Seeing the Unusual in the Usual

July 10, 2010

As I disembarked my auto rickshaw, heading home, I did a double-take when I noticed a man standing beneath a tree engaged in a staring contest with a crow.  Or maybe it was a raven. The staring contest, I am certain about.  It got me to thinking about the various events, actions, people, and happenings that catch my eye, are unusual to me, yet seem to go unnoticed by others.

  • A Temple Priest, bald and nearly naked, riding a motorcycle, wearing a dhoti and a Brahman string as a sash
  • A child defecating on the platform
  • Men wear long pants or short dhotis, but shorts are, of course, for boys.
  • Seeing only men gathered at a local cricket match—no women…But women working muscularly at local construction sites.
  • Dozens of shops, each the size of a good closet, all in a row selling the same products
  • Policemen who wave traffic on…after the traffic has already decided to go
  • Hard to find anti-persperant, but not deodorant. As if the effort is hardly worth it, so don’t fight it, just make it smell pretty
  • ‘Digestive’ biscuits. Not sexy packaging, but very popular.
  • Running a red light—no one is coming, so what’s the point, I suppose. That’s what my driver must have thought when everyone else was driving on as he sat waiting for the light change. But then he went anyway.
  • Large dancing bears at a formal wedding (suits, of course, not beasts)
  • The extreme kindness of people…until it is time to board the bus
  • Washing the dirt from the pavement outside the house, but throwing the trash out into the street, river, bush, etc.
  • McDonald’s in a vegetarian land
  • Bump accidently into an object such as a backpack and apologize to it
  • Where motorcycles barely make it through the ever-thinning space between roaring metal hulks, little school girls petal blithely along on bicycles, seemingly unfazed by the inch of space that passes between a motorcycle and themselves
  • Yellow-faced women
  • Powdered children
  • Penguin-shaped trash cans at petrol bunks
  • Lighting design in the theatre that seems to be designed at the spur of the moment … on EVERY production
  • Endless billboards of the Chief Minster’s smiling, chubby face. Imagine a picture of your governor even hundred yards or so along the roads. Every road.
  • Scarcity of napkins where all foods are finger foods.
  • Cattle nonchalantly moving through a field of weaving vehicles, instinct seeming to encourage their unconcerned attitude

And the deeper…

  • People who subsidize the maid or watchman’s children to attend college
  • How joyful and thankful people are if you visit their home
  • The extreme concern people show over your eating habits
  • The auto driver I haggled down by 10 rupees who now seems happy to try and catch me in the mornings
  • The young people that were briefly students of mine four and a half years ago that proudly tell me they still have the candy wrapper for a present I gave them
  • The often respectful attitude that adults offer children when having a conversation