Marriage Registration

haha, not ours, but ours looks as lovely - after all the sweat and tears we put into getting one.

The marriage over, and having come back on solid ground to make preparations for the honeymoon and Shikha's departure, it was imperative that we get our marriage registered. Any visas after you’re married, will be issued only on production of a marriage certificate – ie, if you state that you’re married – which you will, of course. So this is a word of advice to any married person – DO get your marriage registered (if you have’nt already) with the court lest your visa etc be held up at the last moment! The process wont appear as stressful as it really was, since I've ommitted some of the things we had to do to get the marriage registered:)

It was a very filmy registration of our marriage in Bombay – we were running all around the country and came to Bombay for a teeny interval. Three people were supposed to witness the registration and they’re supposed to have all their identity proof documents with them.

So we quickly called 3 people close to us, and, more importantly, close to the office of the Registrar of marriages..:-D I cannot describe the hurry we were in – we reached Bombay on a Friday afternoon, called up friends and asked them to reach the courts. I was standing outside, waiting to shepherd each friend inside the court. (For all the ppl who want to register their marriage, the registrar of marriages is next to the Asiatic Library).

With friends coming in one after one and me ushering them in and rushing out to get photocopies or getting into frantic confabulations with the clerks to speed things up, it almost felt as if we were eloping. The offices close for the weekend at 445pm and everyone was thankfully in by 430pm. After much cajoling and requesting we got into the office before closing, got all the documents verified and got the stamp of approval! The registrar of marriages does pretty much of a tough and good job when it comes to verification of identities from the documents provided.

The certificate of marriage comes through pretty quickly if you know the right people or takes the usual time of about 8 -10 days if you don’t know anyone there.

Of course, the embassies turn up their noses at a plain-Jane marriage certificate too – so they want the Home ministry to legalise it. Thankfully South Bombay has everything within 10 minutes of each other. So you rush to the High court, get a notary to notarise the document (the notaries sit outside the court – our notary conducted his business from a Maruti 800 car and charged about 150 bucks for notarizing the document – the significance of notarizing is lost on me – it just looks like gainful employment creation). Then you THINK that the home ministry is housed in the Mantralaya and stand for an hour in the queue to get in. You spend another hour inside the labyrinthine Mantralaya, searching for the Home Ministry and the department that legalizes certificates. And you discover that the concerned department is not in Mantralaya, but the building across the road!! And the department has a fixed closing time! Yikes! So you run across to the building across the road, go up the 9th floor, stand in line for what seems like an hour and get a lady to sign on the red notarized mark on the marriage certificate. And voila! You are officially declared married!!

We walked out with our heads held high and carefully holding on to the precious marriage certificate. The entire process was extremely rushed for us since we had to apply for Swiss visas and fly out within the next 3 days. On the whole, we found the bureaucratic processes slow but the individual actors within the bureaucracy quite reasonable, quick to respond and decently helpful. The Mantralaya is a great building from the inside and am looking for some other excuse to go inside and explore. The Swiss embassy employs all Indians for the front end who’re quite pig-headed and think they’re smarter than the rest of us ordinary folks on the other side of the mirror. Unfortunately or fortunately, that isn’t the case. And of course, the guard outside the embassy asks for Baksheesh in true Indian chowkidaar style, after you’ve gotten your visa.

Good fun on the whole, when I look back at it, but there were many moments when we were on the verge of canceling our Swiss tickets because we never thought we’d be able to do it all in 3 days! And yeah - theres more to come - I still shudder when I retrace all the things we did to prepare for the departure!!