Nice. As a British tourist in India in the mid 90s the bureaucracy felt like revenge. Booking a seat on a train meant joining the right queue with the right-coloured form filled in with the right train number. You could get the train number by having bought a guide to trains from a stall *outside* the ticket office. Various coloured forms were available. None of this was explained, but I had another book which walked the reader through the process. I saw tourists trying to intuit their way through the system; they invariably spent half an hour in a queue before being informed they were wrong.
The worrying thing was, after a couple of weeks this all seemed perfectly reasonable, and orderly, and I was tutting at the idiots who couldn't understand it.
Nice. As a British tourist in India in the mid 90s the bureaucracy felt like revenge. Booking a seat on a train meant joining the right queue with the right-coloured form filled in with the right train number. You could get the train number by having bought a guide to trains from a stall *outside* the ticket office. Various coloured forms were available. None of this was explained, but I had another book which walked the reader through the process. I saw tourists trying to intuit their way through the system; they invariably spent half an hour in a queue before being informed they were wrong.
The worrying thing was, after a couple of weeks this all seemed perfectly reasonable, and orderly, and I was tutting at the idiots who couldn't understand it.
I remember feeling the same way!
This piece reminds me so much of one of the all-time great Onion videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ
"Prague's Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport"