Procrastiblog

There really are cows in the streets, but not very many. It’s unclear who, if anyone, owns them or why. I haven’t yet seen a cow and had my camera at the same time.

When your (quite nice but fairly stern) yoga teacher asks you to close your eyes and join him in a Sanskrit (?) prayer, which option is more culturally sensitive?

1) Concentrate on your breathing and keep your mouth shut, or
2) Mumble along semi-phonetically and try to follow the melody.

I’ve been trying Option (2), and I feel like a jackass.

Dad, mom, and baby boy. All riding together. On a motorcycle. None of them have helmets. This is a common occurrence.

A4 paper is great. No more margin fiddling with European conference papers, and I haven’t had any problem with letter-size documents. It is a peculiar assertion of American hegemony, our heedless attachment to letter-size paper.

Also, from the Efficient Uses of Labor Dept: there is a man whose job it is to stand in the copy room, in case, e.g., you need staples, but are unsure how to load them into your stapler. We have a similar job description in the U.S., but it requires decorating your office space with cat calendars. That’s the great thing about India: lots of staples, no cats.

There are also always plenty of workers available to stare at you if, perhaps, after a week on the job, you still don’t know if the main office door opens inward or outward. And they don’t think you’re stupid. Not at all.

Also good!

It’s like a Indian tostada. (!)

Some intriguing copy on the back of a bag of Kurkure Red Chilli Chatka (with “Extra Chatpata, Extra Mast”):

INGREDIENTS: Rice Meal, Edible Oil, Corn Meal, Gram Meal, Spices & Condiments and Salt.

CONTAINS ADDED FLAVOURS.

A Proprietary Food.

So, there’s a lot of man-on-man hand-holding in this town. Coming at this from a non-homophobic angle: what’s the necessity for it? What does it signify? I’ve always interpreted boy-girl hand-holding and arm-wrapping as a sublimated expression of sexual longing… And, of course, so must the rest of the Western world, since we all agree that heterosexual men should not hold hands, and should only hug at sporting events.

I’m pretty sure I have seen boy-girl hand-holding here as well. How is this hand-holding different from same-sex hand-holding? Or is it all the same, Platonic affection, and my dirty Western mind is leading me astray?

Just uploaded a new photo set.

WARNING: The theme of this blog for the next 3 months will be slowly evaporating ignorance masquerading as insight.

So, obviously, I have arrived. I’ve spent the last week trying to get my bearings, and I’m still only just getting started. Rather than write a novel about everything that has happened since I arrived, I will list just a few of the experiences of cultural difference that have perplexed me.

• In Mumbai, I waited an unbelievably long time in a partially air-conditioned corridor to take the shuttle bus* from the international terminal to the domestic terminal. So long (almost an hour) that I began to wonder if we weren’t subjects in some kind of psychological experiment.
• It takes two men to drive a cab to the airport: one to drive the car, and one to talk on his cell phone while the other guy drives the car.
• I have a houseboy who brings me food, washes my dishes and my clothes, and cleans the apartment. He speaks about five words of English, which are: breakfast, lunch, dinner, outside, and tomorrow.
• For some reason, all of my furniture, the refrigerator, and the washing machine disappeared. I asked the houseboy where they went, and he said, “Outside.” I asked him when they would come back, and he said, “Tomorrow.” This was on Wednesday. They have not reappeared.

* Note to my Indian readers: in the U.S., we prefer to take the monorail between airport terminals, as the monorail is the Transportation of the Future (cf. Epcot). We reserve buses for the poor, the infirm, and the insane, or use them to get to rental car agencies, hotels, Atlantic City, or Hooters. In any case, they run every 15 minutes.