Indian Moments

India has a habit of surprising and providing moments of hilarity.

Indglish

The Hindu, a national English speaking newspaper in India, recently had an obituary for a journalist on the front page. After briefly outlining the details of his early and working life, the last paragraph began

At the fag-end of his life he worked as an editor for the...

What part of his life? Indians like to tell you that their middle and upper classes speak the best English in the world, but reading their newspapers one is always delighted by such turns of phrase, thesaurus-inspired vocab and editorial slip-ups.

Got Change?

Getting change when making purchases, particulary off small vendors, can be a problem. But everybody works together to solve the problem. At a bus station recently I was purchasing an iceblock for 2 rupees from a guy carrying an esky (chilly-bin for you Kiwis) while a begger was trying to get some money off me. The seller had no change for my 5 rupee coin (about 15 cents), and without any apparent communication the begger extracted the correct change from his takings for the day. I don't give to beggers usually, but I left this one a couple of rupees.

For Your Own Safety

Recently a law was passed in Mysore making it illegal to ride motorbikes and scooters without helmets. In the leadup to the law coming into effect the police were running around town with loudspeakers reminding motorists of the looming deadline. The law only applied to the person driving the vehicle, not to any passengers. It is not uncommon to see an entire Indian family, Mum Dad and two kids, on one bike. Of course Dad drives, and of course only Dad wore a helmet, with the wife and kids getting the wind in their hair. Tourist passengers who wore helmets were openly laughed at as they rode along.

You might notice that I talk about the wearing of helmets in the past tense, because three days after the implementation of the law everybody stopped wearing helmets and that was that.

Don't Feed The Animals

Out the front of the zoo in Mysore there was a street vendor selling peanuts, with the sales cry, "buy some peanuts for the monkeys". I remembered thinking that was odd, because normally a zoo would not allow the visitors to feed the animals. As it turned out there were plenty of signs inside warning visitors not the feed animals, for their own safety, for the animals' sake and to avoid paying a fine. Nobody seemed to be making any efforts to stop the vendor out the front from encouraging this sort of behavior, though he was standing next to the ticket counter and secturity guards.