Heartbreak...

It was something that I had never anticipated, England losing out to Portugal in the quarters when I was so sure that the English team is going to go all the way and lift the trophy.I like all the hooligans sweared a hundred times for the Argentine referee and Christiano Ronaldo alike... Man I wish he gets a treatment when he goes back to United, the fans are sure going to butcher him if not Rooney.

I think England were surely the better side until the penalty shootouts, they could have done better but they didn't have their two best penalty takers in Beckham and Rooney, ofcourse I expected Lampard and Gerrard to score but the monster in Ricardo broke so many hearts with those monstrous saves.

The World Cup seems now a dead thing for me with England out, but France beating Brazil was a shocker as well.Football can be atrocious sometimes and I learnt this last night.

Mission: Driving License

So this was my first peek-a-boo into the lives of our sarkari offices- the R.T.O (most probably the Regional Transport Office) to be precise. I turned 18 soon (see if you read my blog carefully I’ll divulge some information here and there…), so my papa finally realized that he could get me a driving license (am not so enthusiastic to go there myself). It’s not like you have to wait till you get 18 to get yourself a driving license at least in this part of India, but then my pa just like me is very laid-back in certain things.

Okay coming back to the R.T.O rendezvous, I was escorted by one Yadav dude (a 50 year dude albeit ;)), who is probably in this business for quite sometime but still seems nervous like an amateur. Well he’s kinda middleman who makes it easy to get a license out of the clutches of the R.T.O people, one of my friend tried to get it on his own but was failed thrice in the driving test, lol.

It was an area office, so the building isn’t so big, but man it stinks! Not that I expected a government office to be any good, but I had visited our friendly post-office quite a few times and I never thought anything could be worse than this. Plaster falling of the blue and red walls (which were supposed to be half blue half red, but red probably gave up the struggle for survival sometime back and gave way to more blue), glorious red marks of humara UP ka paan made by veterans of beetle leaves, the maze on the doors had been shredded mercilessly. There were windows but no glass in them, perhaps to avoid the pain of opening the windows to let the breezes in.

But the most distinct feature were the innumerous files, light brown files stacked up in piles, ten or twenty piles and not files in each small room, I’m sure no one would ever dare to search for a record in these files. White pages had turned yellow and even the wood pulp used in them must have started decomposing. Looking at them the only idea you’ll get is “do these people even know that computers exist?”

Anyway Mr. Yadav got me a couple of forms that had an indefinite amount of questions but he asked me to fill minimal. Next up we went to get the documents verified and then he went to deposit the bucks (he wouldn’t dare to take me there- of course he won’t want me to know what was the actual amount used). And then the real fun took place… there was supposed to be a written test…

Clever shit… they had special question papers with answers already marked on them for people like me who applied through middlemen. Looks like the R.T.O doesn’t want to issue licenses without accommodating the middlemen in their ranks. So I finished the paper, I gathered that only 50% marks were required, so I didn’t care to recheck…

Well the experience was really cool… one always sees these things in films, but actually seeing the conditions of official files, officials and the working system in government offices does make you laugh a lot.