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India

The Quest For A Perfect Haircut

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In India, someone has forgotten to tell the men that the 1970’s was 40 years ago and the world has moved on from the silly facial hair grown on the top lip – often referred to as a moustache. Even my own father, after years of an ever shrinking mousch, finally got rid of it all together by 2005.

So…what has this got to do with the perfect haircut?

Well, as I may blog about in the future, people like to be able to pay other people to do stuff for them. This naturally extends to paying someone else to shave them. Laziness in the extreme, but I digress.

There are a million and one male beauty parlours dotted around the city where you can go to get a cut, shave and presumably have a gossip about the escalating price of food, what the kids are up to and the latest story line from their favourite soaps.

Being a good old fashioned male, who gets his hair cut in a nice solid barber shop…and expects to have it done within 10 minutes of entering the establishment (while at the same time expecting no conversation other than to be asked what I want doing with the barnet), finding a good barber shop in Chennai has proved rather elusive so far.

When I first arrived, I thought I got lucky because below our offices was a proper barber shop, unfortunately the place never seemed to be open and when I did pop in, he insisted that I make an appointment and come back another day (it was a one chair show and no customers were ever in sight, but hey, TII, let’s fill out some paperwork!).

I went to this barber a few times and all was well, a fairly reasonable haircut and since I don’t know Tamil and he didn’t know English, the conversation thing was taken care of.

My second barber experience was in April of this year when my company moved to a new office. I was about to go off on holiday with some friends and was in urgent need of a haircut. In desperation I found a dingy place and after a bit of hunting around the premises, I finally found the barber – an old guy who seemed to have difficulty walking.

I sat in the chair and with some pretty innovative hand signals managed to communicate that I wanted a number 3 razor on the back and sides and cut short on top.

So off he went and got the clippers out, a few false starts and they were up and clacking away. He started off on the right hand side and started moving round the back of my head when suddenly the powers that be (or probably someone at the electricity board) decided that now was a perfect time for a power cut.

A few choice words were running through my mind at this point, but the old barber man had seen it all before, he shuffled off to the back room and reappeared moments later with some rusty garden shears with blades the size of your forearm. A little bit of applied oil and he was ready to finish off the job.

The most glorious part about this hair cut was still to come. As he deftly wielded the shears around my cranium, neatly avoiding my ears, he came to the fringe.

Now, as all us guys know, the way not to cut the fringe is to brush it forward and cut straight across. This gives us what is affectionately known as the bowl cut and there is not one single country, even Germany, where it is cool.

Before I could say, “whoa! hold on mister, we’re not in Germany now!” he had brushed my hair forward and with a single snip of the giant blades had cut the most perfectly horizontal fringe you have ever seen.

The old dude took a step back, admired his handiwork and asked for 100 rupees.

Fortunately, my hair grows back very quickly, so after about 6 weeks I was able to go back to work and go out in public again.

In need of another haircut at the weekend and not wanting to make the same mistake again, I asked my trusted Indian friend where I could go to get a decent haircut, some where that doesn’t use a tupperware bowl as an integral part of the haircutting process.

He directed me to a landmark and as I walked up and down the road failing to see any sign of a barber shop I called him up.

Me: “dude [editor: that’s Indian for mate], I don’t see this barber shop”

Friend: “are you outside spencers?”

Me: “yeah, there’s some ladies salon and a furniture shop, no barbers”

Friend: “no dude, you can go to the salon”

Me: *looks up at the sign* “dude! it says Naturals Beauty Salon. I’m a guy, we don’t do salons and we most certainly don’t do beauty.”

Friend: “seriously, they will cut your hair”

After lots of convincing, I made my way in to the salon and rather incredulously asked if they cut hair. Did I have an appointment, they asked? I looked around at the empty establishment. No, I did not have an appointment.

I was found a hair artist (as I believe they are called in salons) and ushered in to a chair. Once again, my hand gestures came in useful, number 3 at the back, short on top (seriously, it’s not rocket science, I don’t ask for much).

30 minutes later and the guy finally put away the clippers after sculpting and shaping with all the care and attention Michelangelo demonstrated when he painted the Sistine Chapel. It took another 30 minutes to ‘cut it short on top’. Fortunately we didn’t have another fringe incident though.

The damage was 130 rupees, which is about £1.80. I wanted to say that they should have paid me 130 rupees for sitting there patiently for an hour while he messed around, but I didn’t know the Tamil word for “patient”.

So now I’m seriously considering investing in a pair of clippers and just shaving it all off every couple of weeks. It’s got to be less hassle than trying to get a haircut here!

India

Expat Grocery List

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I thought I’d try and come up with the most boring and most mundane thing I could to post on my blog. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you:

This week’s grocery shopping list 😀

Maybe a few people are interested in finding out how much everyday things cost here, I think you might be quite surprised!

At the end of my road is what is rather optimistically referred to as a supermarket. In India, it’s still very much a case of one shop, one product type. You buy fruit and veg from one small shop, rice from another shop, toiletries from another shop, etc.

The shops are truly old skool; if you can imagine the store front about 2.5 metres in width with a counter across the front which the owner sits behind and you queue up to tell him what you want. Each one of these family shops is probably about 2-3 metres square at the most.

Getting back to the ‘supermarket’ at the end of my road, if it was in England, it would be called a corner shop. I would say it’s smaller than a Spar and maybe a tiny bit bigger than a shop at a petrol station.

The supermarket concept is just about taking a hold, but as you can probably imagine, there is quite a fierce opposition to it – India is a nation of shopkeepers.

Anyway, my grocery receipt. Here goes…

8x Red Delicious Apples – 160 rupees (£2)
5x Bananas – 15 rupees (£0.19)
5x Oranges – 68 rupees (£0.86)
1kg Basmati rice – 140 rupees (£1.76)
2x 330ml Diet Coke – 50 rupees (£0.63)
Kellogg’s 450g Honey Cornflakes – 125 rupees (£1.58)
Nivea Anti-Perspirant – 160 rupees (£2)
2x Navaratan Kurma (curry) – 98 rupees (£1.24)
Aloo Mutter (curry) – 48 rupees (£0.61)
Chicken Biriyani – 95 rupees (£1.22)
1ltr Tropicana 100% Orange Juice – 85 rupees (£1.07)
1ltr Nestle Milk – 38 rupees (£0.48)

So in total it comes to around £15, to buy enough food to last the week. Sometimes there are additional things I need to buy like toilet paper, shampoo, shower gel, tea bags, coffee – and in that case it can add another few pounds to the bill.

In recent weeks my total expenditure on food has been going up since I now buy fresh fruit to take to the office for lunch and I have stopped going to restaurants in the evening for dinner, so need to prepare (heh! ok, heat up) food at home.

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Upcoming Indian Elections

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The General Elections are about to take place later this month in India. In a country of 1.1bn people where there are over a dozen official languages and large swaths of the rural areas have very low literacy rates, it’s incredible that elections manage to take place at all.

You could easily compare India to Europe. Imagine if all the countries of Europe, with their different customs, culture and language, were asked to vote in a general election to nominate a single party to represent them all. It probably couldn’t be done. But if you can imagine that, then you can imagine the kind of difficulties the political parties face here.

The general elections nominate 543 Members of Parliment, of which a party needs a 66% majority to form a government. The newly formed Government then elects a President (the current President is Pratibha Patil) and the President then appoints a Prime Minister (the current Prime Minister is Manmohan Singh) nominated by the party in power.

The role of the Indian President is a bit like the Queen in the UK (according to my enlightened Indian friends). The role is largely ceremonial. The president is the head of the armed forces. The president can dissolve the parliment and call a new general election, they also sign any new bill that parliment want to pass and have little choice to refuse it.

The role of the Prime Minister is just like in the UK. They are responsible for the day to day running of the country, in charge of policy, schmoozing with the world leaders and whatnot.

Just like in the United States, there are two main national parties called Congress and BJP. Congress is more secular, and the BJP is more about Hindu nationalism. The current party in power is the Congress party, and has been in power for the majority of the time since independence in 1947.

In the build up to elections, there is a large amount of political manouvering amongst the national and regional parties. The national parties come to power based on their alliances with the smaller, regional parties as there is no way they can achieve a 66% majority by themselves.

Here in Tamil Nadu there are two main parties, the DMK and AIADMK. Both the Congress and BJP parties are courting them to try and get an ally in the Tamil Nadu state. In return for this, the national parties promise a certain number of parlimentary seats or ministries to the local parties. The political wrangling comes when two different state parties demand a the same ministry .

I can’t speak much about other states in India, but in Tamil Nadu, it’s very much a case of celebrity politics. When the famous actors and actresses reach an age where their looks fade, dancing ability wanes or singing falters, the natural progression is to turn to politics and to bring your large army of fans with you. The leader of the DMK is a very renown scriptwriter and the leader of the AIADMK is an aging 60’s icon actress.

Unlike in England where there are ‘just’ 27 million votes to count and polling lasts for just one day, the elections in India last for 29 days between 16th April and 13th may, with the results not announced until the 16th May.

There are many reasons for this, such as the size of the country, size of population, inaccessibility of rural areas (ie. no proper roads), providing security for voting, and the shear length of time it takes to count the votes.

I’ll write some more about the upcoming elections here later on this month.

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Three Great Films You Probably Haven’t Seen

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Living in India, I have cable TV which has blessed me with 10 sports channels, at least one of which will be showing live action football on Saturday or Sunday. This means I’m able to watch the Premiership matches which you guys in the UK can’t, such as the 3pm Saturday matches.

It also gives me 3 English movie channels, so when there’s no football, there’s likely to be at least one half watchable movie on.

For anyone that knows me, my taste in films tend to be action, comedy, thrillers with a healthy dose of escapism (think Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, King Kong – all of which are incredible movies by the way!) and a suspension of reality for a few hours.

Unfortunately the movie channels seem to be obsessed with terrible Jean Claude Van Damme straight to TV films (Until Death and Double Impact registering highly crappy on the crap-o-meter scale) which make you feel a worse person after watching them.

There have, however, been some real gems. These are films that I would never have chosen to watch in a million years, either because they are boring ‘life’ films or foreign independent films, but watched them because they were on, and got drawn in and hooked.

Wasabi – 2001

Definitely not a fan of foreign (ie. in a language other than English) films, so would do everything I can to avoid watching them. However, the Wasabi film was dubbed in to English, so made it watchable. It tells the story of an old French spy who goes back to Japan and discovers he has a tear-away teenage daughter he never knew about.

While getting to know his teenage daughter (who doesn’t know that he’s her Dad until much later in the film), he’s also trying to discover the killers of her mother.

It scores good points because it’s actually quite funny and the scripting is excellent. It’s very tongue in cheek, so the suspension of reality in the gun battles and some of the visual gags makes it acceptable. It stars Jean Reno who has been in quite a few English movies as well.

Little Miss Sunshine – 2006

Wow, never my life would I thought I’d sit down and watch a film like this. A dysfunctional family travel to a young girl beauty pagent. Honestly, that’s all that happens.

Each family member is a real character; the Dad is an unsuccessful success coach who preaches positive attitudes to everything and has an unnerving positive approach to every situation.

The Grandfather is an aging rebel who likes his women and booze and has very little social etiquette, going through life on his own terms.

The suicidal gay brother-in-law who has just been released from hospital after an unsuccessful suicide attempt when he finds out his lover is cheating on him with another man.

The gothic teenage guy who is full of angst and hates his family. He has taken a vow of silence in protest and communicates by writing in a pad of paper. Despite this, it’s his dream to become a pilot.

The mum, who seems relatively normal in the family, and works hard as the mediator between the other grown ups. She is played by Toni Collette and looks a million times better than in About A Boy – it’s hard to believe that she’s the same woman. In About A Boy she has a proper British accent, in this film she has a proper American accent, but she was actually born and brought up in Australia…who knew?

Finally you have the chubby young daughter with huge glasses. It’s her dream to win a beauty pagent.

The story revolves around the family’s road trip to the Little Miss Sunshine pagent and how they all come together as a family, despite all the setbacks.

The film really is laugh out loud in places and it does keep you on the edge of the seat to find out if the young daughter actually gets to star and win the beauty pagent.

Juno – 2007

Given all the crappy teen flicks that are out there, you could be forgiven for thinking that this might be lumped in with them. Not so. Juno is about a 16 year old girl who discovers that she’s pregnant (“how did that happen” “the usual way”). The story centres on what she decides to do and everything that she has go through during a teenage pregnancy.

Once again, never would I have thought I’d sit down and watch, let alone enjoy a film about teenage pregnancy.

The mother to be is very much a happy-go-lucky girl, not getting depressed, just accepts the situation and gets on with her life. She doesn’t expect the father to get involved and doesn’t resent him for what happened. As she goes through pregnancy, she grows up a lot and becomes a lot more mature.

The film is quite funny, not laugh out loud funny, but entertaining. The scripting and dialogue is spot on for American teenage girls (“and she was like, totally, oh my god” “and i was like, I know! crazy freaky huh?”) and the acting and conversations seem entirely natural. What’s also refreshing is the teenagers in the movies are actual teenagers in real life, none of the 20 somethings you get in other teen-flicks.

Juno has been absolutely slated for being a bad movie, with crappy dialogue, I guess I watched a different version to all those people!

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A Second Income

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There is no real point to this post, just general / random musings 🙂

Being quite an independent minded kind of person, when it comes to making money, I always like to be in control of how much I earn. This can be very good, but if you are relying on your own efforts and you become lazy, you can fall flat on your face, err, as I found out…oops!

This is why I currently like the concept of having a job where your salary meets your basic living and lifestyle needs and the second income allows you to easily cover any one off expenses without getting in to debt or allows you to save some money – which far too many us don’t do!

I do believe that the days of staying with one job are well and truly over – we live in a much more fluid kind of business world. The older generation, the kids of the 50’s and 60’s, were always taught to find a good stable job with a large employer, keep your head down, work hard for 40 years or so and retire for a quiet life.

This was all very well when the large industrial companies were growing and trade unions had seemingly unlimited power to prevent any layoffs. It was also very well when society expected you to conform to certain rules and norms such as getting married in your early twenties, having 2.4 kids, buying your home, taking a single vacation per year etc. etc.

Nowadays things are a whole lot more flexible. Tying yourself down to one particular role or job could be damaging in the longer term because as soon as we hit uncertain times like we have now, the large company you sought out for stability doesn’t consider the personal impact when it cuts 5,000 jobs.

Society has also changed to a more self-centered one where we look to buy the latest gadgets, go on expensive foreign holidays, take weekend city breaks to various places on the continent, being less frugal with money, spending more and saving less.

Ever since I first started out on the internet, I believed that it could provide a good second income. At times it provided an incredible income to me.

However, I now think it’s more important than ever that people look to create a second income to build up a nestegg. Salaries barely cover our lifestyle choices so there is very little left over to save. A second income can help supplement any savings you might be able to make.

I personally run a couple of websites which have earned a small, regular income for the last 6 months or so. I spend less than an hour a week on them, yet they continue to make money on autopilot, allowing me to build up savings back in the UK.

Having the second income also means that when you are a bit more extravagant that you should have been (and some of us just can’t help but spend money when we get it), it is offset by your second income.

For example, yesterday I went shopping to buy a ‘smart’ collection of clothes for any work meetings and occasions. In total it came to £100, which is a bit crazy (I do live in India!), but included shoes, shirts and trousers. This is way more than my salary will allow me to spend, but my second income offset it because in the last week I earned £100 and didn’t work a single hour to make that money!

The second income has allowed me to make some investments back in England (albeit at shockingly bad interest rates) and enables me to be a bit extravagant now and then without putting the income from my salary under pressure.

The internet makes it possible for anyone to earn some additional money, but it needs to be approached with an open mind and with the right mindset. Some people, who are very close to me, could easily be earning $1,000 or more a week if they chose to make money for themselves, but instead their mindset believes that they should be working for a salary from a company – extremely frustrating for me when they have such a wealth of talent.

You should also be careful that generating money for your second income doesn’t end up taking more time than your actual job! Another area to be careful with is that you are not compromising your work position, if you are a logo designer and offer freelance logo design services this creates a conflict of interest that most companies will not accept!

Another point to consider is that you should probably be looking to supplement your income, not replace your income. Even if you are only able to generate $50 a week, that’s $2,600 from (hopefully) very little work, if you can save that, over the years it builds up savings that you wouldn’t otherwise have.

Important: Obviously if you do create a second income, you should be reporting this to your tax authorities. I have no idea how this works in other countries, but I fill out my tax return each year online! Don’t be cute and try to avoid taxes! In England the tax threshold is around £6,000 a year, which will be taken up by your salary (and, err, if it doesn’t, might want to pop down to the job centre!), but even if you earn less than this, you need to declare it!

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Indian IT Professionals Come Down To Earth With A Bump

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When I came to India in the first quarter of 2008, the economy was still pretty much in full swing as I set about building my team of superstars. As I interviewed candidate after candidate a few things started to irk me, such as their belief that by changing jobs it could net them a 100% to 300% pay rise.

There seemed to be a belief that pay was related to experience, not expertise. When an SEO analyst said they had 3 years of experience, it usually meant that they had been pressing CTRL-C CTRL-V for 3 years and never took it upon themselves to learn anything new. Yet because they had been copying and pasting for 3 years, they felt that they deserved 3 times the pay of a fresher.

Err, no, it doesn’t work like that.

Another peeve that I had was when I went through a resume and found a person had as many as 6 jobs in 4 years (I honestly kid you not!) and when pressed on this it was for ‘career growth’. It’s fairly normal to read a resume where a person has lasted 12 months or less in each company before moving on.

Here’s a top tip for y’all: An employer wants to see commitment from the candidate. Changing companies every 6 months sets off nuclear alarm bells that says this person isn’t worth an interview, by the time you’ve offered them a job, they’ve already applied to the next one.

My understanding of career growth is that you progress in seniority if you change jobs. Apparently not in India. When asked why they wanted to change jobs, invariably it was for ‘career growth’, when told that they would have the same designation as they’ve got now, this would rarely be a problem – so where’s the career growth?

The HR guys tell me that I got off lightly with candidates. Such was the need for programmers during the boom times, the candidates would play companies against each other and say “well company X is offering me 4 lakhs (400,000 to my uneducated friends!), how much can you offer me?” And an offer is made and they go to the next company and say “company X is offering 4 lakhs, company Y is offering 6 lakhs, how much do you want to pay me?” And so we had the situation where candidates were putting themselves up for auction.

Fortunately Agriya refused to partake in this, if any candidate tried to auction themselves, our (err, that is, Agriya) interest was immediately suspended.

So, what is the situation now?

It really brought it home to me how rough it is out there the other day when I was interviewing two candidates from the same company.

They had both come in looking for a job. The company they were working for had not paid any salaries for the last two months – yet the employees still went to work on the hope that they could get paid.

When it came to asking about expected salaries, we have turned a corner, there were no requests for 1.5x – 2x their current earnings, they reply came back meekly… “whatever the company wants”. Unfortunately the candidates, despite having four years “experience” didn’t have any more expertise than I would expect from a fresher who’s been at the company for 6 months.

Another top tip: Employers are looking for expertise and passion, not just experience! I read a great article today where a gaming company hired a real estate agent to help develop their new game because he was a passionate gamer and ‘modded’ dozens of games out of personal interest. Give me passion over experience anyday!

So, back on topic how hard is the global economy hitting India?

Well, of course it’s having an effect. The smaller IT companies are folding left right and centre (my writing is Americanized [note the ‘z’] now that the English spelling of ‘centre’ just looks plain wrong), the larger multi-national IT companies are shedding staff – up to 10% of the workforce in some cases, freezing their fresher intake programmes and in some cases imposing compulsory salary reductions as they look to adapt and survive.

One of my friends owns a consumer computer chain store throughout Chennai and he says it’s the toughest he’s seen it as the geeky IT crowd who make up the bulk of his clientele dries up.

Still, India has a very strong domestic economy – 1.1bn people still need to be fed, move from A-B, get clothed, socialize, have spectacularly over the top weddings, be entertained and live.

So while the West is mired in recession, shrinking economies and the looming face of deflation looking more and more likely, India’s annual growth forecast has been cut from 8% to a ‘paltry’ 5%. The West has sneezed, India has the sniffles, but it hasn’t caught the cold – yet.

India

India: Keeping it in the family

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There’s a nice saying in English which is: every day is a school day. It means that you learn something new each day.

This is exceptionally true when you are immersed in to a foreign culture.

However, today was a school, college and university day.

I was talking to a work colleague, as you do, and he happened to mention that a girl was betrothed (promised) to another man. This girl is about 22 so nothing wrong there (if you discount the fact that she may have had little say in the decision). My school day came when he went on to tell me that the man she had been promised to was her Uncle.

Not a close family friend that is called ‘Uncle’, but a real blood relative uncle. To be specific, her mother’s brother.

Naturally I thought this was a total wind up as India, particularly South India is such a conservative society with strict morals and ethics. Surely ‘keeping it in the family’ would be against every law and religious custom.

To my horror, I found out that this is real and happens often. Wikipedia describes it in more detail for those of you that want to go there. It’s perfectly accepted in the more rural parts of the country for the daughter to marry the mother’s brother.

Furthermore, when I brought up the subject with others, the general attitude was “yeah, what’s wrong with that?”.

It turns out, my maid, is also married to her uncle – her mother’s younger brother. She leads such an unhappy life because she refuses to ‘live’ with her husband. ‘Live’ was the choice of words used by my friend to explain that although she lived in the same house as her husband, she refused to consummate the marriage, much to the displeasure of her husband and the rest of the family.

Guest Blogs

Guest Blogging: The Lazy Man’s Solution

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Guest blogging is for lazy people who want to invite others to contribute to their blog. People get invited because they may have interesting things to say, be an authority voice on a particular subject or maybe it’s just a friendship and you think it’s cool to have others write on your otherwise very personal website.

To be asked to guest blog on someone elses site is a huge honour and should be approached with sincerity and maturity. Hmm. Just kidding. Being asked to guest blog is a pain in the ass as you try and come up with some witty content to prove how wonderful you are.

So, where is all of this leading? To a guest blog of course. I invited my friend Fay to say a few things on my blog and to show other people that there is more than one Brit living here in Chennai!

Now, without furtther ado, may I present your blogger for the day, Miss Fay Kaufhold…

When Pete asked me to write a guest blog, “about India – your view and opinion of it,” I’ve gotta say I balked. I started my own blog a few months back thinking that I’d be able to explore my views and opinions on India and life in general, but had such a hard time formulating my endless thoughts and opinions into words, that I’d only managed to rant at the peripheries.

“It’s easy” said Pete, “what you are doing here, why you came, what you think of it, what you miss.” I changed the subject back to his rather unpleasant mustache. Yes, Pete had a mustache – briefly. Ask him to show you the horrifying pictures!

So one of the first things I noticed in India was that about 60% of the male population has a mustache. A mustache seems to be a badge of masculinity. In Britain, mustaches belong to the Army-Major type, or to people whose self-image is stuck in their 70s youth, like my Dad. Any female Britisher knows that mustaches are Highly Unattractive. I take it as an indication of how Chennai has seeped into my skin, or dare I say, my bones, the fact that I now think men with mustaches can be attractive. Can.

Roight (as we say in Suffolk, for I am from Saarffuk, in the UK), what am I doing in Chennai? Well, as an actress from the last century, Ethel Barrymore, once said: “You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.”

I really value learning things, about life, humanity, whatever, and I’ve found that the occasions when I have learnt the most are when I have taken an opportunity that seems pretty daunting.

So I was presented with the pretty daunting opportunity of moving to Chennai and beginning my working life in the education/IT sector after completing a rather dreary maths degree, and I took it up. I have now worked for HeyMath, creating interactive Primary-level maths lessons among other things, for 17 months. And in that time I haven’t set foot back in the UK, or even off Indian soil.

I really love it here. I find it very fulfilling to live in a country full of people who often have different values to those I was exposed to growing up. You only have to read Indian papers for a week to realise that the golden BBC impartiality is absolute rubbish. The views and opinions expressed by the BBC and other UK media are very very British and really do not reflect some common value held by all humanity, as they like to think.

I arrived in Chennai not long after returning to the UK from Havana, where I’d spent 6 weeks soaking up some wonderful Latin-American socialism, enjoying Cuban culture and attempting to learn Spanish. I sat on the plane to Chennai wondering what on Earth I was doing going to socially-conservative Chennai.

I spent my first few hours in Chennai slightly over-whelmed by the noise, smells and my inability to cross the road.

I spent my first few weeks wondering how I was meant to cope without being able to meet my friends down the pub in the evenings.

I spent my first few months craving cheese and other things that I cannot even recall now.

But I loved every second! Or at least the majority of seconds.

There are plenty more things I could say about my experience of life in Chennai, but I’ll finish here with something about friendships. I think the good stuff of life is getting to know people, without that, I’d be very bored and unhappy.

In India, I have found getting to know people to be in some ways very easy and very hard. Very easy because people are generally very friendly and open to other people. Very hard because life is so very family-centric and regular social time with friends outside of the context of family is not really the done thing, or rather, it is for some, but not all. Also, people make prejudiced assumptions about you based on the fact that you are a Western woman. This may make people more likely to seek out, or shy away from, friendship with you. It has taken a while for me to adapt to how friendships are formed here and how I can progress them. It’s been a challenge, but a very worthwhile, wonderful one.

Finally:

I love Chennai! My home.

You can follow Fay’s blog here, it’s 10 million times more intellectual than mine, and you might even learn a thing or two about the politics of Chennai (rather than how bad the tuk tuk drivers are that I so frequently focus my wrath upon).

And I never had a mustache.

Humour India

How to spot an Indian

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I came across this list on my travels around the internet. Is it true? Speak to your Indian friends 🙂

————

We Indians are easy to identify!

We are like this only So true, lets start the list

1. Everything you eat is savored in garlic, onion and tomatoes.

2. You try and reuse gift wrappers, gift boxes, and of course aluminum foil.

3. You are Always standing next to the two largest size suitcases at the Airport.

4. You arrive one or two hours late to a party – and think it’s normal.

5. You peel the stamps off letters that the Postal Service missed to stamp.

6. You recycle Wedding Gifts , Birthday Gifts and Anniversary Gifts.

7. You name your children in rhythms (example, Sita & Gita, Ram & Shyam, Kamini & Shamini.)

8. All your children have pet names, which sound nowhere close to their real names.

9. You take Indian snacks anywhere it says “No Food Allowed”

10. You talk for an hour at the front door when leaving someone’s house.

11. You load up the family car with as many people as possible.

12. You use plastic to cover anything new in your house whether it’s the remote control, VCR, carpet or new couch.

13. Your parents tell you not to care what your friends think, but they won’t let you do certain things because of what the other “Uncles and Aunties” will think.

14. You buy and display crockery, which is never used, as it is for special occasions, which never happen!!

15. You have a vinyl tablecloth on your kitchen table.

16. You use grocery bags to hold garbage.

17. You keep leftover food in your fridge in as many numbers of bowls as possible.

18. Your kitchen shelf is full of jars, varieties of bowls and plastic utensils (may of which you got free with purchase of other stuff)

19. You carry a stash of your own food whenever you travel (and travel means any car ride longer than 15 minutes).

20. You own a rice cooker and a pressure cooker.

21. You fight over who pays the dinner bill.

22. You live with your parents and you are 40 years old.

23. You don’t use measuring cups when cooking.

24. You never learnt how to stand in a queue.

25. You can only travel if there are 5 persons at least to see you off or receive you whether you are traveling by bus, train or plane.

26. You only make long distance calls after 11 p.m.

27. If you don’t live at home, when your parents call, they ask if you’ve eaten, even if it’s midnight.

28. You call an older person you never met before Uncle or Aunty.

29. When your parents meet strangers and talk for a few minutes, you suddenly discover you’re talking to a distant cousin.

30. Your parents don’t realize phone connections to foreign countries have improved in the last two decades, and still scream at the top of their lungs when making foreign calls.

31. You have bed sheets on your sofas so as to keep them from getting dirty.

32. It’s embarrassing if your wedding has less than 700 people.

33. All your Tupperware is stained with food color.

34. You have drinking glasses made of steel.

35. You have mastered the art of bargaining in shopping.

36. You have really enjoyed reading this mail, and want to forward it to as many Indians as possible!

Personal

No Kissing Please… We’re British!

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I love being an expat, I love working in a different country, and most importantly I love being in a place where you don’t have to wonder what the weather will be like – it’s always shorts and t-shirt weather. It’s always lovely and hot. Give me blazing sun over winter blues anyday.

I’d say 95% of the time I love being in India. The other 5% of the time I’m trying to bargain with theives Auto drivers.

One of the best things about being an expat is the sheer variety of people you get to meet, from all over the world. I have my little clique, as everyone does, and yes, it’s full of Brits with the occasional American to mix things up. (I’m sure my Scottish friend will take exception to being called a Brit though!).

Today, for example, I was playing football at the American International School (the private, $20,000 / year school for foreign kids) and there must have been at least 10 different nationalities. We even had a guy from Burma! Burma I tell you! I didn’t think they were allowed out of their country.

So all this schmoozing and hobnobbing with foreigners (I’m British, we’re not foreign, regardless of which country we’re in; they all speak our language [tongue is in cheek here and not meant to be taken seriously!]) brings up a problematic dilemma.

That of the social kiss.

To a Brit, personal space is everything, an acceptable form of greeting is to extend your right hand and have a firm handshake. Applies to guys and girls. If you are very close to the person (and they are of the opposite sex!) a light hug may be acceptable, if it’s initiated by the girl (note to guys; don’t initiate the hug, let it come to you. Could cause all kinds of problems otherwise).

So, I now have to navigate this social kissing minefield with foreigners from all over the world (and we are talking just the females here, don’t get any funny ideas). Honestly, for the poor British, who are perfectly happy with the formal handshake, social kissing is enough to give you cold sweats and shivers down your back.

I mean, do you go right cheek then left cheek? Or the other way round? Do you making a kissing noise? Do you just plant one kiss? Do you kiss the air or the cheek? Should you initiate the embrace? What if she leans in and you don’t realise and leave her hanging? Some people do three kisses, how are you to know? What if you accidently kiss on the lips?

Gah. This kissing problem is something you don’t consider when you move abroad. Consider yourself told, if you are thinking of moving abroad and not confident with your social kissing, you could be outcast and ostracized from the expat community. “Did you hear about Jeff? Monique went to greet him and he actually kissed her!”

And to Anita, if you are reading this, I’m really sorry! We don’t understand social kissing!