I dread flights to India. This has been my opinion for as long as I can remember, including when my family lived in the Arabian Gulf. Every summer, we would visit India for about one month. At the start, I always counted down the days till we left, mostly because I hated life in Bombay. The flights, though, I loved. They were short, typically three hours, and I enjoyed the airline food. Once I started travelling alone, I learned to dread long flights to India.

Last week, I made a last-minute trip to the motherland for certain unavoidable reasons. Many parts of this trip annoyed me. Like always, I planned this trip via le Moyen-Orient, entirely so I minimize the amount of time I spend on a flight full of Indians. Four hours is about my limit on flights to India. You are free to label me a racist, but the things I’ve seen on direct flights to India would make you a racist as well. I’ve seen food trays in the toilet bowl, puddles of water on toilet floors, Indian adults emptying cups of water on the cabin floor, Indian men drinking too much and then groping the cabin crew, Arab police called to detain unruly passengers, and these are just the memorable ones. I also remember burps, farting, seat kicking, questions about my salary, people trying to steal my seat and so on. Travelling with large groups of Indians is just something to be avoided.

Flights via le Moyen-Orient involve transit via one of the Arab states. This time, I flew Qatar airways. Qatar is not a bad airline but it tries to be Emirates and fails. Emirates is the Dubai-based, state owned airline that led the development of the Middle East as a transit hub and they do sell a good product. Emirates planes are modern and clean. Dubai airport is large, but reasonably efficient. Doha airport and Qatar Airlines are none of these things. They are definitely not as bad as Air India, but more like a dollar store version of Emirates. Anyhow, transit via Doha was annoying, but ok. The annoyances are the long walk from your plane to security, around 400 meters. This is ok for the able bodied but is annoyingly long. During both transits at Doha, I passed only two toilets and there are no moving walkways. Security is fine, but annoying. The Qataris really emphasize that they have tamed the desert by shoving a tropical forest in the middle of the airport. Money and western technology were the real tamers of the Qatari desert.

Post the Doha stopover, I arrived in the motherland, where my annoyance levels grew exponentially. Your first experience with Indian inefficiency is the carpet as soon as you exit your plane at Terminal 2 at Bombay. This carpet is old, obviously dirty, and has holes in places. I don’t know whether it is cleaned regularly. You then have to walk about 300 meters to the immigration counters but the journey there shows you just how broken India really is. There are moving walkways, but they alternate sides. In other words, you first shuffle to the left to use one, but as you exit, you then shuffle to the right for the next. Repeat about three times, despite there being two rows of the damned things. Why they are used this way can only be explained by ancient Vedic knowledge, which has obviously been lost in the slums outside the airport.

Then is immigration, where I generally speak only if spoken to. The lines are slow, the tech regularly breaks down and the “officers” are often rude and uncouth. Not the best introduction to a country trying to grow its tourism sector. Let’s go on a minor detour here, shall we?

While waiting in a glacial line at Indian immigration, you might decide to connect to the airport wifi. This is a completely normal thing at any civilized airport. In the great nation of Bharat, it is not. Connecting to the wifi at most Indian airports requires a one-time password, the beloved OTP in Bharat. But wait, you can only receive this OTP via an Indian cellphone number, which requires an Indian SIM card, which most international travellers do not have! Ah, a Catch-22. What to do? Not to worry, the Indian bureaucracy has a solution! You queue up in front of a pair of machines, of which only one is working. You scan your passport and boarding card and the machine might spit out an OTP for you to use on the WiFi! This is on a good day. On a normal day, there is a line of 200 people, both machines are broken and you decide to just not use the wifi anyway.

Immigration is often a pain in Bharat, for numerous bureaucratic reasons. You are forced to fill in a form that includes questions such as where you plan to stay, your local contact number and so on. How will a tourist have a local contact number? The answer does not matter, for the Indian bureaucrat wants it anyway. To do what, no one knows. Remember, the Indian bureaucracy is like a black hole, a relentless sink and shredder of information, so much so that information triplication is the norm in Bharat. This “arrival card” includes information already in your passport, but must be hand written for reasons unknown. The immigration “officer” will scan your passport anyway, so what is the point of this card?

Once you are past this, you then arrive at customs. This is where a bunch of power-tripping bureaucrats (sometimes scammers) dressed in white can ask you random questions, demand bribes and generally harass you. India is one of those countries where the lowest, most unimportant bureaucrat, has tremendous nuisance value. Customs is the prime example of that, because this time, Ramesh at the scanner could not understand why I arrived from Doha without alcohol. He would not accept my answer that alcohol does not interest me. Instead, he forcibly scanned my bags, found zero alcohol and then repeated the original question. After two rounds of this, he let me go.

Outside, I needed a taxi. Taxis need payment and payment in India needs either cash or that UPI system. The trouble with the UPI system is that you need an Indian phone number, which I did not have. Cash was the alternative. The trouble with cash is that, generally, you cannot buy Rupee notes outside India. If you have literally zero rupees, there are no bank ATMs at Mumbai airport so you are forced to accept extortion-level rates from the currency exchanges at the airport. Ah, welcome to Bharat, where every transaction requires detailed knowledge and without that knowledge, you will be cheated, conned and extorted. Such an amazing country!

I then followed the signs to P4 (unsure what the P stands for), as that was where the prepaid taxis are. Prepaid taxis are great because you tell a person at a counter where you’re going, they determine the cost, you pay and are assigned a taxi. No haggling, no hassle. This is one of the few things that works at Bombay airport… is what I would have said if the counter was easy to find. It is not. As soon as you exit the lift at P4, you are presented with a “Taxi and tour” counter. Brightly lit, this must be the correct spot? It is not. This is yet another example of extortion where the semi-literate fools at this counter will listen to your destination, type out a number on a comically large calculator, and present this to you as a fair fare. I am not new to these schemes so when I heard ₹ 1,200, I told the man to nibble on my gotas and walked away. I found a black and yellow taxi and asked where the payment counter was. It ended up being behind a pillar, not visible from the lift and dimly lit. I paid ₹ 590 for a taxi, which is completely fair.

This was just on my journey out of the airport, and I was harassed or misled four times already. One by the wifi, once at customs, once by the cash, and finally by the taxi stand. Welcome to Bharat, please do your best to enjoy the harassment, pollution and filth.

Yet another planning disaster is the supposed “modern” metro. There is a metro station at the Bombay airport, provided you expand the definition of “at” to include a station 300 meters away. I tried to use the metro station but you have to walk outside on a broken road, carry your bags down a flight of stairs and trudge through 400 meters of tropical humidity to reach a train. If your destination is in the western suburbs of Mumbai, you have to change metro lines and the geniuses who designed the metro lines assigned some lines to separate companies, meaning there is no direct transfer between stations. You must exit one line, deal with the chaos of a Mumbai road, buy a new ticket, traverse the farce of “security”, and then be told that large bags are not allowed on the metro. Is the expectation that people using the airport will arrive with zero bags? Here is the reason why ridership on the airport metro line is at 11% of projections.

Bombay is one of those cities where you wear an N95 mask outdoors, so you do not inhale pollution equivalent to smoking dozens of cigarettes. I decided that we needed an air filter at home. Ok, I went to a shop to buy one. I found a model I was willing to buy, held the cash in hand, and waited at the payment counter. The lady there asked me for my phone number. I said that I had no phone. She did not know what to do and called someone for help. She then asked for my address, and I didn’t want to share that. I declined the warranty and again, she didn’t know what to do. A different person was summoned. Next, she could not find the air filter in the store’s computerized system. A third person was summoned and she asked me to wait. At this point, I’d been waiting there for fifteen minutes, cash in hand, ready to pay. All I wanted to do was to buy something, and Bharat’s digital systems had failed it yet again. No rational shop, anywhere in the world, would do this to a paying customer. I walked away.

I then went to a shop owned by the great Gujarati businessman, the illustrious, well-proportioned, well-heeled, politically connected Mukess. At the entrance, there’s an excellent theatre where you can participate in the great Indian security pantomime. A man will grope and finger you, all in the name of preventing “terrorism”, never mind the fact that muslims are lynched in India on the daily. An actual terrorist would just walk through the back door, which is helpfully wide open and completely unguarded. So unguarded, in fact, that I accidentally wandered out of it, not realizing what the door was. If you need a cellphone, welcome to the world of “Aadhar”, a bureaucratically and legally optional document, but one that the real world deems mandatory. Without an Aadhar number, no cell phone for you. No gas connection, no bank account, no digital payments. Completely optional, if your chosen lifestyle includes foraging in a forest and sleeping outdoors with no electricity. Nandan, I hope your personal afterlife includes eternal Bangalore traffic, no chutney on your idlis, and endless paper cuts from an Aadhaar card.

Leaving the great nation of Bharat is another shining example of just how many Indians are unemployed or underemployed. At the airport departures level, you first show your passport and ticket to a pair of armed men in military fatigues outside the airport. You then repeat the process at the airline check-in counter. Next, the security people check your passport again and stamp the back of your boarding card. Immigration then repeats the stamping and if, Vishnu forbid it, you lose your boarding card, you must traverse this entire charade yet again. Next, the airline staff at the gate check your boarding pass, another person scans it, and you are then accosted by a random person on the air bridge who demands to see your passport yet again. Six people, six duplicated “checks”, all in the name of “security”. I have personally never witnessed any benefits to this level of bureaucratic nonsense, nor am I aware of the benefits. I’m sure the esteemed Indian bureaucrats will sing the praises of such a well-oiled system, but it really shows you how many people in India do not have gainful employment. In the airport toilets is a person to greet you and generally maintain “cleanliness”. I will concede that hygiene standards at the airport toilets has improved somewhat. The toilets are now useable. Yet another person underemployed. Indian public toilets need regular cleaning and civic education, not gatekeepers.

Praise be to Vishnu, Jesus and Allah, for the small wins. In the past, your cabin baggage included a tag that was stamped by airport security. Without that stamp, what evidence did you have of not carrying contraband or illegal aliens in your 7 kg of cabin baggage? Thankfully, that stamping has now ceased.

This is the real experience of Bharat. Inefficient, pointless, duplicative, wasteful, manipulative, tiring. Unemployment is a problem but the solution is more bureaucratic inefficiency, doing everything in triplicate, for no reason other than creating busy work and under-employing the unemployed and unemployable. Just walk into a police station in India or a government office and you will see stacks of papers, floor to ceiling, that no one looks at, just sitting there so someone can tick a box, harass the average citizen and collect bribes.

Welcome to Bharat. Enjoy your stay.