Indian Samurai इंडियन सामुराई

If you are a foreigner holding an employment visa and working in Gurgaon, this message is for you!

How to get your registration in 4 steps (and only one trip).

First of all you need to know that you have to register yourself, within 15 days of arrival. If not you may (or may not) have to pay a fine.

To register yourself, you need to go to Mini-Secretariat near Rajiv Chowk, in Gurgaon. Go there early. It opens a 9:30 and they take papers up till 1 PM but you may want to be there at 9. But be careful, don’t go just like that!

1. Go on this website and fill up the form: http://indianfrro.gov.in/frro/

Have the following documents ready for upload (when you finish with the form):

• Photo
• Lease agreement (or any address proof)
• Visa
• Passport
• Contract, letter of employment (stating the date of starting and finishing – so you need to add one letter with these dates in case your contract does not have an end)
• Request letter on letter head: Request letter.doc
  
• Undertaking letter on letter head: Undertaking.docx
  

2. Then you will get an appointment and you need to go on that day (or any later day) (yourself) with:

• 2 prints of the form
• 2 sets of all the above mentioned documents
• 4 photographs (as per their specifications)
• PLUS these 2 certificates (of monthly: MONTHLY SALARY CERTIFICATE .pdf and yearly salary breakup: ANNUAL SALARY CERTIFICATE_0.pdf)
  

3. Once you are there, they will tell you to make a payment (I had to pay 1,990 rupees).

Now here is how you make the payment: 

Practically, you go out of the building, ask for an internet café, cross the ward where all the lawyers sit, get to the internet café, make a payment online (insist if he says it is not possible), print a challan and go back to the FRRO office. Alternatively, you can run around like a mad chicken, go to a State Bank of India with your challan, only to realise you don’t have to. Unless you do a cash payment.

4. Once you are back in the FRRO you show your papers to the guy. Then to another guy. Then back to the first guy to get a token number. Then wait. Then give your papers, sign and give to the second guy to sign. And get the hell out of there! (And carry this document whenever you travel abroad).

My job change, effective on March 1^st, led to further upheavals. Like moving to… Gurgaon! And this is not nothing... To tell you, I even almost did not go to the interview when I saw that the job was there. Gurgaon.
Gurgaon is on the outskirts of Delhi. Already living in Delhi is not easy when you come from Mumbai: the freezing cold winter, sweltering summer, power cuts, lack of neighborhood life – others would add pollution and insecurity but I have not experienced any of them personally during my year there.
But the suburbs... Especially for a girl born and brought up in Paris... It’s a bit of a stretch...

But hey, you have to put a little water in your wine. And as my husband was game, we packed our suitcases! A few weeks before the big day, we went on a small expedition looking for a place. During which I discovered that Gurgaon was not a suburb as a Parisian would understand it. It is a city by itself.
It’s a new and ‘young’ town that came out of the ground ten years ago. It has managed to attract multinational corporations, malls and bars that brew their own beer (there are dozens of them).
But hey, it's still paradise either. First of all, there are these towers of flats which are really upscale with their swimming pools, sport grounds etc., but remind me of hives. Also you have to take your car to run any errand. And especially this mushroom sprung in the desert so cuts (water and electricity) are common.

That said, Gurgaon offers friendly enough housing options, for instance villas with private pool in a complex, which ensures safety and continuity of water and electricity supply and offers play areas for children and sport grounds. We have seen worse! Gurgaon thus became much sexier after visiting one of these villas!

A few weeks later we moved in...
And we immediately got into the difficulties of managing house staff. Especially in a society where watchmen-cleaning ladies-cooks-drivers-etc. are organized into a mafia and take advantage of the “isolation” to impose their will.
We are far from Mumbai! First maids. Here one cleans the floor, another one comes to dust, another one to cook. Beyond the cost, it becomes a lot to manage... Especially when you always have had one person to do everything! Fortunately, when you want you can, and we found a way. Beside this whole cleaning lady thing, there was the nanny thing. Being a little prejudiced, I brought my nanny Mumbai! I had tried to find a local one before moving, but whoever I asked only warned me, against nanny agencies, against leaving a baby alone with a nanny. I didn’t hesitate long… (in Mumbai there are a lot of Christian (hence English speaking) ladies who do a great job but this ‘species’ does not exist in Delhi and the best option seems to hire a Nepali girl).
Then the driver. When you ask for a contact, you are again warned: “first, before hiring him, you need to check his police record and register him with the police”, “it’s hard to find someone you trust”. Moreover, as recently as last week a driver burgled the house of his mega-millionaires employers. So, I saved myself the headache for later and I’m driving. And you should know that in Gurgaon, people drive like PIGS. If you think that Indians in general have an archaic driving behaviour, you have not seen anything until you’ve come to Gurgaon. Pigs I tell you.

Then there are all these little joys of moving in: running after the carpenter to barricade the pool, after the air conditioning guy, the plumber to fix the leaking toilets or insulate a wall. Even if you don’t pay them until the job is finished, they just take weeks before coming back to finish the job and get their money! This is madness…

Ah 2015 ... Thank you! Thank you for the discoveries: the joy of motherhood, the sleepless dazed state, the horror of falling hair, the joy of short hair. All this on a background of great travels, in Switzerland, France, Sikkim, Kerala and Corsica (all this with the baby). But of course there was a stain in the painting : I had to experience the inconsistency of the Company (at least mine*) claiming they want more women managers and then let them drown without lifting a finger when the transition back to office of the said women managers is not as smooth as planned after a long break.         

For me, the beginning of the end started in February when, two months after the birth of Baby Samurai, I received a message from my boss who wanted to shorten my maternity leave (I had a six month leave, as per the policy of the company, or so I was told since I was 6 weeks pregnant).           

By the way, if anyone imagines that a maternity leave is anywhere close to a holiday (like me before the baby’s arrival) I am sorry to cut the dream: it is ANYTHING but a holiday. There is of course a kind of workaholic mother who buys a pump at the third month of pregnancy, gives birth with her Blackberry in hand, hires a nanny right out of the hospital and works from the house the first week. But the common mortal has non-functioning neurons (it’s hormonal) for a while. And since a baby, even the coolest one on Earth like mine, eats every 2-3 hour, there is a good chance that any videoconference be interrupted by a feed – in which case the only solution is to mute the mic,  adjust the webcam and pretend to care about what is going on in this meeting on increasing wages, a topic that usually fascinates you (or not) but that is completely beyond you right now.        
And apart from the fact that they feel completely disconnected, there are mothers who want to focus on their baby and just don’t want to switch on a computer. A lot of them are in their thirties, educated, ambitious and hard-working women who become breastfeeding champions who suddenly have only one thing in their mind: survive and feed their baby. Fierce, they do not let go; to set the tone, sometimes they even reach the point of screaming (inside) from pain and cry (silently) while applying cream and plasticky breast protectors on their cracked nipples but nothing will make him miss a feed! In the process they will not hesitate to continue breastfeeding after the six months prescribed by WHO; even after a year, let's be crazy ;) They can also secretly take the baby and the grand-parents to a seminar in France to continue breastfeeding smoothly.

And well, these warrior-mothers, they believe they deserve to be left them alone for a few weeks, if only in the name of all the extraordinary efforts they have made for years (and even up to 8.5 months of pregnancy) to prove that they are as capable and bankable for the company than a man.            
That may be a bit pretentious to say so, in these times of crisis and job insecurity, but there is no way to put it otherwise, they won’t take any shit. They are like that, they have the power – even if sometimes takes a coach for them to realize it.              

So when you are pressurized to reply to mails during your leave (mails? What mails? But it takes you a week to gather the courage to cut your nails so imagine switching on a laptop. Now you understand... that mails... well...), and to get back on top of your game – but it doesn’t work, there is nothing to do, you understand nothing, you can’t even remember whether you have taken a shower in the morning. You can only try not to cry and hope that better days will come… And they do come, when the hormones finally calm down, or just that the storm has passed. But you find it difficult to swallow that bitter pill, even when you regain your self-confidence and manage to reach the objectives. You quit. And they call it a “motherhood crisis”, a crazy move that I will quickly regret.          

And there is very likely some truth in it. Perhaps, in my case, this difficult return from leave was the cherry on the cake, in a context where, to be quite honest, I was very tired. But leaving a company that taught you everything and a boss that taught you everything, developed you and made you feel “talented” is not so easy. Luckily I was helped by my new company which contacted me a few weeks after I got back to office. A couple of days after I burnt my breast pump. I was enjoying a break from the baby (who was sleeping, for quite a long time) and fully absorbed by the preparation of a seminar, I forgot the pump which was being sterilized in the pan. This incident is quite important since the company in question makes... breast pumps!  

* Doing some research, I found out that only 25% of new mothers go back to the office after work. And by the way, India ranks 115 (out of 128 countries) on « Empowering women at work ». So when they get pregnant they get fired or demoted or their salaries get cut. And if not, same things happen when they come back. They are however some companies who really go out of their way to retain or hire women who have been on a long break (they had to look at these pool of talents as they anyways find it difficult to recruit women here):

This is called the “Back to Work” programme though I personally prefer “Back to Office” as being a stay-at-home is really a job, according to me!

Cartoons from: http://www.awesomeinventions.com/doodle-diary-of-new-mom/