Bank Account and Lockers

We needed to open a bank account and a locker is a must have in India.
We went by word of mouth as well as the market research results and decided to have an account with HDFC bank.
So far, we are quite satisfied with the bank. Do not compare your experience with banks in India to your banks in US. You will be very disappointed and will never be satisfied but still, they are doing a good job.

The funny or ridiculous part about opening an account was that they wanted us to give them a local check to open a bank account. If we had a local bank check or a local bank account why would we be here asking for a new account anyways???

We offered them an out station check from my hubby's account in his home town and they were not too glad and needed a few more documents to complete the process. Fortunately, my FIL has a business and thus a fax machine and he runs his business from home. So he was able to fax the documents to the bank within minutes. But what if he did not have a fax machine at home?! I will leave that for you to imagine.

Now, there was a 6 months waiting list for the locker. This was really annoying. Actually annoying is a very mild term for that experience we were going through.(and again, i would like to remind you, we had a toddler with us......I ran to a nearby grocery store to get some chips, water, juice, etc. also in between).

We decided to go to the B'lore branch of my Hubby's hometown bank. Luckily it was a minute walk from the HDFC branch we were being harassed at.
It was an IOB branch at CMH Road....now they have a new one but the one we went to was the old one. It was like a run down, dark, stinky, damp, depressing, untidy, dirty hall with partitions. I know they are a lot of adjectives, but each and everyone of these have their own importance in this context.
We asked the manager for a locker and he also told us that there is a 6 months waiting time. Then he gave us a very lucrative offer- "Transfer a minimum of Rs. 5 lakhs to your account in my branch and you can have the locker right away". WHAT The.....!!!!

This meant that he had a locker but wanted to sell it to us. Looking at the branch we decided to pass on the once in a lifetime offer and went back home.
My brother was working with Kotak Mahindra Bank in delhi at that time. I narrated him the story and he told me that Kotak branch in Indira Nagar had many lockers available and he can get me one. I was over joyed. I was so proud of my brother at that moment.
He fixed an appointment for us and we were there dot in time.
The person we were supposed to meet was out of office. I called him up and was told that he will be there in 15 minutes. Whenever anyone tells you 15 minutes in India.....translate it as anywhere from 1-6 hours. Why am I saying this? you will know in my future posts and also by experience once you R2I.

Again....we had a tired toddler with us and Mr. Kotak took 1 hour to be back. He also asked us for a local check.
Arrey paagal(a lighter version of what I actually thought).....agar local check hota to yahan sad rahe hote kya....woh bhi tere liye 1 ghante se???(stupid fellow...if we had a local check....would we be sitting here that too waiting for you for the last 1 hour)
Beggars cannot be choosers, so we smiled and completed the formalities. Once our out station check was cleared, we got a SMS and went back to get the locker.

One thing about India is that SMS is kind of lifeline here. For every darn thing, you get a SMS.