You say tomato, I say tamatar

Having spent a fair bit of time outside the country, I consider myself part foreigner and part Indian. One of the advantages of being a part foreigner is that you get to observe the differences in how people act & interact – those minor things that a local doesn't notice, but a traveler finds amusing. So here are some of the interesting tidbits I’ve seen so far:

• Double 1 and Triple 2

When saying numbers, such as phone numbers or bank account numbers, people here have a tendency of using “double” or “triple”. The funny thing is that if you don’t use it, they will get confused and ask for a clarification. Case in point - my phone number is xxx43222. During our initial few days, when asked for my contact info, I would say “…four three two two two”. Quickly would come the verification – “Triple Two?”, as if I had committed a grave folly of calling 222 as "two two two" instead of "triple 2", and that the mistake needed to be corrected right away. This happened 100% of the time, whether we were talking in person or over the phone, to a business contact or a call center agent. (By the way, I have seen the opposite as well. Desis trying to use double 1 and triple 2 in the US, with little success. No one understands it over there).

There was a funny incident with this number reporting when someone gave me his number as “blah blah four three…”. I got the number, repeated it and he said that it was ok. I told the guy that a couple of digits seemed to be missing. After a few minutes of back and forth explanation, I realized that he was trying to shorten “3333”, didn’t want to say “double three double three” and probably hadn’t heard the word quadruple – hence the confusing “four three”.

• Sahab, Biwi aur Gulam

Noticed something a few weeks back that struck me as a bit strange. A Merc stopped in front of a mall, “madam” got out immediately from the back seat from one side of the car, and then waited in the sweltering heat. The driver then applied the parking brakes etc, unbuckled himself, got out of the front seat, and opened the rear door for the “Sahab” to get out. What struck me as weird were two things. First, why would a perfectly fit person wait for a minute or two in car (while his wife is waiting outside in the heat) for the driver to open the door instead of opening it himself? I mean it’s one thing to not carry heavy stuff or to not chop vegetables (saves time and effort), but it's totally a different thing to not open a freakin' car door. Come on!

Second thing that was odd was that the driver opened the “Sahab” door, not the “Madam” door. This is something I have seen on numerous occasions. In the US, it’s the women who get preferential treatment – people will open the doors for you, waiters will ask the women for their order first, etc. It’s the opposite in India – there seems to be a fair bit of sexism, even in a city like Delhi. Not that I am complaining :)

• Sheet sizes and the square root of 2

This one is more of a nerdy piece of fact. Regular paper size in India (and most of the world) is A4. In the US, it’s a “letter” size. To satisfy my curiosity on these differences (and to take a break from client development), I did a bit of research into the topic. On the surface, the US letter, with a size of 8.5” x 11” sounds sensible (round numbers), as compared to the bizarre 210mm x 297mm (8.3” x 11.7”) dimensions of an A4 sheet. But delve a bit deeper and you’ll uncover some practical logic behind the “A” series. So here it goes:

The largest size in the A series is an A0 with the dimensions of 841mm x 1189mm. Why the bizarre size? Well, if you multiply the two, you get the area of the sheet as one sq. meter, which is not a coincidence. Then why not 1000 mm x 1000 mm, why choose these seemingly bizarre dimensions? There’s a reason for that - if you take the ratio of 1189 by 841 you get 1.414, which is the square root of 2. This is a special ratio – what it implies is that if you fold the sheet in half parallel to the shorter side (so that the new dimensions are 1189/2 = 594 x 841), your resulting sheet still has the same aspect ratio of 1.414 (=841/594). This size, by the way, is size A1. Repeat the process a couple more times, and you now have a size A4 sheet. So you can get all the A sized sheets just by folding an A0, and all these resulting sheets will have the same aspect ratio. Implication - if you are enlarging or reducing material, the result doesn’t come out to be stretched or squished. Pretty logical, eh? I guess I am now a convert to A4!

That’s it for now. There’s more coming up in the “tomato-tamatar” series soon – it’s going to be about handshakes, about eating out, and about passing up on things. Stay tuned. And yes, cast your vote on this blog entry below.

- D