Sky News' Asia Correspondent Alex Crawford blogs from India.
Tap.Tap. A familiar grubby little face is pressed against my car window and its owner is tapping insistently on it. She’s a girl of no more than thirteen or fourteen and I see her every day I drive to work at R K Puram in New Delhi.
She sells the Tehelka newspaper which describes itself modestly as India’s leading independent free weekly. As far as I know, it’s the ONLY national independent free weekly newspaper so its claim would seem to be accurate. She tells me she’s going away to her village in the next few days and would I like to contribute to her wedding? It’s her second wedding within a few months.
She’s fast becoming India’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor. The thing is she seems to forget her betrothed quicker than you can say Richard Burton. After the last ‘wedding’ and her disappearance for about ten days from the crossroads where she sells her papers, I inquired anxiously about how the wedding had gone. ‘What wedding?’ she’d said. Then, a pause. The rupee drops. ‘Oh…the WEDDING. Oh, it went very well…’ Another subject is quickly found. You know, I am beginning to think there may be no wedding at all.
Going to the INA market in Delhi, always reminds me of a scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian when Eric Idle won’t let the hapless Brian buy a false beard and ‘tache - which he is anxious to don to escape the Romans- without first haggling over the price.
Maybe it’s the Scottish in me (my father is Scottish and very proud of his bargaining skills) but I just can’t help joining in with the national sport second only to cricket. But it's no fair contest. There’s no such thing as a quick trip to pick up some forgotten milk or a loaf of bread. It’s a whole morning of winding through the lanes and stalls in the forty degree-plus heat, fighting your way past crippled beggars and coolies desperate for you to grace them with your loads of shopping.
I swear the market traders can see a little glow around you which signals you are new in town, fresh to this whole business of haggling, infants against the maestros of bargaining. For a start, the traders all seem to have formidable mental arithmetic skills. Which puts them streets ahead of me to begin with.
‘How much is that?’ I would ask naively, giving the game away that I am a novice. No Indian resident would ever ASK. They would state in a large and unwavering voice that 50 rupees is ALL they are going to pay for those mangoes. The first time we ventured to the market I seemed to end up paying more than a whole week’s shopping at Tesco’s.
The piece de resistance came when one of the traders asked if I needed anyone to do my laundry. And then it finally dawned on me.
Yes, I was being taken to the cleaners.
Well "Sanjay Dhariwal" sounds as though theres a "Heeriay in every corner!
Posted by: Khalid 23 Apr 2007 16:51:15