Friday, January 20, 2012

If you go

If you go to India and
  • have never been in a largish American city
  • travel to Delhi by your lonesome midwestern selves
  • attend a wedding to which your hosts - the family of your boyfriend's Indian office mate in the US - has been invited
  • wear your memorable bright red tight sleeveless dress with lots of decolletage, which was very appropriate for dancing on the tables at a wedding in the US, because it will “keep you cool”
  • wonder why the women are not dancing
  • dance with the men in the baaraat anyway because “they asked me to”,
  • wonder why you were then shunned by the women for the rest of the function
  • wear that same red dress to Red Fort
  • get separated from your boyfriend who saunters on ahead while you visual-graze in the shops in the crowded entrance
  • are confronted by someone in uniform who does a double handed simultaneous boob squeeze (on you), then does namaste and walks off
  • fly to Pune, take an autoriksha instead of allowing a local contact to pick you up at the airport
  • lose your camera bag (with the camera bought especially for the trip) and glasses
  • are unaware of the number of bags you are traveling with (“the big black one, the small red roll-on, that green one”, “the samsonite?”, “No! The one we bought for the trip to Mexico, the shopping bag from Dubai duty-free, the medium dark blue one with the clothes for the wedding, ...”)
  • not check behind the seat when disembarking from the autoriksha
  • accuse the (unknown and long vanished) riksha-wallah of being a thief who intentionally put stuff behind the seat
  • eat a sandwich for lunch at 11:30AM because you “always do”
  • refuse to eat with the rest of the family at 1PM because you “just ate”
  • go, again in the infamous red dress, when you could've replaced it with a modest salwar-kameez for $2, to a small locals only shopping area to buy a sari
  • enter the dark sari shop,
  • are puzzled when a young child starts screaming and crying, yelling something that sounds like “bhoot, bhoot”
  • insist on hot water for a bath, or at least for hair, because “it's been three days in the dust and heat”, and complain about the length of time it takes,
  • then after washing hair, complain about dinner being late, on a specially arranged trip to see tigers in the wild at an undeveloped preserve, at a “hotel” with obviously only one coal fire...

...Never return. Please.

1 comment:

ClimberT8 said...

The Old Man and what he Sees in me.

On Jan 20, 2012, at 1:06 AM, I wrote:
Hi,
Please let me know if you do NOT want to receive links to my posts in the future - I am aware of the narcissism inherent in bringing my posts to your attention, and that you do have lives and busy schedules, even if I don't ;-)
Also, I apologize for the multiple e-mails some of you receive due to your membership in various of my e-mail groups (friends, climbers, IIT etc), they aren't mutually exclusive categories.

http://pol-imer.blogspot.com/2012/01/morning-in-india.html
http://pol-imer.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-family-is-animals.html
http://pol-imer.blogspot.com/2012/01/if-you-go.html

OM: What happened, you woke up on the wrong side of the bed?

I, wondering whether my writing tone was that bitter and misanthropic: 3 yrs ago and 20 yrs ago, perhaps. Why do you ask? Seriously.

OM: because of all the apologies.

no need, post away - those who don't want to read can hit the delete button.

yes you are wasting bits on the wire by sending the same message to the same people a few times, but you don't loose carbon credits for that.

I: Ah! I thought perhaps it was some general tone in my writing that indicated "wrong side of bed". As for the apologies, well I'm just giving pipol an out.

So there you have it, when I am trying to be considerate and SNAG, OM thinks I got out of the wrong side of the bed.