Alien

There’s been so many things that the Indians do that have just left me shaking my head in disbelief. I’ve been told so many stories about other people’s adventures that just leave me wondering if the Indian people are actually human, or belong to another species entirely.

I’ve already mentioned their ability to lie straight to your face without a shred of guilt or worry that you’re going to find out just a few minutes later that they’ve lied to you. For example, a man in the queue behind me at the bus station told me that I had to get a ticket from a special office. He knew it was bullox and he knew I was going to come right back to that same bus a few minutes later, obviously pissed that I’d been tricked out of my position in the queue. Yet it made no difference to him, he still said it.

Or their complete different interpretation of personal hygiene. As many of you might well know, the Indians use their right hands to eat and their left hands to wipe their bum. Now that would be a great idea if they would use toilet paper or, barring that, they would then use soap to wash their hands. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure many of them do use soap, but many of them don’t! What’s even worse, sometimes you walk up to the washing basin area and you can’t even find soap there! You’re like ‘this is a restaurants, I’m sure that the cooks have to do their business sometimes, they don’t have soap at the wash basins and I imagine they can’t cook with only one hand. Hmmmm….’

That’s like that story of a town that they spent a great deal of money on to build toilets in this little village, then they came back a couple of months later and found that the people were using it for storage. Why? Because the villagers preferred crapping out in the open by the river. You don’t crap in the house, that’s dirty! You crap outside, preferably by the river so that it washes away (and the dysentery only affects the villages down river).

Or the place where the government spent huge amounts of cash to cover up the open sewers and the people then proceeded to rip back open those same sewers, as they preferred to have them there to do their business in, or throw their waste in.

But then they won’t clean bathrooms. That is a task only left for the lowest of the low. To ask people to clean the bathroom is a certain way to be ostracized and ridiculed.

Or their completely different way of interacting socially. When a woman engages in idle chit chat with a man, for instance, that pretty much means that she is sexually interested in him (according to the man, anyway). Or the way they take western politeness (when they are trying to sell you things on the streets, for example) and means that the person is really actually interested in the product but just being difficult.

And the way you can say ‘no’ seven times and they will still ask you an eighth, a ninth and a tenth. You can’t have a conversation with somebody who sells something without them ever giving up on trying to sell you that thing!

Now I’m sure I’m grossly over generalising, but so far this place has been truly alien. I’m still waiting for the good stuff.