Asking for a receipt, buying a train ticket or posting a parcel: official acts that are a matter of seconds in Europe can take hours in India. However, this isn't always due to the laissez faire attitude of the Indians, lovingly called shanti (“peace”) by the natives. Most of the time, Indian bureaucracy is to blame for the deadly delays. That is why an act as simple as posting a parcel can become a nerve racking odyssey.
9.30 am Although a sign in front of the main post office in Mangalore announces in bold letters that the counters will open at 9.30 am every day, no one of the employees is to be seen when I get off the rickshaw. Three glasses of chai later, I've finally made my way to the counter where a grumpy post office employee explains to me that I have to get my parcel sewn up by the tailor next door. This is because in India parcels aren't sent in paper boxes but as neat little bundles of cloth. After searching up and down the street for a while, I finally find the tailor shop which is still closed, of course. The man in the shop next door is busy arranging a couple of skirts and tells me off for waiting in front of his display.
10.26 am Namasté! A chubby little man carrying a briefcase jumps off his scooter and walks towards me with a big smile on his lips. Even before he has sat down behind the counter, he starts a lively debate about corruption in India: It is really impossible! Everyone is corrupt, politicians, doctors and most of all the police! To become a policeman, he explains to me, you have to pay around 50 lakh rupees (about 76 310 euros) in bribes which is why most aspiring police officers take out a credit. It's quite hard to pay this back taking into account that a policeman only earns 15.000 rupees (about 230 euros) a year and therefore all officers are corrupt.
10.55 am While the tailor bewails the state of India, I have a good look around his shop and am surprised to find that he not only sells sewing machines but also all kinds of kitchen appliances and bric-a-brac. As I cannot see any cloth whatsoever in the shop, I take advantage of a short break in the conversation to ask when he could sew up my parcel. Without batting an eyelid, the shop owner sips his tea and says: I'm not a tailor. That's the man next door.
11.00 am Annoyed, I again try to speak to the wrinkly little man in the shop next door who tells me in his incomprehensible English that I should wait. Why he didn't tell me right away that he was the tailor and sent me to the wrong shop instead? These kinds of questions had better not be asked in India.
11.05 am When he has finally revamped his shop, the tailor almost grabs my plastic bag. With a few precise stitches, he transforms the whole thing into a round parcel. It's a matter of seconds and costs 30 rupees (45 cents).
11.12 am Back in the post office, the mood of the woman behind the counter hasn't changed for the better. After endless discussions, she hands me a form that I have to fill in. Just as I begin writing, she pulls back the paper and hysterically admonishes me that I should “xerox” it first, which means “photocopy” in India. So I set out in search of a copy shop which I finally find in a backyard nearby.
11.27 am Back in the post office, the post office employee complains that I didn't get enough copies. While I'm still deliberating whether I should slam the parcel on her head and just leave it, I apologise politely and run back to the copy shop.
11.35 am Relieved to have finally got it right, I fill in the first form and hand it over to the lady behind the counter. She then tells me to complete the remaining seven forms with the exact same information. When I ask her, not only slightly annoyed, why I couldn't have filled in the form first and then made the photocopies, she pretends not to understand my question. As I write my parents' home address for the eighth time, my pen stops working.
11.56 am After I've finished writing the address on the parcel, the woman starts fumbling it and pulls a face. For whatever strange reason, she seems to think that I want to send a bottle of whiskey to Germany and gives me a withering look. Suspiciously, she checks the address on the parcel and on the form and pretends it's not the same. While I try to convince her, feeling more annoyed by the minute, that the names and zip codes are all matching each other, a quotation from Shashi Tharoors The Great Indian Novel comes to my mind: “Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art-forms. Every official act in our country has five more stages to it than anywhere else and takes five times more people to fulfil; but in the process it keeps five more sets of the potentially unemployed off the streets.”
12.00 am It takes about just as long till I have persuaded her to accept the address of my hotel as the sender’s return address. Finally, she prints out the stamp and sticks it onto the parcel.
12.14 am After having paid 1055 rupees (about 16 euros), I leave the post office and buy a chai first thing to calm my nerves. If Kafka had been Indian, his novels would have been just as impressive. Drinking chai while waiting for a queue to dispel or for someone to emerge from his office is an integral part of this country. But to be honest, what would India be without the terribly long delays? At least I have assured today that five more Indians are earning their bread and butter.
Four weeks later, the totally unexpected efficiency of Indian bureaucracy is proven yet again. My parcel arrives safe and sound in Germany which I didn't really expect anymore. As the Indians say in Hindi: Saab kuch milega! (“Everything is possible.”)
Photos: (C) Dave Watts, Listeners Vision, Raaf.
“I don't know why everyone always has to run. Life is not just about rushing around like crazy!” Looking at stressed out Europeans and busy Indians, Piyush can only shake his head. But not so long ago, he himself was very much one of them. Piyush, who was born in Surat in Gujarat, worked himself into the ground for six years for a renowned firm of architects in Mumbai. During this time, he collaborated with Hafeez Contractor, one of the most famous Indian architects, and designed gardens and hotels around the international airport in Mumbai. If his professor hadn't taken him to the Osho ashram in Pune more than ten years ago, he would probably still adorn Indian mega cities with skyscrapers.
“I've learnt a lot at the ashram that I want to share”, Piyush says. He has been working as a meditation teacher, counsellor and reiki healer for about nine years now, trading in his job as an architect for a life with no regular income and without a permanent home: “I try to live with as little as possible and don't charge money for my work. Somehow or other, I always find the rupees I need and most of the time they are donations.” Although Piyush still has a bank account, he only owns two shirts and no underwear. But he wouldn't really need any, he says, because Goa is warm enough to only walk around in large Ali Baba trousers.
Guys, guys! I need more action!!! One of the hip Mumbaites on the set who seems to be the director of the film runs back and forth between the dancers, gesticulating wildly. The latter show first signs of exhaustion, as do the extras, after four long hours of shooting. Only the body builder in the leather jacket is still tirelessly twirling his beloved around in front of the camera, although the scene doesn't seem to have changed since the morning and we must by now have completed the 136th take. After more than eight hours of only moderately interesting conversations with the other extras, I am poking at the plastic olive in my glass filled with coloured water, lost in empty thought. Okay guys, last take! After almost ten hours, the last take feels like a liberation. I quickly sign a random document, pocket my 500 rupees and make my way to the train station where the night train to Delhi awaits me.
Back in Colaba, the buzzing centre of Mumbai, I buy a ticket for the afternoon show of Desi Boyz. As Akshay and Co. only received moderate praise for their performance, I brace myself for a three-hour marathon of endless song and dance scenes without any sense. But as it turns out, Desi Boyz is not that boring. After all cinema goers have supplied themselves with sickly sweet cake, the Indian national anthem blares out of the speakers and everyone sings along. Off we go for some serious Bollywood action! Jerry and Nick, two friends who are currently living in London, lose their jobs and can't afford to support their orphaned nephew and their expensive fiancée any longer. They therefore sign up with an escort agency and proceed to entertain young girls in bikinis with their erotic dance moves. As neither the fiancée nor the youth welfare office really like this, Jerry and Nick spend the rest of the film making things up. It doesn't really matter that they all only speak Hindi because their facial expressions are exaggerated enough for me to understand the plot.
Spotlights, grey plastic chairs and roaring air-conditioning. The backyard shed I end up in after a long bus drive through the never ending slums of Mumbai doesn't in the least resemble a professional film set. There are a lot of cameras that could easily collapse if you tripped in the general cable tangle, but actors are nowhere to be seen and the set, which is probably meant to represent a bar, reminds me more of a strip club. To complete the décor, a couple of curvy dancers in colourful mini-dresses are scattered around, waiting to get going. If it wasn't for the little Indian boy who tirelessly supplies them with water bottles, you could easily forget that this is an Indian film set because all the dancers are Europeans. That is also the reason why I end up at the set of the Bollywood film Desi Boyz on an unbearably hot day in May: I'm white and that's what the Indian cinema goers want to see.
Most of them found their way to the Bollywood set accidentally, just as I did, because they could only afford the scummy hotel of the Salvation Army in the ridiculously expensive city centre of Mumbai. The latter serves at the same time as a placement agency for European extras in Bollywood films. Why say no to a whole day of free food in an a/c room that even makes you 500 rupees (about 7 Euros)? What would be a starvation wage in Europe is more than a good day's earning in India, especially if you only have to stand around. Our only direction is quite simple: We have to pretend that we are in an underground salsa bar in London. That should come naturally to you guys, right? Our supervisor can't stop grinning. The fact that such a location in London would definitely look different, if it existed at all, seems to be of no importance.
Normal Indians are almost never part of a Bollywood film, not to speak of beggars and the homeless. This is hardly surprising as most cinema goers don't want to be reminded of their life outside their plush seats and prefer to dream about magical wealth and romantic love. The Hindi language film industry in Mumbai caters for this with ease, just as its rival Hollywood is equally concerned with concocting dreams. Thus, most of the films produced by Bollywood are either cheesy rom-coms or action films. But even though Bollywood now churns out more films per year than Hollywood, the American film industry still has the bigger revenues by far. How the fight between these two cinematic giants will develop in the future remains to be seen, but as the population of India is incessantly growing, stagnation in the most extravagant film industry in the world is not very likely.
In spite of this, CURRYPOWER was born to shed some light on Indian mysteries. There are so many things to discover and experience in India that it would simply be shame if I kept them as my own personal treasures. Students from Chandausi, yogis in Rishikesh, camel drivers in the desert around Jaisalmer and media moguls from Mumbai: they will all have their say here and paint their own version of Indian realities, complete with the surprised, despairing and amazed view of a western girl on her way across the subcontinent.
From December onwards, you can read my exciting, crazy and enlightening stories about India on CURRYPOWER. Number one will come to you in a couple of days from Mumbai, heart of the Bollywood film industry where I start my career as an Indian film starlet.
Lilian Maria Pithan