So, after the eye opening experience with “Sir ji”, we booked our appointment with the consultant recommended by our friends. The upcoming weekend we headed to their office. We were asked to start with our prelim assessment for eligibility of the visa which was conducted by consultant itself. Though I was quite confident of our eligibility, we still had to go through the process. The process took a few days and as expected the assessment was positive. We were asked to come back to the consultant’s office to initiate the application process and start collecting the documents required as per “the List” and start preparing for the English exam. English exam was a very important part of the process for us to be successful in getting the visa.
We were confident or rather I should say "I" was the one confident of our completing the application easily.. Inching little towards over confidence infact… though my partner as always dropped her pearls of wisdom…
“Don’t jump to conclusions so early in the process my love, over confidence is not good!!”.
Well, as it would turn out she would be proved right once again.. I still thought to myself that the visa process should not take long as most of the documents would be available with me (after all what all can they ask for???) and obviously English was my strength (Over confidence!!!!!!!!!).
So we booked an appointment for next available evening post our respective office timings and reached consultant’s office with a smile on our faces. As we sat inside a consulting chamber with one of the Australian visa expert, we were once again told about the various visa’s we could apply for and the point structure required to be met for the same. We were also given the idea of the expected expenditure for the whole visa process for different categories of visas as well as the fee structure of the consultant. Since we had already met the eligibility criteria, we had made up our minds that we would be applying for a Permanent Resident Visa for Australia, so it didn’t take long for us to give the consultant a go ahead for the same. We knew the next step too, as I mentioned before, i.e. we would be provided with “the List” to start collecting documents required to be submitted with the application. But what ensued was something we had not envisaged (or as my partner looked at me and said with her eye…. “See, I told you not to be over confident”).
“The List”, as they called it, was not just a list of a few documents; it was the list of all the documents I could think of, from my schooling till today!!!!! It was a 3 page long list of my history!!!!!!!!!
As we read the list, our smiles turned into a frown. Australian government wanted to know each and every detail of my education and professional life to 'the nth' detail (Since I was supposed to be the primary applicant) and a lot of details for my partner too. The consultant could see the smiles on our face vanish and said to us…
“Saaar (she was a south Indian, that’s why the elongated sir), please don’t worry….. We will help you collect these documents… we have helped thousands of clients till now!! Our friendly representative will be at your beck and call to support you anytime of the day or night!!
Somehow her assurances were not comforting us as I was able to foresee the challenges we would face to collect few missing school and university related documents, which we had never thought would be important. Specially for me, after I had completed my Chartered Accountant’s qualification. It was like my earlier educational degrees were getting a chance to get back at me after I had ignored them post becoming a CA. There were a lot of my professional experience related documents too (like pay slips from my job 5-7 years back, experience letters from my ex managers etc.) which I had to provide which would also be hard to get now.
We had not come out of the shock of the amount of documents to be collected when our friendly expert told us about another formality to be completed before they started the process. We were requested to deposit the whole of the consultant’s fee in advance (it was a hefty fee) before they would start processing the application. The frown had now turned into tensed looks. We were not prepared for that!!!!!! My punjabi mind started to go into hyper activity now….
“What if I didn’t like their service and had to withdraw from them in between???”
“What if the company went bankrupt in between the visa process????”
“What if I had to arm twist them for some more benefits in future which I could do by withholding the fee but would not be able to do that now.....”
My over confidence on my capability to handle it “my way” and with relative ease had by now been shattered (Also, remember the lesson from earlier post.. “Man proposes, god disposes”.. That also started to dance once again in front of me).
"My" over confidence had taken the expected hit. My partner and I had to get into a huddle to take a call.
After a lot of deliberations and tensed discussions (mostly from my side, my partner is a much calmer person than I am… I am sure this confession will make her grin ear to ear if she reads it!!), we had to give in to the proposal. This was the only good alternative we had at that time to proceed with the application with a credible and proven consultant, which was very important. In my partner’s divine words…
“Look at the long term gain, not short term pain”
So we gave the representative our consent to proceed and she handed us “the List” as well as requested us to transfer the fee to their account within next 2 days to get them to prepare the agreement etc for the process to kick off.
We transferred the entire fee the next day (read hanuman chalisa – a sacred Indian text – atleast 5 times before I hit the submit button on the bank’s website). I didn’t like losing control on the situation but then that’s how it was meant to be.
We were provided a contact of a lady in their Hyderabad office (a city in south of India) who would be our primary contact during the documentation process and that she would be contacting us to welcome us to their company and take it from there.
The visa process was itself a long one involving an assessment of my education and experience, with requirement for elaborate documents as per “the List” to be scanned and submitted to the consultant for scrutiny and then for onward submission to the visa office in Australia. It also required me to give an English test as mentioned earlier, with passing marks above a minimum requirement prescribed, for the process to proceed. I choose the PTE (Pearson’s Test of English) option as it was an online test and did not require me to give the test in my handwriting as in case of the prevalent option of IELTS.
PS: God knows, if I would have to give that test in my handwriting, I would have never cleared it!! The writing section would have failed just because the poor examiner would have to guess the answers from my handwriting…. Which I am sure he would not be very interested in, given the number of people giving those tests!!!
And so we set off on a long journey of collecting the humongous amount of documents from “the list”. It was a painfully long process as it meant having me and partner to dig into the skeletons in our closet (like those old school mark sheets of mine I probably didn’t want to see now or for my partner to get her graduation degree from her college in Shimla, Himachal which she had conveniently forgotten about till now).
There were a few documents that were either missing (like my 10th class mark sheet which was nowhere to be found) or my graduation marks transcript which I had to apply to my university for getting a copy of the same at a cost or the transcript of my subjects studied in graduation and CA. There was also some experience certificates from my earlier organizations which I had to submit. Plus a Police Clearance Certificates (to certify our character as a responsible and law abiding citizen) to be issued from the city where we had our passport issued from.
All this process involved a lot of travel to and fro to my base city from Pune where I was currently working. And to admit truly, it was neither the travel nor the hassle of getting work done from my school and college authorities which was that difficult (though they were not a cake walk too, lot many babu’s I had to bribe to get the age old documents and certificates out of their trunks), it was the taunts that I had to hear from my mother every time I came to my home town for submitting applications or collecting some documents….
“Look at you… you have all the time to come home to get your visa work done, but if I ask you to come and visit me … all your office hell breaks loose!!!
Well, I can’t blame her too. I had to squeeze out time from my tight office schedule to get these documents from “the list” completed and obviously it was eating up into my allocated holidays which I usually spent with her. Well, that’s a sacrifice I had to make to meet the huge amount of requirement of the visa process and fulfilling my “Aussie dream”.
It took my partner and I quite a while to collect the documents from various parts of the country (I had to get documents from as far as Rajasthan, Mumbai and Himachal), scan and send over the documents to the consultant and ended up spending a lot of money in the process over and above the other known costs.
But, my woes had not ended there and the “cursed” English exam did not spare any trouble for me. It had its own fair share of dramas as you would come to know in my upcoming post.
So read on…………..