Of rows, rush & rum

“Why does the sweet
Turn rancid or sour?
Why can’t the bee
Keep faith with the flower?”
From Bachchoo
ka Adda

This is to warn readers who are planning to come to Britain now or at any time before the end of August to dodge the heat or the monsoons or even to attend the 2012 London Olympics that landing at a London airport may be the end of one journey but is the beginning of a trial of patience.
The wait in the queues at passport and visa control is on most days, at Heathrow for instance, two hours long. It’s something of a scandal and questions have been raised in the Houses of Parliament. In this run-up to the first Olympic Games to be held in Britain in 50 years, the country needs to put out some welcoming signals and the long waits, standing and shuffling along in immigration queues are not doing the job. Or I should admit that the negative publicity that alerts people to this inconvenience (such as these very paragraphs) is not calculated to do the British tourist trade any favours.
I assure you it’s not done out of spite or any attempt to gloat, as some commentators did when the riots of last year broke out, that Britain, with these delays, inefficiencies and discomforts has achieved Third World status.
Not that the entire “Third World” is subject to the same trials that bureaucracy and the sheer volume of traffic impose. One experience of mine, at a time when countries really were classified as being Third World, demonstrates quite the opposite:
A few decades ago, travelling to Trinidad from London through some bucket-shop deal, I had to change planes in New York. I transferred from a by-and-large regular plane to a rattle-trap affair with a couple of dozen seats. Even this flight to the Caribbean was, at the most, half full.
It stopped in Antigua and the air steward told the passengers that it would be an hour before it took off again and that we should leave the plane and return in time. We alighted and walked to the terminal which was then (I expect it has developed now — everything has!) no more than a shack. One could walk through it for landing formalities but my fellow passengers, all of whom were, from their accents, Indo or Afro-Caribbean, didn’t bother. They walked around it.
A fellow passenger, with whom I had struck up a conversation, swore he knew the best rum shack a little distance away where rum punch to die for was being dispensed. It didn’t take much persuasion to get me to agree to spend the hour in this quest.
“Don’t bother go in there,” he said as we walked from the runway to the terminal shack. “The passporter probably gone home. Too hot!”
“And illegal immigrants?”
“Everybody welcome,” he said. “The place small so everyone know who you are so no one could hide.”
Sure enough, we went round the side and into the open roadways.
The rum punch lived up to its reputation. The proprietor of the little den was very glad to have pound sterling notes, which he referred to as “English dollah”, in payment. My companion had three refills before we went back to the plane and assumed that I would foot the bill as payment for his introducing me to the place.
We went through the terminal shack on the way back and sure enough there was a man there in some sort of uniform but he wasn’t bothering with passports or any formality. He shouted to my companion by name and asked him how much punch he’d managed.
That was the only time and the only airport at which I experienced an open-door policy. Coming in and out of any Indian airport on an international flight is, to say the least, tedious. I’ve always wondered why the Indian state records one’s arrivals and departures so diligently. It’s obvious that there ought to be a check on known criminals and terrorists coming into or leaving the country, but equally obvious that they wouldn’t be travelling with documents which could incriminate them. So if, for instance, I were Osama bin Laden, I wouldn’t fly in from Abbottabad carrying a passport in that name. I think I’d wear a turban and an eye-patch and get a false passport which identified me as plain Mr Singh.
Undoubtedly the processing of entrants to a country has become stricter and very much troublesome after the threats of (mainly) jihadist terror began. Britain, while cutting its budgets and recruitment to the border services which supervise entry, has introduced electronic gadgets and surveillance which automates the process. I have a British passport with a “chip” in it which looks like the metallic pattern on a mobile phone SIM card. I am, on entry to Britain, invited to join the automated queue and instructed to place my passport in the chip-reader and be photographed by staring into a camera. Some pattern of my iris acts as an eye-print to my identity and the gate opens to let me into Britain. All very efficient and quick, except that the last two times I’ve entered the country the wretched machines have been out of order or out of service for some other reason.
Next week the union of workers in the border control services has called a strike, not to protest against the running down of their service but on the issue of civil service pensions. The government says it will put volunteers from the other border control services, such as customs officers, on passport check desks and that the strike will not be allowed to cause any inconvenience.
This may solve the passport queue problem but at the same time will relax customs surveillance. So to any readers who want to smuggle drugs in their baggage, I say, as the Black Panthers of the US used to, “Seize the time.”