More from the voyage of learning

Continuing the theme of my last post on the most endearing things I encountered on my recent trip to India, I offer you now the 10 most infuriating things I encountered on my recent trip to the deep south of India:

10. Petty bureaucracy: Seemingly since individuals have very little control over various aspects of their lives, when they are put in positions of power, however trivial, they exercise the small amount of authority vested in them with an almost feudal vigor. A great example was a clothing store where I had taken my mother to get her a sari for her birthday. After picking the sari, you couldn't just pay for it. All the saris are shown to you by a sales clerk, who then hands the chosen sari to another guy, who walks with you to a cash counter where you pay for the sari. You would expect then that the sari would be handed to you. Not so much. They give you a receipt in 2 copies, which you then take to another counter where they examine the receipt carefully, tear off one copy and hand you the sari along with the receipt. On your way out, you hand the sari and the receipt to a guy at the door who examines the whole deal to make sure that you're not decamping with contraband. He then stamps the receipt and lets you out of the store with the sari. Any attempt to short-circuit this "make work" exercise is frowned upon.

9. Complete lack of civic responsibility: You need only to see people living in large homes surrounded by high fences dumping their garbage and refuse over the tops of their fences onto the street to get this. Another example is where little boys work at gas stations and garages for the express purpose of dumping used motor oil and lubricants at the street corner. The attitude is "Not in my backyard, but in my neighbor's front yard is just fine". The only truly authentic way to describe it in Hindi is "मेरा बाप का क्या जाता है"। ( Man, I just love this new Hindi transliteration capability in blogger. This is going to add so much more this blog. Even fewer people will read it now.)

8. The double standard: What's right for the goose is most certainly not right for the gander. Certain attitudes and activities are reserved for men. Women just cannot aspire to them. For example a frankly appraising glance at a member of the opposite sex is absolutely reserved for men. A woman who looks at a man in any way other a purely furtive glance risks being branded a harlot.

7. The status of women: While women seem to enjoy parity in the work place, at least in middle and lower-middle level jobs, and India was one of the first countries to have had a woman leader, women seem to be conspicuously absent from most the management teams of most large companies. Women entrepreneurs seem to be restricted to micro-businesses, and in employment seem to be restricted to traditional roles such as nurses, school teachers and ob-gyns.

6. 'Eve teasing': A innocent and somewhat romantic-sounding term unique to India, that hides a darker, more unpleasant truth. In this euphemism for harassment, hordes of young men grope, push and rub against women in buses, trains and other crowded public places, causing intolerable and unacceptable stress to young women. A young girl told me she decided to drop out of college some distance away from her home due the uninvited attentions of several 'roadside Romeos'. While in Italy it's not uncommon to find men leaning languorously on Vespas, making frankly appreciative comments about women passing by, they draw the line at physical molestation. And if the woman in question doesn't appreciate the wolf whistles, the Italians pack it in. The young college age Indian men see lack of enthusiasm for their advances as a challenge. Perhaps bred on a steady diet of Bollywood movies where all it takes is a couple of songs to turn the heroine's anger and disgust into undying love for the hero, they ratchet up the level of harassment to frankly appalling levels.

5. Driving habits: You realize the true horror of Indian driving habits only when you are traveling on an Indian highway in a car (which from the quality of the ride appears to have square wheels) that's approaching 3 oncoming vehicles, only one of which is on its own side of the road. The oncoming bus is being passed on a blind corner by another bus, which in turn is being passed by a large truck and they are all hurtling at you 3 abreast with their headlights and all manner of auxiliary lights on. So what does your driver do? Get off the pavement onto the shoulder and allow these suicidal lunatics to go past? Hell no. What kind of man would he be if he did that? This is clearly a call to arms. So he turns his headlights on high beam, leans on the horn and continues to barrel straight at the oncoming vehicles in this high stakes game of chicken. These contests of manhood are not resolved in the same way on every occasion. Sometimes the outermost oncoming vehicle decides at the last minute to hang back a little allowing enough room for the three others to just squeak by. Sometimes your driver loses his nerve and goes off the road onto the shoulder, waving his fists and making lurid suggestions about the sexual practices of the other drivers' mothers and sisters. In either case, you would be needing a change of underwear about now.

4. The obsession with lighter complexions: Perhaps as a result of hundreds of years of colonization (first the Mughals from Central Asia ruled India for 250 years from 1525 to 1775 and then the British ruled for a further 200 years until 1947) by light-skinned foreigners who were always in positions of authority, caused the average Indian to prize the lighter complexion. But the emphasis on the desirability of a 'fair' complexion is bordering on the ridiculous. Skin lightening products have created a $140 Million market and matrimonial ads in the papers and on internet marriage sites asking for and offering "fair" brides abound. There is change on the way with more successful dark-skinned Bollywood actresses, but it's far too gradual. The common man (and woman) still thinks lighter complexions are prettier.

3. A strong anti-American sentiment coupled with a desire to migrate there: It would be an extremely rare social gathering in India where the topic does not eventually turn to the war in Iraq or American politics. Inevitably at these times, the popular response from the whisky- soaked guests is either a disparaging remark about the bumptious Americans, or a George Bush joke illustrating just how clueless the 43rd President is. Admittedly, the President doesn't do himself any favors and has been providing rich fodder for comedians the world over since his first inauguration. But what makes this contempt for America and things American, more puzzling is that every middle class family has at least one child (sometimes every child) in the United States, who is pointed to with great pride. India accounts for the largest number of foreign students admitted to American Universities each year. In the immortal words of Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware,"you can't go into Dunkin Donuts or a 7-11 if you don't have a slight Indian accent". Seemingly the same rule applies to Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Yale, MIT and Stanford. So why the contempt?

2. Flies: They are the most ubiquitous creatures and are to be found equally plentifully on the piles of garbage piled on street corners as they are on sweets and candies in roadside stalls. They fill me with dread every time I see them swarming around food, and I can imagine myself contracting some particularly virulent form of hemorrhagic fever. Enough said.

1. Mosquitoes: Having donated many pints of my blood to the swarms of mosquitoes that invade Indian homes every night, I should now be on fairly congenial terms with them. But I am not. When I awoke on the second morning in India with my face and head covered in hundreds of angry red bumps, my heart lurched sickeningly and visions of small pox isolation wards came unbidden to my mind. Pulling up my T-shirt and examining my chest and stomach closely, and finding no bumps convinced me that these were indeed evidence of the nocturnal visitations of my buzzing nemeses. My horror at the viral fevers spread by these critters and the casual way in which people in India refer to a recent bout of such a mosquito-borne illness called Chikungunya, causes this to be ranked the #1 most infuriating thing I encountered in India.