Playing the game

So after awhile in India you start to learn how things work and realize the little 'games' that go on in every day life. In my own case and some friends', you start to play your own games to cope.

Once you are in India, you quickly learn that 10 Rupee bills are like gold. This country runs on these things. To take a rickshaw, to buy a coke, a snack, these small, everyday items, you always need 5 - 10 bills. And everyone knows this so everyone goes to great pains not to give these bills out as change. Actually as I think of it, no one ever wants to make change for you at all. So it's like a game of chicken, when you are paying for something, you see who folds first. You hand a Rs. 50 note to an autowala and need change, he claims not to have any. At first I would have just given him the change I had, but now I hold out as long as possible. I may have a stash of 15 - 10 Rupee bills but I'm not gonna let on and I make sure not to let him see that stash in my wallet. Usually after a few seconds of scrounging around, change emerges. Sometimes neither of you really do have change. Hopefully there's a shop nearby to ask, but many a time I've had to walk around with the autowala to go find a place to get the change.

I purchased a book called 'The Argumentative Indian' and more and more I think of that title because I am becoming more and more argumentative. But in India you just simply cannot take 'no' as a first answer. I checked online for two trains tickets and it showed they were available. However when I got to the station, the clerk said that they weren't. After arguing and going back and forth to different offices for about an hour, finally yes, there were two tickets and I had them in my hand. I have often found myself arguing over the price of an auto ride as well. But I knew for a fact yesterday that the trip I took cost Rs. 15. It always costs that much, but this autowala said Rs. 20, so I argued with him. Finally I said 'hamesha pandrah' which means always fifteen. He seemed amused by my few Hindi words, so I walked off leaving him with the fifteen. But you forget that the Rs. 5 difference you are arguing over is around ten cents in american dollars. In the end it's about the principle of the thing, about being right, and fairness.

But here you just learn to play the game and that you have to break the rules.
People here don't stand in nice, neat lines. If you leave any space between you and the person in front of you, that will be interpreted as you just milling around the line, not your actually waiting. So you have to bust up in there; I learned this my first time in India and have been learning it better and better as time passes here. Although maybe I'm becoming too Indian...As I was waiting in the line for foreign tourist train tickets which also includes senior discounts and other things, there were several indians pushed up to the window as usual, and then there were several foreign girls who had not learned this rule yet. They were standing well behind this crowd, leaving the standard western personal bubble of space, and of course not getting anywhere. Maybe I'm a bad person because yes - well that is already pretty established!- , I knew they were in line and they were there before me, but hell, they were leaving way too much space. I easily walked up to the counter and pushed next to another Indian right next to the window. Ten minutes or more after I had left the counter I looked back, and the foreign girls were still waiting there.

My boyfriend, Haider, who is from Iraq has found his own ways to play the game.
Indians often mistake him as an Indian as well and begin speaking to him in Hindi or Gujarati. To get the benefits of being viewed as a native, he usually tells people he encounters on the street that he is Kashmiri. As this is a very far northern state and people tend to be a little fairer and look a little different and people in Gujarat don't seem to know the difference, usually they accept this fact. However one day a wala commented, 'you are the first Kashmiri I've know who doesn't speak Hindi' Ha! He also tries to use this technique to get into cultural things and monuments. Usually museums and things like the Taj Mahal etc. charge one small fee for Indians and a much bigger one for foreigners. Usually he can get the discounted rate, but when he tries to buy several for us, while we the foreigners wait out of eyesight, this just doesn't fly.