The past week saw three visitors to the city, all foreigners who had lived here some years ago. Back after a hiatus, they were curious to see what had changed — and what hadn’t. As always, it’s more interesting to view oneself through others’ eyes.
Someone needs to really tell kids that you don’t become ‘foreign’ by going to a mall, buying expensive stuff and ordering a Big Mac
At the outset, there’s Erich — tall, blonde, German and Aryan to the core. Back in the 1940s, he’d have been Goebbels’ poster boy. Once the head of a local study circle chapter, he now heads his own wellness company in South America. Amid horror stories of having his taxicab chased by unemployed black thugs through the now deserted downtown districts of Johannesburg, South Africa (a regular occurrence, if one is to be believed), he came around to talking of his current bugbear — international hotel chains across the river in the old city and the cleaning maids employed by them.
The previous morning, when he was trying to sleep late, he’d been disturbed and woken by a consistently annoying knock on his door by the maid, who refused to get the message; till he eventually proceeded to scare her out of her wits by angrily opening the door — totally starkers — and yelling, “what?!!”. Whatever the good woman might have expected, seeing a six-foot-four-inch, long-haired Norse God towering above her in the buff, probably wasn’t it. With a shriek (that suspiciously sounded more like delight than anything else), she dropped her mop and pail and ran for the hills — possibly in search of room rentals that didn’t include naked guests. I tried explaining the paradoxical Indian hang-up of personal hygiene and room cleaning, but he wasn’t convinced and said that an international hotel chain wasn’t supposed to be “Indian” or “foreign,” but was meant to have standardised services that made people opt for a familiar brand while travelling abroad — and not disturbing a guest when he doesn’t wish to be, was one of the essentials.
The second visitor, ‘Alley,’ was a Canadian architect who had done a stint at CEPT, back in the eighties. Twenty-five years later, she vividly recollects her introduction to India (and Ahmedabad). On her second day in town, a student from her school she’d been visiting an ice cream parlour with, knocked her socks off by saying that since they’d been spending so much time together, they must now get married! If that wasn’t startling enough, a little later, the driver of the family she was staying with at a bungalow in Mithakali, had tried straddling her in the middle of the night on the terrace, as she lay sleeping. To add insult to injury, when she complained to the lady of the house (the ‘saab’ being out of town), the latter tried downplaying and ignoring the issue totally; a good driver perhaps being more important to her than a paying guest. (What a wonderful impression for a foreign visitor to take back and carry all these years!)
Finally, there was Martin, a young Bostonian film-maker who’d worked with a local NGO, some years ago. Of all the three, his remarks are perhaps the most scathing: “Most of the rich kids here think they’re living in the US; the problem is they have no idea of what America is really like! It’s not just about jeans, burgers and dating; most kids there work really hard to learn the value of money.”
In fact, he finds some of the slum kids far more modern and westernised in their thinking and attitude than the suburban brats. “Someone needs to really tell these kids that you don’t become ‘foreign’ by going to a mall, buying expensive stuff and ordering a Big Mac,” he continues; “our country, while emphasising on the freedom of the individual, stresses on work ethic above all else.”
However, he has a solution, “Send them abroad for a few months to actually work as the youth there do; a few hard knocks will straighten them out.”
Truer words were perhaps never spoken, but are mummy and daddy listening? “Koi baat nahi, beta; here’s twenty grand; go buy another iPhone.”