8/18/05

Hend

My life in India, 2005-2006

10/10/2005

In Bangalore, almost all prices are negotiable. When I go to buy fruit and ask how much something is, the person selling it adds 10 rupees to the market price. Moosambi, this citrus fruit which I mistakenly thought were oranges at first, is 20-25 rupees/kg in terms of the market. But invariably, the fruit vendor starts with 30 or 35. If you ask for something lower, they instantaneously go down by 10 rupees. Negotiating price is quick and pleasant. I don’t think Bangaloreans have it in them to get nasty over something like fruit.

Unfortunately you can get cheated easily, especially if you’re white skinned (India is one of the places on earth where that classification includes me). Most of this sort of cheating is not even worthy of getting upset over. For example, auto rickshaw taxi drivers often pretend not to have change in order to get an extra rupee or two (or maybe they really don’t have change, who knows), or they might take a longer route than is necessary in order to run the meter a bit longer. I’ve learned how to avoid getting suckered in some of these instances, but many times I feel ridiculous arguing over what is probably no more than 25 cents. One time, though, a guy at a newsstand asked me for 30 rupees for an “Ad-Mag” that had “Rs 10” written in big letters on the front. That was a little too much for me to tolerate.

Why is bargaining and negotiating price so much more common here? Say what you want about culture, but I bet accounting practices are the main reason. In every tiny kiosk or fruit cart, obviously no one is doing any detailed bookkeeping. And I don’t think guys with push carts full of bananas are in danger of getting audited. Plus, in Bangalore the very rich and the very poor live and work right next to one another. So why not go for a little price discrimination and try to squeeze an extra 5-10 rupees out of those who are willing to pay more?

One problem with this whole thing is, as I see it, that the same ideas that go into bargaining and small-scale cheating are also at the root of petty corruption. The Public Affairs Center and Foundation are two of many organizations trying to combat this type of corruption in India. It’s different from the glamorous, Enron/Worldcom corruption. It’s small-scale extortion from ordinary people, and often the poor (for whom “small-scale” is not so small) are most affected. This means that a new homeowner definitely has to pay someone under the table to get his or her property registration forms processed, and a new mother probably has to pay something extra to a nurse or doctor to see the baby that just exited her body. Given the chance to get some extra coin above what the market or the law has dictated, you do it. It’s just the way it’s done. It’s your right. Is this mentality really any different from how Americans think? You might argue that in the U.S. we just have more rigid regulations and better enforcement. And you’d probably be right, at least on some level.

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Who said Hindus worship cows? I knew this was a fallacy, or at best an exaggeration, well before I got here. It’s analogous to saying that Zoroastrians worship fire because so much of their religion talks about it or uses it in ceremonies. Most of my Hindu friends back home explained the whole cow thing to me like this: cows are valuable because their milk is nutritious and vital to the Indian diet, so they are revered.

But the way cows are treated in Bangalore, and I assume other big cities in India, is puzzling. They are everywhere – chewing garbage on a street corner, sitting down to rest on the sidewalk, or just shooting the breeze in the middle of a highway. I’ve heard that there is an organization in Bangalore working to get them off the streets and into more natural and productive settings. But I’ve never seen anyone even acknowledge a cow here. When you’re driving by one you slow down to make sure you crash into it. When you’re walking by one you get far enough away such that its tail can’t spontaneously whack you in the face. You just avoid the thing and carry on. No one seems to care that these creatures largely subsist on human waste and are probably miserable (cow facial expressions are hard to interpret). But of course, don’t even think about shooing them away or, God forbid, pushing or hitting them. I think if I did this I might get lynched.

There are also stray dogs everywhere. I have probably seen three or four dogs actually accompanying an owner. For every one those, I’ve seen about 100 strays. On the side of the street you can see the dogs sleeping, either from exhaustion or hunger or disease or something I haven’t thought of. They are so motionless it looks like they might be dead. Some of them have patchy, awkward looking coats of fur and spotted skin. But some of them seem pretty healthy on the outside, the kind of dog that looks like it might have an owner. People don’t treat dogs cruelly here, but as you might imagine dogs don’t enjoy the same respect as do cows. You can shoo a dog, and a couple of times I have seen children throw rocks or other objects at them to get them to go away.

The downcast of dogs and the downcast of human beings sleep on the sidewalk in about the same manner. For Bangalore’s poorest, there’s no makeshift pillow made of dirty clothes or even a blanket of newspaper. There is no grocery cart full of possessions in plastic bags. There’s just a man or woman in dirty clothes, sleeping in the exact middle of the sidewalk as people walking by step around them. It is a tragic reminder that amid the right conditions even human beings, the species that brought you poetry and calculus and space shuttles, can be reduced to about the same level as a stray dog.

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