Conversation

Feels like in India you can’t get anything done online without a local permanent mobile number that can receive OTPs. And every damn thing is tied to Aadhar and PAN. The old bureaucracy has remained aggressively unchanged or gotten more user hostile in going digital.
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In-person running around doesn’t help smooth things along like it used to. Now all services have phalanxes of feeder functionaries with no discretion or ability to massage the system by throwing more paper at it
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Dealing with the tax crap around this one bank account I now regret ever opening is a major PITA. Trying to shut it down and move the money to the US in dollars is turning out to be a Trial that will eat up half my vacation looks like.
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Dreading the eventual clean-up and disposition of my parents’ assets when sister and I (both in US) eventually have to deal with that. My dad’s kept it all super tidy but it’s still going to be a major financial engineering operation.
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I’ve gotten by with just a PAN card so far, but since I suspect I have to be more entangled in India stuff in the future I might cave and get an aadhar card too, which I believe OCI card (~green card) holders are now eligible for. Maybe I’ll get an India cellphone too
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Indian bureaucracy is defensive speculative maximalism. It feeds on random extra inputs it ingests just in case it needs it in the future. So it’s fathers’s name, multiple copies of everything, attestation/notarization everywhere. Stamp paper and auditor sign offs everywhere.
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This trip I cheaped-out on paying for international roaming. Used to be just $25/mo on Verizon but is now $100/mo or $10/day. Basically just use wifi from parents home and don’t even take my phone when I go out. I’ve never done the local SIM card thing
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Weirdly, it’s harder to do low-level corruption with this new mobile IT infrastructure which has made it harder to do low-level work at all. I only learned the low-level corruption ways back in the day 🤣
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When graft is the bottom of the stack, social networks are *really* effective. I got my first driver’s license in 1990 without setting foot in a dmv or taking a test. The legal way wasn’t even an option back then in my corrupt state of Bihar. You paid pimp, you got license.
Replying to
But despite myself I’m impressed any of this works at all with so few administrative resources stretched so thin across 1.2 billion people. If the US were broadly forced into such circumstances (some parts are getting there, some are already well below) there would be a civil war
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In the adjacent state, you go to DMV stand in line for 30 minutes at every counter, there will be always 6-7 people ahead of you but you will get the license, you had also the option to go to a pimp and get the license delivered to your home.