After this, the HR exec comes in, hands me a google t-shirt, tells me there is a taxi waiting to take me to my hotel. I go out, find the taxi, ask him if he could take me to the airport instead, he says he can't as he is only allowed to take me to the hotel. I tell him to not bother, flag down an auto, rush to the airport, negotiate with the airline to let me fly the 8:00pm instead of the 10:00AM the next day, pay the are difference, and just return home.
I am thinking finally that the ordeal is over, but theres a twist. I summarize the whole thing for my friend @ Google MV, who says he will try and find out what happened, but turns out theres not much in file in their referral system.
Two weeks after this, the same HR lady send me a mail, yet again no preamble, nothing. "We want you to come in for a second day, I am booking tickets" and then the exact same content from her first email - same day return, 4:30AM flights etc, follow. I reply to her, telling her that I'd prefer to make my own bookings and inquiring if google would reimburse me for them (and any policy about such reimbursements, limits, etc). She doesn't reply. Ten days later, when she has still not responded, I request my friend @ Mountain VIew to see if he can find me another contact (and berating myself that I did not do this a lot earlier). He says he doesn't have another contact for me, but that he has conveyed my concerns to "some people". A day after his email telling me this, I get an email from the same HR person - this time responding to my last email about booking my own flight tickets, tersely telling me - "that email was for someone else. sorry. thanks for applying to google".
/end_rant.
What I have come to accept is, dealing with engineers is fine (as long as language doesn't become an issue), but others, in government, or even in most private organizations in India, are just not up to doing their jobs 99% of the time. Its not merely an issue of corruption, its just the culture does not provide for shaming people who are bad at their jobs, firing incompetents is considered evil, and its not even a solution as incompetence is everywhere. One recent report suggested that a full 80% of Indian graduates with a 4-year degree were so bad they were not employable at all in their chosen fields - not even with additional training.