I applied for my US visa a few days ago but it didn’t seem as easy as I had thought. Some things were very nice but I did not like a few things at all. First of all I had to deposit the visa fee and the good thing was that US embassy in India had arranged visa fee deposit with HDFC bank in several cities in India so I just went to the local HDFC bank with my passport and deposited my visa fee which was close of Rs. 6700. They asked me to use the receipt after one day as takes them around 24 hours to upload it on their sever. Anyways, it was very nice that I could deposit the fee in Varanasi.

After depositing the fee, I went on the US embassy website to schedule the appointment for my visa interview and the US embassy website directed me to their VFS website. I filled up the DS-160 form which was kind of a trouble because the connection would fail often and I had to start from the beginning. Even the website said that the applicant should save each and every page before submitting it so that means they also knew about this problem. It took me 2 days and at least 6-7 attempts but somehow I was able to fill up the form and submit it online.

After submitting this form I wanted to schedule the appointment for my visa interview and this was the worst part. I tried several days and several times each day but their website would always say that no date available for interview, please try again after 24 hours. After 4 or 5 days, I wrote to the VFS about this problem and it seemed like they did not read my mail carefully. Their mail seemed like a canned message which they send to many people for similar reasons but this mail did not answer my question.

Finally I made a telephone call to VFS and I was really surprised to hear their answer. They said that their website works only around 8 o’clock morning time so I should try to schedule my appointment around 8 o’clock in the morning time. I went online the next day at 8 o’clock and found that the website was working and I booked my visa interview. It was not something really bad but I was not expecting for anything like this from US government services. I explained this problem to one of my sponsors of my trip and he said that I should write to the US embassy in India about this problem as he was sure that US embassy was not aware about such problem but still whenever I think about this problem, I always think about US government services.