On the 18th of July, I completed a payment made towards Expatrio for setting up my blocked account. A Blocked Account is a restricted access bank account that international students in Germany are required to have. This was the last process I had needed to complete before I could apply for a visa. The ban on Indian travelers in Germany had been lifted earlier that month. Students in Delhi who had an admission offer from a German University for a Masters’ course could start applying for appointments on the 19th of July.
As I write this on the 10th of September, I do not have an appointment at VFS to submit my application for a visa yet. I lost my 82-day streak of learning German on Duolingo three weeks back and until last week I had abandoned the sweater I was crocheting for myself too.
Earlier this year, in March, I was in Bangalore for a month-long assignment in college. When I arrived at the airport, I realized that I had left one of my two carry-on bags in the aircraft. That little bag had a hand-kerchief, my kindle, some cough drops, and my wallet in it. I rushed to find a customer service executive, but couldn’t find any. I asked a janitor where I can find someone to talk to and she directed me to a white monolith with a black screen near the exit. Customer requests would only be entertained via a video conversation. I looked for a button or a keypad to enter my request into or to request a conversation, but I was instructed to wave at the screen. When I waved at the blank screen, a woman appeared, clearly in a cubicle elsewhere, and I told her what I needed. She told me where to find someone who represented the airline I had used. Several conversations and half an hour later, my bag was found and returned to me.
I remembered to turn my phone on and found a text from my supervisor waiting. He asked me to call and inform him when I land. I ordered some curd rice for myself from a “south Indian” eatery outside the airport because I had had a bad stomach that week. I called him once I had my food and as I was looking for a place to sit. After the brief exchange of informing him that I had reached safely (in which I omitted the fact that I had nearly lost my bag and all my money), he made small talk by asking me where I had found a place to stay. All my life, I have found myself not very expressive around male figures of authority. In the same spirit, I doubt I was able to sufficiently communicate to him how confused that question made me. I had had conversations with him discussing the assignment in which I told him that I could only come if I had accommodation on campus, and other conversations where I had thought that the implied subtext was that I had been given a place to stay on campus. Most of all, it confused me because my employment contract had carried the phrase “Housed under: SAS” near the top, which I had inferred literally, but apparently, that was actually not so.
I looked very good that day. I was wearing a printed bush shirt, my mint-colored sweater, and a tasteful light blue coat with soft pink cheques. I had had a haircut about a month prior, which meant that my hair was looking its best. this is evidenced by some pictures I took with friends that I was meeting after exactly a year, later that month. My head sank further and further into my chest as I realized that I had no place to stay in the city with each subsequent call that Karthik didn’t pick. A horrible weekend of stress (and requests made to men with authority, with tears held back and a quivering voice) later, I was offered a place to stay on campus.
In the first week, however, I stayed with Karthik and we appeared for our admission interviews with Heidelberg University together at his place. We both did well. We both received our admissions from the Free University of Berlin the same week, at the same time. We celebrated with several flavors of breezers. A few weeks later he received his admission letter from Heidelberg University too, and though mine had been dispatched, it never arrived. He was working as an RA with a few months to go on the job, so he knew from the start that he would be deferring admission to the next semester. I had no such plans. I had intended to join right away. I wasn’t able to, however, because my letter simply didn’t arrive. I spent an hour every day for weeks, emailing all the relevant offices asking them to grant me an electronic admission letter, or to extend my period of enrolment, to allow me to attend classes. I got no responses. On the night of April 10th, two days before classes started, I emailed all the deans and vice-deans. I awoke to an email granting me an interim student id, and telling me how to pick courses.
On the 12th of April 2021, I joined the online classes at Heidelberg University. I had picked courses according to the M.Sc. Students’ handbook to follow the “Particle Physics” stream. In the first lecture for a course titled “Standard Model in Particle Physics”, the lecturer started with an overview of the course and informed us of the prerequisite courses needed to understand the course. Both of these were only conducted in the winter semester. When I took another look at the suggested course plan for following the Particle Physics specialization, I realized upon finding the course descriptions on the university website, that I would have had to do the advanced courses before the prerequisites. I emailed the lecturers of each of my courses about this, and with varying degrees of support and empathy, they told me that it was going to be “impossible” for me to follow their courses. I spent that week waking up early and reading the prerequisite courses’ material and then the rest of the day cluelessly, furiously taking notes through lectures that made no sense to me. The lectures ended at about 7 in the evening.
I spent that week not being able to breathe. I sobbed every night not out of loss or anxiety, but just because the tightness in my chest was overwhelming me. Finally, I emailed the same vice-dean that had granted me an interim account and asked her to defer my admission to the next semester. She told me that I would have to reapply with my admission letter. I requested again for my admission letter, and this time, a prompt electronic scan was sent to me.
These things were happening in the background of the terrible second wave. I no longer remember how I was processing thoughts and feelings. There’s an email I had written to a kind advisor I had at that time, describing all of this along with the context of the second wave. I remember writing it through tears, asking for advice. I imagine reading that email will help me understand how I was thinking at that time, But I don’t want to.
With a shattered spirit I told my parents that I can’t carry on and that I need to drop out. This was the second time I was telling them this since graduation. The first, Amity Univeristymade me drop out because of how high my hopes had been and how disappointing being in an online lecture with teachers advertising their tuition classes, and three-hour-long online lab sessions with 2-D lab simulations were. Since Amity, I had appeared for the DU entrance, the JNU entrance, and the IIT entrance tests. I never checked the results for the former two tests because the sessions wouldn’t start until December, and would have to condense 10 months of teaching into 6. I did well in the IIT test but functionally forgot about it. I am deeply grateful to it for keeping me occupied for several months and giving me some strength with its result, after a year of disappointments. Of course, most of it was shattered again but there’s still something to that confidence that will take time to erode.
By the end of May, both Karthik and I were applying to the same colleges again. Exactly one year earlier I had finished applying to a Bunch of universities abroad, all of whom rejected my application. During this current cycle, nearly every university I applied to offered me admission.
Karthik posted his second application to Heidelberg about two weeks before me. Both our applications were ready, but for some reason, I thought that the application period begins in June, which clearly wasn’t true. Karthik received his admission notification as well as admission letter soon after, it took more than a month, several emails and a renewed fear of postal issues for me to get my admission notification. I never received my letter in the post. I was provided with an electronic copy. My entire extended family was elated the day the electronic copy was issued. We ordered pizza, and my dad jovially invited me to sit with him in the living room and start all the processes that we needed to complete to apply for a visa.
On the 19th of July, I started attempting to book an appointment at VFS New Delhi. The system for booking appointments is an unprofessional ridiculous mess. Appointment slots are “released” at indeterminate times on indeterminate days. These slots are very few in number and become unavailable within a minute of being released. It can be reliably believed that people working at VFS trade insider information and server access to “Agents”, who are able to buy slots before anyone else, perhaps before they even go online. There is no assurance that someone who needs an appointment, will get one ever.
I joined a WhatsApp group of Masters students trying to get appointments at VFS New Delhi to submit their Visa Applications to Germany. It hasn’t helped in any way but to keep me abreast with whispers in the corridors. Sometimes people let each other know whenever new appointments are “released”, but this has only publically led to some 3 people out of over 180 being able to book themselves an appointment.
This group of people hated agents. There was even a parallel spin-off group called “No To Agents” which a friend I made added me to. The group failed; no one uses it. I made this friend on a day when slots were “released” about a dozen times. One of the many things that prevented people from booking appointments for themselves despite there being so many appointments was being shown a “This slot has already been booked, please select a different time and date” message for every slot one picked. Another was an arbitrarily delivered “problem”: an error message that locked you out of your account for making “too many attempts”, even though none of the attempts had been successful. I encountered both several times, and it kept me from apparently being able to book myself appointments in August. I asked the WhatsApp group how people were dealing with the problem. My friend replied to my message in private and told me not to tell that method to anyone. I won’t.
On the same day, someone with ‘Vikram’ as their WhatsApp name declared that he was able to book two appointments . There might have been more. That was suspect in itself, but over time he always seemed to be sitting on top of many appointments, always offering them to people on the group and in private chats. Some people reported that he had offered to book one for them in exchange for some money. On one of these days someone else on the group started asking passive but probing questions to vikram. I had always been suspicious and envious of him, so I asked my friend if he agreed. It turned out that vikram had personally offered my friend a slot in exchange for money. I told my friend to ask him vikram about that publically. My friend instead texted on the group “Don’t believe this guy he is a fraud. he was telling me he has a python code for booking slots”. This brought me joy in an otherwise desperate week. There was a lot of chaos on the group that day. The coonversation ended when two people who had always been vocal on the group shared vikram’s linkedin profile. He was a student. Or at least some vikram is. My friend texted my privately saying that everyone who vouched for vikram is a fraud too. I so agree.
For a while, the ‘Visa At Your Doorstep’ service was considered by students to be a way out. This was exclusively for the reason that registering for VAYD put you on a waiting list. You had to fill out a form, and VFS would then contact people based on their place in the list. Then, after the payment of an unreasonable 20,000 rupees, your appointment was confirmed. Some applicants got together with other students in their network and booked themselves group VAYD appointments. Others found themselves being offered slots on dates later than their arrival in Germany. I was offered a slot less than a week before the last day of enrolment. I did not pay for it.
I had moved my bedtime to after 4 a.m. because of a prevalent rumor that appointment slots are released at midnight in Germany: 3:30 a.m. in India. I stopped speaking to friends because I was always completely mentally exhausted. I stopped doing exercise, I stopped learning german, and stopped crocheting the sweater I was making for myself. The worst came when my father suggested that I should probably email the IIT that offered me admission and ask them to let me enroll even though I had ignored their offer and deadline about a month earlier. I realized that after all the winding dance of the year that had passed, I was still going to end up in a college I didn’t care for, with a course I don’t like.
I have begun to appreciate the value of routine and ritual. A month of dehumanizing circumstances, calls that would automatically cut off after waiting on them for 90 minutes, emails returned with an unhelpful automatic reply 3 weeks after they were sent, skyrocketing prices for dubious services, and nothing, nothing to show for all the collective effort and subsequent mental suffering of an entire family puts you in a place where rituals seem like a pleasant relief. Our rituals were to call everyone we know who might have anything to tell us, to remind them to inform us of any leads. Soon, over Raksha Bandhan, a lot more of my family learned of our predicament and tried to get involved. An aunt referred us to an astrologer who told me that Venus was unfavorable for me, and for a modest price, he can fix it via two zoom calls. All I had to do was put aside arithmetically increasing amounts of grains and jaggery for birds and animals every day for 21 days, and for another 21 I would have to put aside an arithmetically decreasing amounts of grains and jaggery. I accepted this assignment with cynicism and disdain. Now I find it relieving. When nothing yields in these binary attempts, it’s good to feel like I’m working towards something. And of what use is the truth? My belief in the grains hasn’t affected my obsessive checking of the VFS website for appointments. If none of it is going to work until randomly one day it does, and if I have no agency in this operation beyond mechanical unproductive routine, of what use is to be aware of the reality? I’d much rather lie to myself about these rituals that I’m doing and about the outcome of this whole affair than live with the dehumanizing and disaffecting truth.
When the IIT result had come, when Heidelberg sent me my admission letter, everytime good things happened, I felt nothing. Out of habit, I had spent weeks anticipating terrible results, and I constructed emotional fortifications to prevent a breakdown, but they were never good enough to help me during bad news. Instead good outcomes and warm greetings bounced off of me. I shuddered at the thought of having to tell people about all the good things because I knew that I will not be able to appreciate or even match their enthusiasm, excitement and optimism. I don’t think I’ve ever had the maturity in my life to be as single mindedly dedicated to anything as I was to preparing for IIT JAM. I was in Bangalore when the results were declared and I distinctly remember being sorely disappointed in what was a good score. I sent a screenshot to my parents and told no one else. They called me immediately, and I had expected that I would have to explain myself, but my parents were ecstatic. They had seen me seriously dedicated perhaps for the first time and I could hear them ordering sweets in the background of the call, having seen the result. I felt encouraged to text my friends my result. Their reactions were jarring to my mental state too, and I decided to draw the curtains of my room shut, lock the door, put on a “celebration playlist” on spotify and dance with abandon. At the end of an hour I was sobbing on the floor, music still playing. Then I went for lunch.
I was explaining Tenet to my father and my eldest cousin when everyone was over for RakshaBandhan. I had recently understood how heavily it (Tenet) leaned on themes of seemingly having no agency in events that you act in, of having to play your part regardless of how redundant or ineffectual it seems. Similar themes are reflected in Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’; a story about an epidemic, but actually about the spread fascism in 20th century Europe. One of the most compelling and deeply affecting YouTube videos I have seen in the past year is Carlos Maza’s ‘How to be Hopeless’. It talks about ‘The Plague’ and the fight against the Right and how to play your part, knowing that it’s not a winning battle. When I told my dad about Tenet he chimed in with a classic “That’s what our scriptures say”. He was being good-natured-ly humorous about it so I don’t mind.