It's now a breeze & can be done from the comfort of your home. If I'm not mistaken, the railways introduced it much before the airlines & the travel portals did. And now the icing on the cake is their new application which can be downloaded onto your GPRS phone. You can do your rail bookings from your cellphone, from wherever you may be. Way to go!
On the other hand, we still have a few vestiges of the long-queue-torture in the durbar of our maai-baap sarkar at our passport offices. A recent experience at the Worli passport office for applying for an additional passport booklet was a nightmare. Queues typically begin at 5 a.m. outside the office, while the office itself operates between 10:30 a.m.& 2:30 p.m. The verification is endless & the so called online registration is only for cutting down the department's data entry work, not for the applicant's benefit. For a passport applicant the whole system sucks & there is no way of avoiding your personal presence, even if you have an agent to "speed" things up. And despite the so-called verification, I am sure that the criminals & terrorists must be having their own ways of obtaining a passport. It's only the honest applicants that have to suffer. I wonder when we will seem some change in this system.
Perhaps a short spell away from the muck & potholes will drive away my blues. Fortunately Mumbai still has a few destinations untouched by the screeching, gluttony, "vegetarian" hordes without any civic sense.