Year: 2006 (page 2 of 6)

Getting Dressed

My hotel offers a really nice laundry service. You leave your laundry in a provided linen bag and they return it to you that night by 7pm. They do a great job, but it’s unbelievably expensive. $5 to wash socks! Therefore, once I got over the sticker shock, I committed not to using this “service” again. I had already tried earlier to find clothing at the name brand stores without getting screwed there, too. Abhijit, one of the guys on my team, let me know that he had a childhood friend that was a tailor. I visited him this past Saturday and it was pretty amazing. They would make my clothing for just a little bit more than what I was paying to have it cleaned. If you ever have a chance to have your clothing made, go for it. There’s nothing like having clothes that fit you perfectly. Abhijit said that they’d make one shirt and one pair of pants for me, I come back the next day and try them on and give feedback. Sounded pretty good. I had a button down dress shirt made to my specifications, for about $9.50. The pants never fit better and they were less than $15. I went to town on this. Abhijit suggested I look at other stores for cloth and have these guys make the clothes. I did that on Sunday and it came out amazing. I got much better cloth, so the price basically doubled, but I’ve got really nice clothes for an amazing deal. Let’s put it this way: you bring the cloth and they’ll cut the cloth and make the shirt for $3. Sure beats letting the hotel wash the socks.

Movies

India has a good amount of fame for it’s movie industry, commonly called Bollywood, for Bombay’s Hollywood. The common joke is this: now that it’s known as Mumbai, maybe it should be called Mumblywood. I did see a movie on Friday with the VP of the India outsourcing group. It was one of the more popular commercial movies now playing, though I couldn’t tell you the title. Most billboard advertisements are in English but the movies are all in Hindi, with no subtitles. I had to deduce what was going on by visual cues and the odd English word or phrase dropped in the dialog. Differences were pretty quickly realized. Tickets were purchased for assigned seats, with an attendant showing us where we sit. We got our seats way in the back. It was a huge theater and I couldn’t see well in the dark, but when my eyes adjusted, I realized that the entire theater was empty except for the last five rows. I guess no one likes to sit up front.

The premise of the movie was that a gangster wanted to meet this not satellite disc jockey. In between there were lots of jokes and musical interludes where the lead characters were suddenly the stars of a music video. I found out that the singing is a common theme in just about every India movie. There’s almost always an intermission, which is odd in just over a two hour movie, but I guess that’s just another culture thing. It wasn’t about ¾ of the way through that I realized another key difference. Here’s this romance and they’re moving toward each other and the romance is heating up, but there’s no kissing. It’s a romantic comedy and not once do they kiss. I read in the paper the day before that there’s a big debate going on about whether to allow kissing on television. A big no-no here. Lots of cleavage shown in the newspapers, everyone as hot as can be, but that lip locking is not happening any time soon.

Self Improvement

The paper and television are filled with various forms of improvement: weight loss is by far the biggest, though I didn’t see heavy Indians like you see in the U.S. the whole time I was here. The others are age defying creams, various hair replacement techniques and Fair & Lovely. There is also a Fair & Handsome line. These are skin lightening products. The local movie and television programs are filled with people that are only slightly more tan than tuberculosis patients. I asked my driver, Sameer about this. He says he has a good friend who’s on some sort of mission to lighten his skin. He’s a black guy who uses three different skin lightening products, one of which is herbal. Garnier is another popular brand. After a year, Sameer can’t tell the difference, but his friend swears by this stuff. I told him that Americans often would like to be more tan. Just highlighting how people are never happy.

Marble

In my hotel, the entire lobby is a really nice marble. The staircases and walls are all marble in the hallways. My whole bathroom is marble, too, which makes the shower floor a little slippery. I took the team out to a really nice restaurant at a five start hotel on Thursday. Their bathroom was all gorgeous marble as well, but the bizarre party is that they had the cheapest plastic toilets I’d ever seen. It was a really strange combination.

Just about all the marble is local, though some is imported from Italy. They make shrines out of the white marble, with two red swastikas on the inside. They’re different from the German ones in that they point in a different direction. Even so, it was eerie to see. They symbolize prosperity and happiness.

Security

India is very security conscious. There’s a security check point at every high end hotel and every office building that deals with foreign companies and also western style shopping malls. It consists of about three guys that surround every car that comes in. One guy has a mirror attached to a stick that looks underneath the car. Another looks in the trunk and a third makes sure you don’t make a rush for the building by standing in front of the car. Now, the number of ways to circumvent this boggles the mind. You could put your boom stuff in the middle of the engine, where the mirror won’t see. It’s even better at night, when the mirror can’t see in the dark. You could make a rush for it, running over the human speed bump, you could simply put your explosives in a grocery bag in the car, or (best of all) wait for the supervisor to finish his shift, in which case the guys meant to examine the car are staying inside and just waving you on. The guys that they catch must be the biggest idiots ever imagined. I feel so much safer now.

There’s also a metal detector at all the malls. You volunteer any bags you carry and your cell phone. They make sure that the brand of cell phone makes you sufficiently trendy, take the briefest of looks at any bags you might carry and then wave you on. The metal detecting gate is what mystifies me. Sometimes I set it off and sometimes I don’t, even though I’m carrying the same things. I just imagine that they have a filtering setting that varies depending on if the supervisor is present or not.

Many of the busses have signs that say, “Don’t let terrorism on this bus.” Same message appears in the malls. Does this change ANYONE’S behavior? Has one terrorist event been avoided with this message? It reminds me of the urinal splash guards that say, “Don’t do drugs.” Well, I was going to, but now that I see that sign while I’m urinating, I guess I’ll change my ways…

Traffic

Traffic is universally bad at all hours of the day, with “roads” that contain numerous craters and speed bumps for no apparent reason. This must be where all the New York cab drivers come from since everyone drives with about six inches between them. It’s pretty scary if you think about it for any length of time. All trucks have hand painted phrases on the back that says “Horn OK Please” which means that you are supposed to honk your horn if you approach on the right. Cars also honk if they’re behind you, approaching from any direction, or it’s been at least 20 seconds since the last time it was used. It’s important to know that your equipment is working correctly, unless it’s something like lights. Many of the automated rickshaws (two cylinder, three wheeled, low-end taxi cabs) have many of their lights out. Since they’re all painted black, it makes it all the more difficult to see. They weave in and out of main stream traffic without any fear at all and I’ve yet to see any sort of accident. My hat’s off to them.

My driver, Sameer, tells me that the vast majority of the drivers are Muslims. Whether it’s the rickshaws, higher end cabs or truck drivers, they’re almost guaranteed to be Muslim. He tells me that since education is not as valued, they tend not to get the higher paying jobs.

The day after I boast to my co-workers that the weather has been great it starts raining. All week I had great weather. When my predecessors were here, it was in the middle of monsoon season, which lasts from June to September. It’s miserable during that time with many of the slums being decimated. Traffic becomes a parking lot and the rain is intimidating. The rain came with a vengeance, with record amounts coming down in an hour. The water was six inches deep in some parts of the road. It was the front page story in the paper, near the one where L. Ron Hubbard (founder of Scientology) gives advice about how to get over traumatic events in your life. Sameer took an alternate route into work because traffic was just not moving the usual way. It was a private road, owned by a big dairy in the area. You paid 15 Rupees to go along this fairly well maintained one lane in each direction road. I passed through some beautiful land on either direction. There was the dairy, a number of very well maintained kindergarten and grade schools and gorgeous and oh so lush landscapes. I found it pristine in many ways. In a slower area, there even appeared to be a guy just admiring the beauty of a stream near the road, until he just dropped his pants and squatted. I always have to remind myself about assumptions – they can ruin any ideas that you might have.