Dear all, A bit longish mail, sorry about that.
After lot of legwork, finally got a visa but not of the dates that I wanted. As can be seen from my arrival and departure dates, I'll be in Cape Town for almost 17 days but the visa I got is only of 10 days. For last couple of days, I have been trying to get across to the South African Consulate but without any success. The number - + 91 22 2351 3725 exists but nobody attends it. At the most I'm able to get to the switchboard but it doesn't get connected to the visa personnel inside the consulate. The time for enquiry is only one hour from 1400 to 1500 hrs IST where nobody picks up the phone, at least that's my observation after trying for 2 days. There is no e-mail address for the South African Consulate in Mumbai, the e-mail address sacgmum...@saconsulate.in is useless/dead. Doing a simple whois on the domain shows it's no longer there (not found). I am non-plussed how to approach the consulate. The South African consulate in Mumbai, India seems to have out-sourced all its work to vfsglobal http://www.vfsglobal.com/southafrica/india/ Now how do I approach the consulate as there doesn't seem to be a way out. I tried connecting the Delhi Consular Office with the same results. Even there the e-mail addresses are either dormant or not working and anyways Mumbai is far nearer than Delhi. One option is that I send a registered post asking for the e-mail address of the Mumbai consular office. Another option is to go to mumbai and try to see if I can somehow force their hand to share their contact details or/and have some sort of appointment where I can show all my documents although what I heard from the third-party (vfs) they are not approachable unless you contact them one way or the other before making the trip. They refused to co-operate/give the e-mail address or any Consular officer's number so I could approach them directly. The whole thing is opaque. I am in a bit of quagmire also on the flight . I have no idea if Qatar Airways (the airlines I'm flying with) will make an exception and just change the file tickets of coming back. Mostly I may have to cancel my tickets and buy new tickets which would be horrendously expensive (also both tickets are non-refundable in nature) to do both the things. Could people suggest a way out ? I did see few cover letters for the same - http://www.careerride.com/view.aspx?Id=11416 Looking for the way forward. -- Regards, Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com EB80 462B 08E1 A0DE A73A 2C2F 9F3D C7A4 E1C4 D2D8 _______________________________________________ Debconf-discuss mailing list Debconf-discuss@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-discuss
