At 6.15am on a December morning the streets of central London are cold, dark and offer little for the omnipresent cctv cameras to record. But outside the Indian High Commission 109 people are sleepily waiting for the visa section to open. David Robb and his friend are first in line, huddled in sleeping bags behind a windbreak since 3am, to ensure visas for a planned holiday in Goa. Nearly all his fellow-sufferers in the queue have booked their air tickets and sometimes their entire holiday on the internet, paying with a credit card. Those electronic signals move information almost at the speed of light-billions of times faster than the shuffling, shivering humans in the visa queue. "In this day and age? Bleeding disgusting," is Mr Robb's pithy comment on the Indian visa system.
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