The Agonies of an Indian Visa

A lot of these issues remind me of the time I got my US visa. Had to pre-book a flight and plan my itinerary before I could set foot in the US embassy.

Some of the issues (no option for mother's profession, no "Atheist" option, etc.) are cause India is a mostly conservative society. I'm an atheist but according to my government records, I'm a Hindu.

And the government sites are made horribly. One time, I had to pay some taxes but the site kept on crashing. The reason? My apartment's name had an apostrophe and their system only accepts [a-zA-Z ]+. Had to read the obfuscated HTML code of the site, figure out the API calls (read: not an API, an old-school POST request to an ASP.net server) and write a small client JUST TO PAY TAXES.

It is payback. Indians have terrible problems getting visas to many places, in the U.S. I think Indians have the worst problems with the immigration authorities of anyone I know.