🚗 Confession: I paid an extra 500 at the RTO office and I still feel weird about it

I had never paid a bribe in my life until last Thursday. My licence renewal had been stuck for five weeks at the Tolichowki RTO office. Two visits, two different clerks, and both said the file was pending verification without ever telling me what needed verifying. I took leave from work for the second visit and lost the whole day standing in one queue and then another, and the second clerk did not even look up from his phone while I explained the whole thing again from the beginning. On the third visit a man outside the gate, no uniform and no ID card, asked if I wanted it done today. He said 500 rupees and I would be out by lunch. I stood there for maybe a minute doing the maths on another lost day, which comes to about 1,800 rupees of salary. So I paid. The file moved in twenty minutes. A clerk who had been so busy on my last visit suddenly found the time to stamp three pages, and my new card arrived by post four days later, which I did not expect at all. I had already pictured myself back at that counter in November, holding the same photocopies and the same receipt, with a fresh excuse waiting for me. Nobody looked at me differently afterwards. Nobody looked at me at all, and that is the part that has stayed with me, how ordinary the whole thing felt for everyone involved. I keep telling myself it was an agent's fee and not a bribe, and it is not working very well. My father renewed the same licence ten years ago and swears he never paid anything, but he also went in at seven in the morning and waited until two in the afternoon. Anyway, the card is in my wallet now and I look at it every time I open it.

I am home from Riyadh for a month and did my renewal last week, so this hit close. Half the queue seemed to know somebody at the counter. I refused, and it took three visits and most of a week of my leave. Not sure I would do it again. The clerk suddenly finding time to stamp three pages made me laugh, I watched the same thing happen.

Went at 8 am on a Tuesday for mine last March, took a token, and was finished in under two hours with no middleman. Might be my luck, or maybe the Kondapur office is quieter than Tolichowki. Your father's early morning advice is not wrong. I also carried two extra photocopies of everything, and that seemed to skip the whole pending verification routine for me.

I did the same at the Malakpet office two years ago, 700 in my case, and walked out feeling like I had lost a small argument with myself. Try not to be too hard on yourself. Those five weeks would have turned into eight. What bothered me more was that the man at the gate knew exactly which clerk to walk my file to, like it was a routine.