Dude, where's my luggage?

I have always lived by the saying that when it comes to baggage in air travel there is carry on and there is lost. When one is planning a long term trip to another country and taking most everything they own with them, carry on is not really an option, and thus most of my worldly possessions are lost.

Now when we came into Delhi yesterday it was a cluster. After some discussion we managed to get ourselves on a flight to Kathmandu, but were told our bags would arrive the next day. Faced with the possibility of spending a full day in an airport in India, this sounded like a deal worth taking. The problem of coarse is that today we spent 4 hours at the airport, checking multiple incoming flights and speaking with many people from Jet Lite, and no bags are to be found.

When you ask for assistance in things in the sub-continent there is this belief that by filing paperwork things will get done. Forms are filled signatures taken, log books are filled with numbers, but I often get the feeling that no one on the ground is actually doing a whole lot. You can fill out all the paperwork in the world, but if someone in the airport in Delhi isn't actually physically looking for the bags they simply won't be found, and it seems to get people to do that is something just short of a herculean task.

Lucky for us, Pradip graduated with and is friends with one of the woman who works at the Jet Lite office and she seems to be making an effort to figure out where the bags might be. At this point I could live with being told that the bags are going to be another 4 days before we get them, as long as someone can tell me that they are actually going to get here some day. As much as it kind of sucks losing just about everything you own, I'm glad that we can be patient and wait for it. I can't imagine if I had come all this way for just a couple of weeks and had to waste so much time chasing luggage.