On 26 October 2010 14:55, Sriram Karra <[email protected]> wrote: > This guy appears spoiled from not having to fill out too many visa > applications.
About ten years ago, my then employer, a large telco, asked me to organise a series of lectures by "tech celebrities" to publicise the launch of a new ISP. I duly invited one such celebrity, a US citizen, and worked out dates and terms and so on. On the day he was to land, I went to the airport to pick him up. International flights land in India at the worst possible hours of the day. His was at 1am, I think. When he didn't come out of the airport till 3am, I tried calling him on his US cellphone. It went to voicemail because his carrier (CDMA, of course) did not have roaming in India. Then he managed to get word out that Indian immigration had detained him because he didn't have a visa. They had ordered him to be repatriated by the airline on the next flight out. The principal shareholder in the telco, now a member of the Indian parliament, woke up people in the Home Ministry in Delhi, and they managed to arrange a special, one-off, "on arrival" visa for our guest. The guest hadn't bothered getting a visa because as a US citizen, every country other than China issued him visas on arrival. And he was a well-traveled man. He was upset because I hadn't told him to get a visa. As an Indian, the thought that you could expect to get a visa on arrival had never occurred to me. Ram
