Of Tomato and Tamatar - Home Version

After taking a long hiatus from writing, I’m back. Thanks for all the readers for their reminders. Well thanks to everyone except one: No thanks to Bhawna for waking me up on a Sunday at 7am to remind me that I haven’t written a blog entry for a while!

Anyway, I am back, and have a lot of material for a few blog entries. Before I go into the details of this one, a quick summary of where we are (wrt the move to India) these days. We have totally settled into our life in Gurgaon, have started identifying “our” restaurants and “our” sabziwala, Indus Insights is as exciting and demanding as ever, our squash game has improved (thanks to the court in our apartment complex) and we no longer stop at red lights if there isn’t a compelling reason to. So, as our dear friend Kashyap puts it, we have passed the two stages of moving back (Stage I: “losing the romanticism”, and Stage II: “desperately wanting to move back”), and are onto the third stage – “being a part of the problem”.

While there’s so much to share, I’ll continue from where I left off. In my last article, I was talking about some minor differences between how Amreeka operates and how this country functions / tries to function. Drawing a parallel to MS Windows, this blog entry is the “Home” version, the next one will the “Professional” version, wherein I’ll talk about how the professional life is different. So without further ado:

• Hello hello bol key

Every country has a different set of introduction etiquette, and India is no exception. Infact, in many ways, it is similar to the US than many other Asian countries. But there are some interesting differences. The obvious one is that women usually don’t shake hands (either with men or with other women). So when our property broker would come every morning, he’d shake hands with me. Neha would get a 2 arms distance, a dazzling smile, and a “Namaste Madam, kaisey ho aap?” (Namaste madam, how are you?).

The other piece that is not immediately obvious is the myriad different ways of shaking hands that we desis have come up with:

(1) “Handle with care” Handshake: Looks like a regular handshake, but the grasp is extremely gentle, as if the other person is concerned that he might break your bones

(2) “Hold you forever” Handshake: The handshake has a regular start, but the end…well, you keep waiting for it, and it never comes. So you end up holding the hand of another guy for an awkward 30,45,60,120,…seconds

(3) “Multitasker” Handshake: The handshaker has something else in his hands (keys, his 2nd cellphone,…) and can’t/won’t keep this stuff in his pocket. He goes on to multitask, with some of his fingers holding on to his stuff, and extends a finger or two towards you. How you proceed is your call

(4) “Mother of the Multitasker” Handshake: Similar to the “Multitasker” handshake, but this time there’s larger stuff in the guy’s hand. Example range from a water bottle, as shown below, to a kicking and screaming baby (yes, that was my first experience with this handshake). The solution – the handshaker extends his wrist out to you. Quite awkward when it first happens to you, coz you are left wondering what to do with the extended wrist. Do you give it a wrist bump, do you extend your wrist out as well, or do you just waive a hello? Here’s what we did:

• Pass yaa fail

We go to a restaurant and order some food. As we wrap up the food, the waiter asks Neha if she would want some dessert (he asked the right person for sure!). Not sure what comes over Neha (she usually doesn’t say no to such questions), but she says, “Thanks, I’ll pass”. The waiter gives us completely bewildered looks, and asks the question again. Neha has the same reply. He thinks about it for a few seconds and then says, “Is that a yes or no?” The poor guy was wondering why was Neha telling her her expected examination results, and moreover, if she was so confident that she’d pass, she should be celebrating by ordering some desserts!

• To eat or not to eat

Similar to the one above, but with a role reversal. Its my first time at Haldiram’s – the chaat and fast food place. I order a Raj Kachori (the #1 ordered item at the place) and get a coupon for it. I go to the chaat area and give the coupon to the server. He looks at it and says “Hmm, Raj Kachori. Khana hai?” ("Do you want to eat it?") Similar to the waiter in the story above, I’m totally bewildered. I mean what all activities can you do with a Raj Kachori? I start thinking about all the various potential uses, and feel like one of the comedians on the prop round of “Whose Line is it Anyway” who have to come up with as many bizarre uses for the same prop as possible. After convincing myself that the guy isn’t thinking that I’m interested in just smelling the Kachori, and that throwing the Kachori at the face of another patron and starting a “Kachori Fight” isn’t probably what ppl do, I go with the offensive route. “Khanee hee hai, aur kya karoonga. Hadh hai!” ("What the heck, of course I want to eat it. What else would I do with it?"). The guy says “Sir, gussa kyon ho rahey ho, pack bhee kara saktey ho” ("Sir, why get angry, you could also get it packed"). Lesson learnt – the “khana hai?” question is the equivalent of the “For Here / To Go?” phrase in the US. Incidentally, that phrase also had me confused for a while in the US (more so because it is spoken so quickly)

• Co-existence w/ nature

Living in India means co-existing with other living variants of the non-flora kind. No matter how picky you are, how well designed your doors and windows are, which restaurant you are visiting, you’ll come across a few insects/rodents here and there. We saw a rat at a Haldiram’s, I have killed two lizards in our apartment so far (and scared off a few more), and the monsoons have brought with them a steady supply of random insects with <12 hours of average lifespan. Our first experience with this co-existing phenomenon happened at an Airtel customer service center. As we were explaining to the agent the kind of plan we needed for our blackberry, out crawled a baby cockroach, straight onto the agent’s desk – about a foot from Neha’s hand. Neha happened to notice it, and tried to induce a heart attack in the poor animal by giving out a 120 dB shriek. As everyone turned around to see what calamity had befallen on us, the agent asked Neha what had happened. Neha conveyed her big discovery – “there is a cockroach here!” The guy looked around, saw the insect in the limelight, and shrugged it off by saying “So what, it’s such a small one”. Needless to say, Neha was left speechless.

I guess I’ll leave everyone with this mental image of a baby cockroach. More material coming up pretty soon. And yeah, don’t forget to rate this blog entry by clicking on the options below.

Cheers,

D