enough cases to be useful as a rough guide - that men often try to stimulate conversation by disagreement, while women generally do the opposite (this provides a highly amusing view of teenagers' conversations involving the apposite sex, which tend to illustrate this, or something very close to it.) If so, then the Net often appears to be full of 12-year-old boys, stoned out of their minds on their brand-new experience with testosterone and desperate to be noticed.

I was in a very sour mood while I was driving back from work today. When I stopped in one of the frequent traffic snarls that adorn the roads of Bangalore, I saw that next to me was an autorickshaw with a small girl and her family. The small girl reached out and touched the rear view mirror of my bike. I made my don't-mess-with-me face at her and she just smiled at me. My reflex was to smile back at her and my bad mood was promptly broken. Sometimes I wonder how many of these small opportunities to make someone's days better have I have missed.

Dina points to "email is dead" in reference to teens by Danah Boyd

"Now, let's talk about youth. They have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there's not a lot of emotional investment over email.

That said, take away their AIM or MySpace or SMS or whatever their primary form of asynchronous messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you've ruined their life. And you have. Because you've taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It's like me taking away your access to blogs and email and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

There is a difference that I see in the way IM and emails work. On an IM, you get messages from a set of accepted people - who talk about stuff that (mostly) matters to you. On the other hand, your email account is a dropbox for a bunch of uninteresting stuff - mostly spam. However, if you think about it, email has its advantage too - it can be archived, encrypted, signed, personalized, sent across networks (i.e. your gmail.com account can send an email to yahoo.com email id, but you cannot chat with your yahoo! messenger friends from gtalk.

Maybe something equivalent to your IM-buddy list can be done for emails too. You have an email account and that accepts emails only from a whitelisted set of email-ids. Whenever you get an email from a new id, you can either add him to the buddy list or you can report the message as a spam and block the email id. Next step would be to integrate the notifications of new messages into you own desktop and an online presence indicator.

Just some food for thought .