Week 5:

As previously mentioned, there was some work to be done in the office on Saturday so travel wasn't really an option. In place of a travel log, I'll try to elaborate on some things that have stuck out as unique to me so far in the month I've been here.
First off the general Indian personality is incredibly friendly and accommodating; if you say "hi" to people on the road or in the office you're almost always treated to a enthusiastic smile in response. If you're doing something wrong, you probably won't know it because they won't likely correct or rebuke you. In district conference yesterday the soon-to-be former Mission President Nichols shared an experience of his in the Goa Airport. While waiting for the gate to open, a crowd of 20-25 Australians set their baggage down in the terminal, inadvertently creating a wall preventing access to the gate. In order to pass most people (Indians) would patiently walk around the Aussiewall to walk single file through a gap at the end. The first non-Indian to come across this situation started accusing and yelling at the tourists from down under, causing a huge scene. The single-file line continued, feigning obliviousness to the entire ordeal.

In spite of the general patience, people selling their wares and services are NOT to be trusted with their suggested prices. Just the other night I got in an auto-rickshaw and asked him to take me to a nearby location, probably 3-4 kilometers away. This was in the evening, around 10:30, so the a typical auto fare would be around Rs12 per kilometer (approx $.25) When I communicated the destination the driver responded without hesitation (450 rupees). He tried countering my surprise and rejection of the price with excuses such as the time of day and traffic. After refusing continuously and walking a few meters away a couple times the price came down to 100Rs. While I still got taken advantage of, I managed to avoid the quadruple price initially suggested. This scenario is by no means atypical, I've been told by locals that any initial price suggested by street merchants for their wares is generally 8x to 10x the amount they will accept.

Sanitation here has a strange twist. Rather than washing hands before a meal, it's customary to go right into eating (typically with ones hands) then stop by the designated "hand wash" to clean up. A coconut will be rinsed off on the outside, yet when it is opened, a grimy rust-covered blade is used to cut off the top, allowing access to the milk. In a juice shop, the glasses provided are rinsed out after each use, but the blenders used to make the juices are left unwashed for hours at a time. Panipuri, while delicious, is typically hand-made by a guy on the side of the road, punching holes in the top of the hollow bread-balls with his thumb immediately after wiping sweat off his forehead with (hopefully) the other hand. You get to the point that you try not to think too much about what may or may not be in your food; to this point I've been very lucky to have avoided any health problems whatsoever.

As with China India has a huge excess of cheap manual labor; this results in a very different kind of work process than you see in the US. IE: Construction...Rather than collecting a number of well organized, specialized people and collecting precise equipment for the task at hand, a large team will be allocated to the project and equipped with the most rudimentary of tools sufficient for the job, usually a shovel bent at 90 degrees, a hammer, and a hardhat. The same concept applies to other fields, even at my workplace I've seen larger groups than necessary assigned to menial tasks. The determining factor of this situation is the leadership; if a queen-bee or alpha-male is in the area directing the crowd of workers, things come together very well. Otherwise objects move meaninglessly back and forth and holes which are dug exist only to be filled with dirt from the next hole.

A last thing I'll mention today is the mixture of languages. India is home to a few hundred of them but fortunately only a handful are spoken in each area. Most people in Bangalore speak Kannada, Hindi, or Telegu in addition to some amount of English. When two people meet each other for the first time they may be able to recognize their origin by appearance, in which case they'll try the language of their native area if they know it. Dialects of Hindi are spoken across the country, and is used as a fallback language if nothing more familiar is found in common. From what I can tell the vocabulary of these languages are overlapping and melding with one another. On several occasions I've asked what language a word is in and gotten conflicting responses. At least for those in Bangalore, the vernacular seems to be a hybrid of languages, a grouping of whichever words come to mind quickest or most specifically communicates what one is trying to convey.


Tomorrow night we're attending an Indian Culture dinner. I'll post some about that experience in the near future.

-Scott