This story begins in Paris, Rue des Cinqs Diamants. There’s a restaurant there, yes, probably the one you are thinking about, and in that restaurant worked as a waiter a guy with the most theatrical face I have ever seen. That guy often wore a t-shirt that read Same Same But Different. For months, watching [...]
Archive for the ‘My India’ Category
S for Same Same But Different
Posted in My India, Same Same But Different on November 3, 2008 | 1 Comment »
R for Reduce Reuse Recicle
Posted in My India on October 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The ways of trash are infinite. Here, for instance, they include aerial trajectories from windows and balconies to streets or sidewalks. Or long residencies outside people’s front door, on the landing, until someone (someone else) comes to take it away. Trash occupies the sides of the roads, and it serves as food and bedding for [...]
Q for Qwality
Posted in My India on September 24, 2008 | 2 Comments »
As everywhere in the world, most of items in India come in different prizes and quality, or to say it local, qwality.
With the exception that there is no “low qwality” here. There is not even “normal qwality”. Qwality, in local small shops, comes only in three types: “best qwality”, “very best qwality”, and “special qwality”.
Try [...]
P for Party
Posted in My India on September 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I am not a party person, but Indian parties are something else. They are not big, they are huge; they are not frequent, they are constant. People here know how to party since they come to life, they enjoy doing it, and they are better than anyone else anywhere else at it.
I have been at [...]
O for Orthography
Posted in My India on September 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
India is the land of writing. Indians love the writing. Partially because they love papers, and they love love love bureaucracy, they will always ask you to fill forms, write commentaries and suggestions, leave a note the guest book. But it goes much beyond that: a urge of communication affects any kind of people, from [...]
N for Nature
Posted in My India on September 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I am not a Nature person. I get bored outside cities, I wouldn’t go on a desert island no matter how nice the sea is, I intensely dislike trekking. Nature normally doesn’t impress me.
It does, though, here.
Not as much in the big things (the Himalaya, the desert, the forest), but in the small. Nature here [...]
M for Metro
Posted in My India on August 22, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Delhi Metro does not simply move in space, it moves in time.
You leave the semi-contemporary locations of New Delhi, and get underground. Everything is made of steel and glass, there are escalators and displays that announce when the next train will arrive. And they are on time.
Very few things remind you of where you are: [...]
L for Language
Posted in My India on August 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Along with other 22 official languages, India is an English speaking country.
The problem is that Indians are not an English speaking people. Signs are in English, money are in English, documents are always also in English. Clerks in the grocery store only know rice, bread, how much? and some numbers. Rickshaw drivers only know left, [...]
K for Kitchen, Bathroom, and Everthing I didn’t know
Posted in My India on August 22, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Things in my South Delhi flat divide in two big groups: those that I changed, or fixed, and those that I just had to accept.
They were equally hard, the fixing part and the accepting one.
To begin with, as my postmodern self learned with a bit of a shock, there is no Ikea in India. Or [...]
J for Jugaar
Posted in My India on August 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Jugaar is a Hindi word that doesn’t translate. And it doesn’t need to, because it wouldn’t make sense in any place that I can think of. Instead, it makes all the possible sense in India, and I am lead to think that jugaar is what India is based on, what gives it its ultimate energy [...]
