Even though some stories are ordinary, they deserve to be told precisely because a lot of us take ordinariness and normalcy and the forces behind it so much for granted.
My tale is of the time a month ago when I had to renew my passport. After completing the formalities in my local PSK relatively smoothly, I was informed that my passport would be granted pending physical police verification of my current address of residence. A little more than a week later - a Saturday evening, I received a call from a policeman asking me to report to the local police thane with all my documents for verification next morning between 9.30 am to 12.pm. The next Sunday morning, I reported sharp at 9.30 am with the agenda of finishing off with the task and keeping the rest of my day lazy and free. As one college student and I were one of the first ones to arrive, we were ushered into a small cabin where a middle age policeman asked us to fill some forms and one by one checked all our original documents (which for some surprising reason included all the documents since the inception of my existence from birth certificate to mark sheets to all government ids etc) . After having an argument with him regarding my rent agreement document resulting in him lecturing me about how I might get an adverse police report, he, after some fuss, accepted the photocopy of my documents. Finally he mentioned that he would be visiting our residences the next day and asked us to ensure that we would be present. I requested if he could give me some prior intimation before he came as the next day was a working day. He agreed to give a call half an hour prior to coming. As I walked out of his cabin, I noticed the serpentine queue of people that had built up in the 20 odd minutes that we had been in his office.
The next day, it was pouring very heavily in my area the entire day. By 6 pm when I had not received a call from the policeman, I assumed that he would not be coming that day, However at 6.30 pm , I received a call from him saying that he would be coming in half an hour. Now considering I had burnt my fingers with a fiasco of an attempt at renewal of passport exactly a year ago because of sudden relocation of city, I was determined to pull out all stops to ensure I renewed my passport successfully this time around, I had researched A to Z about the passport renewal process. If you happen to chance upon people's experiences online particularly with the police verification process, it would scare you enough to believe that it is virtually impossible to get a bribe free passport in India. I literally was rehearsing strategies of negotiation in my mind on how to bring down the potential bribe amount which I concluded as inevitable especially as a non local of the city who couldn't speak the local language. I even kept ready snacks and fruit juice for the guy.
He promptly reached my place within half an hour despite the heavy rain. After he was seated , I offered something to eat or drink which he declined politely but with a bite of impatience saying that he had already had something in the other houses he had visited. He was carrying a tab with him in which I had noticed all the documents I had submitted yesterday had been meticulously uploaded. As he was going on swiping on his tab, to complete the procedure, he was getting interrupted constantly by his ringing mobile phone. In the probably 10 minutes that he was in my house, he received not less than 7 calls. From what I could gather, the content of a few of the calls went like this:
Call 1: A man pressuring him to issue a PCC (Police Clearance Certificate) right now as he was scheduled to leave the country the next day morning!
Call 2: A man literally pleading with him about his adverse police report because he had filled in some wrong details in his application and what he could do about it as he had already initiate visa proceedings for some foreign country
Call 3: A colleague or superior presumably who was asking him about his whereabouts. When he answered he had been visiting houses for passport verification the entire afternoon, the colleague asked him to immediately come to the police station as there was a lady (who sounded very influential) who was waiting for him at the station for some urgent clearance.
Each call that he was getting reflected some kind of crisis and urgency to the point that even as a mere on looker, I was beginning to get stressed out!
But I have to say that he did not show any signs of pressure, strain and losing his s**t. In fact, he was cool as a cucumber very patiently and calmly explaining about procedures and documents needed.
Towards the end, I blurted out stupidly in Hindi - 'Sir, you always get these many calls?'. He replied a bit ruefully that generally people take things very easy and always apply for things like PCC/passports etc last moment which results in a lot of unnecessary panic.
He meanwhile completed my verification process in his tab and explained that he had sent a clear report along with all my documents to the Commissioner of Police's office which would review my documents one last time and would send a final go ahead (if everything was ok) to the Passport office to print my passport. He further elaborated that very single day, a person at the Commissioner of Police receives minimum 500 applications for review. (Imagine a hapless soul going through such an avalanche of documents per day)
He then promptly left on his bike. And no, he did not take a single rupee from me as bribe or anything.
Given what I witnessed the last 2 days, I couldn't help thinking that day whether he ever got an off and even if he did, whether he could ever escape the constant bombardment of calls from frantic citizens who had urgent and genuine needs. From what I had seen, he did not even have an assistant.
I guess the whole point of narrating this incident is that most of the times, we are exposed to mostly vilification and sometimes glorification of the police force for things that they do out of the ordinary. But there is the low profile, almost invisible chunk of the police force that work really really hard behind the scenes under severely overworked, high pressure from all kinds of quarters and (what I am sure is not very off mark to assume) very underpaid conditions so as to ensure as much normalcy possible in the functioning of day to day affairs of areas under their jurisdiction. So the next time I grumble about working on alternate Saturdays and some rare Sundays or when I start getting flustered on the days when there are too many calls at work, I'll remind myself of the feeling of respect I felt for this policeman with the way he handled his duties in a job where there is infinitely much more at stake
