Reading about the rush for and racket in American visas reminded me of being introduced to a Soviet diplomat at a Calcutta party. "What do you look after?" I asked. "Mine is the most unpopular job," he replied a trace smugly. "I am visa officer and have to refuse people!"
It was only wishful thinking. Few Indians, even in the high noon of Indo-Soviet peace and friendship, chose to go to the Soviet Union without a particular reason. That meant unless someone else - one of the two governments usually - was paying.
Jawaharlal Nehru and his sisters in Moscow in the thirties must have been the first and last Indians to dip into their own pockets. They made up for it with many trips at the taxpayer's expense after Independence.
But would Indian students ever have gone to the Patrice Lumumba University without a scholarship? I doubt if the Soviet foreign office had to recall and punish a visa officer for taking bribes as the Singapore government did recently with a functionary in Chennai.
Indira Gandhi may have been slightly left of self-interest (in Peter Hazelhurst's memorable words in the Times, London) but the great Indian public has always been firmly and well to the right of self-interest.
So, I can understand why, according to Peter G Kaestner of the US embassy in New Delhi, this year's 2,400 rejected visa applications involve about Rs 9.8 million, which he converts to $24,000. This is money of which starry-eyed aspirant emigrants have been swindled. America, warts and all, is the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, and people will pay for their dreams.
When I was researching my book on India-US relations, I came across William B Saxbe, American ambassador to India in the seventies, saying, "When I call on Cabinet ministers, the President or governors, they all love to talk about their sons, sons-in-law and daughters in the US and how well they're doing and how well they like things. The next day I read in the papers the very same people are denouncing the United States as a totally different kind of country."
Two lessons can be read into Saxbe's wry comment. First, status and ideology are no bars to a hankering that unites a Marxist revolutionary and a Hindutva zealot. A Marxist mayor of Calcutta wanted his city twinned with San Francisco (it was already twinned with Odessa) so that he could visit his son there at municipal expense. A BJP legislator from Gujarat is now accused of trafficking in migrants.
The second message is the hypocrisy of Indian life, especially of Indian politicians. There's an element of playacting in everyone but we, more than any other people, run down what we crave for most, be it wealth, status or the green card.
At the Visa on Arrival counter in Bangkok's new Suvarnabhumi airport the other day, I queued next to a couple of Hindi-speaking rustics. We got talking and they told me of the jobs, albeit humble, they expected to secure.
They demonstrated that unlike the Chinese who go anywhere there is land and water, Indians go anywhere. Period. Anywhere is better than the India they know.
I respected the vision and admired the enterprise of those two dehatis at Bangkok. It was zeal such as theirs that built up the US as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
But I have neither respect nor admiration for the Delhi academic who denounces US imperialism in Iraq while grabbing at any chance to join a delegation to any Mid-West hick town. Or the Calcutta culture-wallah who does odd jobs in the US while pouring scorn on American philistines.
Time was when Indian leaders used to say that exporting manpower was not their policy. More recently, we were told that outsourcing, which earns billions of dollars, would put an end to migration. Nothing of the kind. If one layer of society is satiated, there's always another waiting behind it for similar opportunities.
And so it goes on until you reach the bottom where villagers sell land and jewellery to pay for a flight to Dubai or Kuala Lumpur. They are the victims of passport and visa racketeers. At one time, they came mainly from Punjab's Doaba region; now, human smuggling is an organised crime also in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.
No wonder the number of rejected applications in New Delhi alone has gone up by 60 per cent this year. The US embassy reportedly expects 600,000 applications this year against 460,000 processed in 2005-2006.
They used to joke before the end of the Cold War that when a Pole who had applied for a passport was asked why he wanted to travel, he replied he wanted to go the US for Ronald Reagan's funeral. "But Reagan is not dead!" the passport officer exclaimed. "I know" said the Pole, "but I want to wait there for his funeral."
Remove all passport and visa restrictions, and a billion Indians will stampede after that Pole. And I thought we were all set to be the world's next superpower with a booming economy.