Around April this year, I decided to do something about me not having traveled out for a while and the traveler inside couldn't resist the temptation to head south of the border of the USA towards tropical weather, beautiful beaches and great parties ! The only problem was that my H1B Visa had expired a few months back and leaving the USA would mean that I have to get a Visa to get back into the country. I got the usual gyaan about how I should be going to India to get my Visa stamped to be safer (not only by people around me, but that's what is recommended by the US consulates as well). Well, not being able to travel out made me feel like I'm a prisoner in the country and having to travel to the other side of the world and paying for the exorbitant flight prices in July was pure inconvenience. My travel destination was decided as Puerto Vallarta and I started finding out more information about this whole process. Blogs such as this one was really useful in get...
Renewing Indian Passport in San Francisco and splitting the name in the passport. Here's the breakdown of the process I went through to get my Indian Passport renewed and have my name split in the passport. I wanted to get my name split because my expiring passport had an empty Last-Name field and my full name appeared in the Given-Name field. This led to my US Visa having my first-name as FNU [First Name Unknown] and my last-name as my complete name. First of all, the processing of Indian passport renewal applications has been outsourced to a separate company called BLS International and does not happen at the Indian consulate like earlier. When did I apply for renewal of my passport ? As per the instructions on the website and as of writing of this post, one can renew their passports when there is less than 1 year left for the expiry of the passport. That is, if your passport expires in April 2016, you can apply for renewal on or after April 2015. ...