Renewing one’s passport is really mundane. It takes up an afternoon. One drives to their city's passport office, gets pictures clicked, fills out a form and waits. It is really uneventful and boring. This was not the case with my last renewal.
I live in a small town, and I generally have to be driven three hours to the nearest 'city'. When my family applied for it last time, we were happy to find out that a new passport-office was opened ‘only’ an hour away.
Being used to normal passport offices, and their metal chairs, glass counters and ticket coupons, we were surprised, to say the least, when we pulled up at this passport office. The ‘office’ was a shed in a pretty post office’s compound. We were convinced that this was the wrong place. It was a quarter of an hour before a ‘post office employee’ confirmed that we were indeed in the right place and ushered us into the waiting area.
The ‘waiting area’ was enormous. It was the inside of a go-down, literally. A few desks and old folders occupied a corner, giving the whole place a ‘daftar’ (old 80s office) kind of vibe. A few shelves of ‘old documents’ (or what looked like old documents and binders) were present. There were no chairs, or sitting areas, except for an rickety brown wooden chair, which looked like it would break as soon as someone sat. (We left that alone, no one was going to touch that.) And, the main attraction, which stood out like a (not) sore thumb, was a pile of hay - A proper hay-stack. While, we had spotted cows in the post office compound, we had not expected the waiting area of the passport office to double up as a hay-storing facility. I’m not complaining though, it was comical. On the bright side, It did have a lot more space than a ‘modern waiting area’. Sunlight came in, and I and my sister could ‘explore’. I spent the whole ‘wait’ describing this place to my fellow 15 year old friends on phone, who were equally interested in it for some reason (or just put up with my rambling).
It was brand new. I mean, it was opened DAYS ago. We were some of the first people to be issued a passport here. Our appointment was for late morning (11 or so), but we had shown up with a few minutes to spare. The whole building was desolate. No officials or other applicants were in sight.
The locals started entering the go-down at a bit past 11. A dozen people gathered and were waiting, when two officials walked in. They seemed friendly, carried a bunch of papers and cups of chai (for themselves, obviously). They opened a side door, and asked us to file in.
Peeping into the door they opened, I could see a small room, with a couple of ‘teacher’s desks’. Instead of glass partitions and separate rooms for biometrics and a coupon system, the two ‘blokes’ did the whole sha-bang. This accelerated the process a lot though. We avoided waiting in any queues (especially the one where we have to wait to get a coupon. Smh, that's so extra). One quickly went over our documents while the other clicked our photos. They made small talk, and discussed local politics with dad, as they swiftly cancelled the old passports. We were done within 20 minutes of entering the room, and ensured that our passports would be posted within 30 days.
We were out of the shed by 11:45. We had estimated it would be atleast 2:30 by the time we were done, and this was such a pleasant surprise. Instead of being stuck in a boring building for hours, we got to spend an hour in a cow-roaming, hay-storing, convertible daftar. I would take that trade any day.
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