Hyderabad Diary – The Customs of India

When you land in Hyderabad, after immigration your hand-baggage is passed through a scanner. The intent here – unlike the scanning that happens during security-checks – is to identify items on which customs duty can be charged. When my turn came, the official appeared to raise his eyebrows a little. “Do you have a camera there, with a long lens?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied. “I have an SLR”. He took my customs declaration form and scribbled something on the reverse.

After gathering my suitcase from the belt I tried to pass through the ‘Green channel’ but was stopped by the person at the exit. He asked for my customs form, flipped it over, and then directed me towards “counter 2″ at the ‘Red Channel’. The man at the counter took the form, and asked me to open my bag and take out the camera.

“How much does it cost?” he asked.

I thought for a while, and then said: “It is an old model I bought three years ago. It would now probably cost about fifteen thousand rupees.”

“What about the lens? The lenses are quite expensive, isn’t it?”

“It is not a zoom lens, so it wasn’t very expensive. I paid a hundred Euros for it. But why are you asking all this? These are my personal belongings, and I always carry them when I come to India. In fact, I’ve carried it with me on my last three trips to India.”

“Did you pay duty on any one of those trips?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then you should pay duty once,” he said, shaking his head. “Pay duty once, sir, then it will all be fine.”

“But look this is unfair!” I protested. “The form says I can carry Rs.25,000/- worth of items, and I’m not carrying so much.”

“What is in the suitcase?”

“Some chocolates and clothes.”

“What about your mobile? Show me your mobile, please.”

I took the mobile – a Sony Ericsson – out of my pocket and gave it to him.

“How much does this cost?”

“Nothing.”

He looked up at me.

“I took it with a two year contract, and with such contracts some models of mobile phones come free of cost. This was one of them.” I explained.

“Ok, so how much can you give me?” he asked, without meeting my eyes.

This was an explicit request for a bribe. I thought about it for a while. If they checked all my belongings, I could be in trouble. The camera was worth much more than the price I had mentioned, and I was also carrying my iPod.

“I can give you 500 rupees. But this is very unfair, let me tell you.”

He gave a toothy smile, and shook his head. Perhaps he thought my offer too small?

“All that I am carrying are my personal belongings. I don’t think you can charge duty for that.” I repeated, although I wasn’t too sure of what “personal belongings” were allowed.

“It’s okay, sir,” he said, and handed my the customs form after putting his signature there.

I picked up my bags and walked out through the ‘Green Channel’. Just when I came outside the airport building, I heard someone calling me from behind – I turned around to find the customs officer walking towards me.

“You’ve left your mobile at the counter, sir,” he said. “Please come and collect it.”

He wasn’t carrying the mobile with him, and the reason became clear soon. “You could give me that five hundred now, sir.” he said. I looked a bit surprised at this turn of stance, so he added, with a sheepish grin: “If that is okay with you.”

He had my mobile, and I wanted to get out of that place; I relented. He pocketed the five-hundred rupee note in a flash and walked back inside, picked up my mobile from his counter and gave it back to me.

Back home, I decided to check the customs rules (a subject I had been blissfully ignorant of upto now, thanks to the smooth passages through the ‘Green Channel’ all these years). After digging through parts of the Central Board of Excise and Customs website, I found a page dedicated towards the customs duties applicable to different categories of passengers. In summary, it said that for ‘tourists’, articles allowed free of duty include:

1. Used ‘personal effects’ and travel souvenirs, if: (a) These goods are for personal use of the tourist, and (b) These goods, other than those consumed during the stay in India, are re-exported when the tourist leaves India for a foreign destination. [The phrase 'personal effects' had a link that did not work]
2. Duty free allowances applicable to Indian Residents.

The second point referred to another section of the document, which mentioned that “Used personal effects (excluding jewellery) required for satisfying daily necessities of life” are duty free. What those “daily necessities” could be was open to interpretation.

This showed that I could carry with me any amount of ‘personal effects’ as long I declared them as artifacts I would carry back to where I came from. However, my experiences with immigration and customs officials on my way out of the country did not involve anyone checking my passport to see if I had declared some goods on my way in. So it wasn’t a foolproof system. Nevertheless, with all this homework done, I could now prevent myself from being bulldozed by a customs official. (He must have had quite a laugh about “these gullible rich types who live abroad”).

If you are a regular follower of this blog, you’d perhaps be wondering how all this could have happened when the Wife was around. You see, she isn’t with me on this trip to India – she intends to visit her parents in the U.S. during the same period – and when I narrated the incident on the phone later that evening she was quick to remark that this would have never happened had she been there. To her, it is not about knowing the rules – it is about showing that you know them.

Um, well.

Welcome to WordPress

I’ve moved from Typepad to WordPress for a simple reason: paying for a blogging service  didn’t seem to make sense when something as flexible and user-friendly as WordPress was available for free.

I have been thinking about this move for some time now, but could not get over the inertia mostly due to lack of time. Until now, that is. I’m presently on a vacation in India, and this seemed a good time to take up the project. I’m happy not to have lost any of the comments – they are an important part of this journal – and I’ve additionally added category information to most of the posts dating back to 2003.

Welcome. I look forward to more posts, and more discussions.

U.S. Diary: Flying In

It is less than six months since my last visit to the U.S., but I’ve forgotten what an adventure getting into the country can be.

The experience begins during check-in, where the friendly but firm German official behind the Lufthansa counter asks me if I have a machine-readable passport. It is an unexpected question, one that I have not been asked before, and I hesitate. He repeats: “Do you have a machine-readable passport?”. I tell him no, I have a U.S. visa; if one has a visa, a machine-readable passport is not needed. He says he has to check that, and starts searching for something on his computer. After a while he is still not sure, so he turns to the young blond in the next counter and asks her if there are any exceptions to the machine-readable-passport-rule. She replies without thinking: when someone has a visa.

After check-in I proceed towards security check. There is a long queue, winding endlessly through the hallway. I join the line, and I’m followed immediately by a middle-aged lady wearing dark glasses, who shifts to the side to get a better look at the length of the line and mutters something under her breath. At that instant a man tries to get into the position behind me; the attempt is immediately rebuked by the lady who tells him sternly, in German: “Behind me”. He falls in behind her, and she turns around and addresses him:

“Do you know why I’m so impolite?”

“It is a long line,” the man says.

“Yes, and I have been in transit for eighteen hours, and these officials at Frankfurt airport have sent me from one gate to another, from one counter to another. Utter incompetence!”

They talk about the declining standards in airports, and she says she has been living in the U.S., where things are much better. In the conversation that follows, she frequently visits the how-Europe-is-falling-apart theme, and at one point refers to the book ‘While Europe slept‘. My mind immediately springs to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir Infidel, and an interview where she refers to the book ‘While Europe Slept‘. I make a mental note of buying this book in an airport bookstore. If I have time before departure, that is.

The queue moves slowly. Along the way, some even jump across when the tape demarcating the lines – unusual behaviour in Germany, but human behaviour in large crowds is seldom usual. When my bag passes through the scanner, the official places it in a different queue which means it has to be opened. The lady who looks at the snapshot of the X-Ray says there is a pair of scissors; I can’t remember putting any scissors into the bag, so a search begins. It takes a few minutes until she finds the offending object; I smile at her and say “Sorry!”. She smiles back and throws it into the waste basket, amongst dozens of other similar scissors. Despite the crowd the atmosphere is relaxed, which keeps the experience from being unpleasant.

After security check comes the passport check, and then near the gates there is yet another security check – an identical routine, only the officials are different. It is already past boarding time for my flight, and I can sense the anxiety in some passengers around me. When I reach the corridor that leads to my gate, there is another queue: a final passport check. The American citizens can’t believe it; “But we just had our passports checked!” a lady cries in dismay. Others shuffle uneasily in their positions, ask people in front if they are in a later flight, and some even try to squeeze into the middle of queues.

It is a relief to get into the flight: the greeting from the stewardess seems more welcoming than usual. I have an aisle seat, and next to me is a young man reading what I later find to be a book on Thomas Aquinas. Across the aisle is a lady reading Haruki Murakami in a language I cannot decipher. The man in front is reading Die Zeit, and the pages strike me as luxurious: it is the effect conveyed by the font, layout and graphic design. Just looking at those pages makes me want to read them.

I pick out my book (an excerpt from Herodotus’s Histories), plug-in my headphones to Lufthansa radio (playing Schubert), and push back my seat. The eight and half hour flight passes quickly.

At the Newark liberty international airport the immigration queue is a short one; when my turn comes, I am asked a few routine questions about my visit. I answer them, including one about any previous visits to the country, which I answer with a vague “earlier this year”. This prompts a repetition of the question, now in a tone that appears to demand specificity. “I was here in April this year, and stayed for a week.” I reply; the officer stamps my passport and hands it across the counter: “Welcome to the United States.”