never been angrier

Have you ever got the feeling (pausing in your journey, and surveying the road before you – the road of life, to be poetic) that Fate had developed the most inexplicable predilection for throwing banana peels in your way and the occasional old newspaper in your face? Have you ever wondered what you did to deserve the slur, the insult, the affront? If you haven’t, it means you’ve never had to apply for a driver’s license in India (or at least in Andhra Pradesh) as I did today. My faithful readers will be familiar with the account I wrote in August about how I obtained my learner’s license. (Here.) In the end, all I got was a low-quality printout with the most unflattering picture of me stuck defiantly in a corner, stretched beyond recognition. If that was ignominious, no words in the English language can describe how infuriating the process of getting the actual license was, in spite of the fact that I didn’t actually have to drive. What I got in the end – what they so audaciously called a “license” – was a hideous, hideous, hideous card with my information smeared across the middle in the most hideous low-quality ink, and the same picture – the hideous picture from my learner’s license – brainless resizing preserved, marred even further by the fact that it was in color this time. That the debauched, gangrenous government believes that such a disgraceful piece of trash could possibly serve as a valid photo ID for anyone but E.T. shows that India, under the veneer of making incredible economic progress, is still at the level of the most undeveloped, savage countries of Africa. Pretending to be otherwise will never change the facts. The worst part is that I am doomed to be stuck with this apology for a driver’s license for twenty confounded years. I would rather never drive in this country at all, if it means being able to avoid taking the thing out of the bowels of the safe – to avoid looking at it. It doesn’t deserve to see the light of day. And the government – the astonishing arrogance! Issuing licenses to people, permission for people to drive! Can you believe it? People should be paid to drive in this hellhole of a country.