Having lived in 6 countries and moving to the seventh now, I often feel that perhaps I will always remain an outsider. Sure, I love the experience in these foreign lands and the cultural soy sauce that accompanies the concoction, but I do sometimes crave for the familiarity of home. Home being India. Home being where you are not looked at curiously for your skin color, your accent or your culinary taste. Home, where you are accepted for who you are.
This is however an illusion and nothing more. Anytime I need a reality check I think about applying for a visa for any country while in India. I have had strange requests from agents and VFS- no objection certificate from my husband- which prompted me to change my status to single on the visa application, to a letter stating why I am not returning to India on departing from a certain Schengen country. Answer being: since I am going to UK to take up employment. But clearly that's not good enough. Either because of my nationality or some profiling formula- I am not eligible to travel at whim. And should I want to, every agent involved in the process will frown their eyebrows and look at me with eyes riddles with curiosity and a degree of frustration. "But you have to come back to India!"
I understand basic checks for issuing a visa but I don't understand the increasingly skeptical eye that every visa applicant must be scrutinized with by the embassy employees. I don't think I have been asked for a no objection certificate or such a detailed letter when applying for visas outside india. Why is it that we are faced with such cynical and skeptical scrutiny? Ok, I might know the answer to this one. I might not fit the description of a typical traveller going to Europe or Hong Kong all by herself at that, which could raise eyebrows. But still. One would think that once someone has developed a certain travel profile or some credentials by virtue of education and a clean record, this would not happen.
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