COPS AND CHICKEN CURRY

The last blog I posted and emailed out to my friends had such minimal response that I could only draw three conclusions – everyone was busy at the same time or nobody understood it 0r it was too long. Come to think of it, it could be combination of all three!!!

Well, something very strange happened last night…but these things are so normal in India that I must be the strange one…we’ll talk about that later.. Last night, I went over to a friend’s house to help her settle into her tiny little cottage that she shares with her boyfriend and three dogs and it could not be more than 450 sq. ft. Well, it got pretty late and we had asked the others who were running some errands to pick up some food on the way back since we were all starving. They returned and promptly declared that they forgot to get the food. So, with an elevated headache and a desire to eat a horse due to the starvation, another friend and I went out at midnight to look for food…which miraculously you can always find somehow. Well, we found this “hotel” that claimed to have all kinds of non-veg food. We thought this was great and placed a large order of parathas and chicken curry to go. This all seemed normal up to this point. What happened later sort of shook me a little bit although my friend was completely relaxed about it….

A cop car (another means to make the cops even more lazier and corrupted) with lights blazing, drives down the street and one of them on the loudspeaker was asking the little shops including the seedy “hotel” joint that was preparing the food for us, to turn out the lights and shut down the place as it was past the closing time. He kept screaming this on the loudspeaker and I thought we were going to leave without any food. I found it bizarre that this would even happen but my friend says, “let’s just wait, they will turn on the lights after the cop has driven past the street…the owner of the hotel is paying the cops anyway to allow him to stay open and the cops are just doing this to make the public believe that they are doing their job…” I was in shock and realized in a few minutes that my friend was absolutely right!!!!!

The cop had barely pulled out of that street and they were open for business again. So of course this gives rise to the conversation that even if the Western world and its customs are mimicked to a certain extent, Indians will be Indians no matter what…The place will always be filthy and overridden with beggars and homeless people and drunks, the flies will always make homes in the huge garbage piles found on different parts of each street, everyone will want to be paid for anything they do for you – there is no charity done here, stray cats and dogs and cows roam the overcrowded streets at all hours of the day, trains and buses are streaked with red stains from the beetle nut leaf that they chew and spit anywhere and everywhere, dirt and dust is caked on so thick in some homes that it almost forms an insulation layer making the house hotter than it is, the insects and rodents are fatter than the starving people, cell phones are more important than food, things will always fall apart, hardly anything is done on time and not even expected to be done on time, mosquitoes dictate your evening behavior – meaning that there is a certain time during the evening when you have to light these “mosquito coils” …these foul smelling spirals that you pierce on a metal stand and these are supposed to drive away the mosquitoes. They also have the plug-in kinds which are much better.

So when all is said and done, we Americans have it real easy and very good compared to other parts of the world. You notice I said, we Americans…I still feel and always will feel very patriotic about the United States of America…I will talk about this patriotism and the lack of it here in India in my forthcoming blogs….