Indian Samurai इंडियन सामुराई

We talk about the casts a lot but we don’t know much about it.

This is how I discovered this charming community of shit pickers with bare hands: the manual scavengers of Vidisha - 15.12.2010.pdf. Their job: go to people’s places, manually scavenge and bring the pot outside the house, with the shit sometimes dripping.

This has been banned by the law but it is still practiced. Some people do it even by choice, or at least be fear of being “mocked”.

This brings us back to the Middle-Age in France. After all, we invented the chamber pot!! But we stopped using it somewhere in the 20^th century… (when we became “conquering bourgeois” who made natural needs disgusting).

I was talking about flying in India…

And now I am going to talk about the lack of discipline of Indian flyers. (I have not yet mentioned all the throat and digestive noises that you hear nor the sweat smells that you cant’ escape but I won’t).

No, I would like to talk about the landing only.

In India, as soon as the wheels have touched the track, everyone is up – the staff does not react anymore. There is no need to ask them why they rush like this, they all do…

And it can even be dangerous to stand (rebelliously) in the way of someone who wants to grab his bag while you have decided for the doors to open before you move!

This ad is a good illustration of this. I love self-deprecating!

It’s bad to laugh at people but this is too good!

Here is an article with a compilation of the best comments made by Indian travellers on Virgin airlines… (http://www.mumbaimirror.com/index.aspx?Page=article&sectname=News%20-%20City&sectid=2&contentid=201102082011020802062751495a638d3#ftr2)

• Slow down, plane’s going too fast
• Need to spit, open the windows
• A passenger insisted on sleeping in the overhead luggage storage bin. Post dinner, he climbed on his seat and tried getting into the storage bin, thinking planes too have two or three tiers of beds like trains do.
• Where are the ladies?
• There is no water  (communément utilisé en Inde à la place du papier toilettes).
• Phone please, kids are waiting. Passengers would see the crew members using intercom handsets on the flight and mistake them to be telephones.
• Can I have a Mac Donald’s?
• On a Los Angeles to London flight, a woman booked a seat for her Barbie doll, which was dressed exactly like her. She even requested for a cup of tea and a massage for the doll.
  An elderly passenger was unable to sleep in the Upper Class and asked for a sleeping pill. When that didn’t help, he asked crew to tell the captain to turn off the plane’s engines. Air hostess’ response? “Er.... cannot do that sir, we need the engine to stay airborne.”
•  On a flight from New York, a female passenger asked, "Is there anything you or the captain can do about this turbulence...?" The crew member replied, "(Virgin Atlantic owner) Richard Branson has a lot of contacts and influence with some very important people, but unfortunately, Mother Nature isn’t one of them...just yet!"
  

   

  Promise, next time I’ll look for comments by French travellers!!