Dusty laptop

This isn’t my story but I wanted to share it as it made me laugh so much at the time and is a perfect example of the kind of small cultural differences between countries that make the experience of living in a foreign country simultaneously baffling and hilarious.

I was on the way back from a meeting with two colleagues today in an auto and we were talking in very general terms about certain cultural differences between India, the UK and the US. One colleague has an Indian friend currently studying in an American University and her friend had called her up yesterday and was telling my colleague how much she missed home. She said that one of the things that she found so frustrating about living in the US was the different rules and systems to those in India and she gave an example saying that she missed the fact that in Indian towns and cities you would see people’s clothes hanging on the line and laid out across the roofs and terraces of the houses and apartments. In the city in the US where she lives there are strict rules about where you are allowed to hang out your clothes to dry and even stricter rules about where you park your cars, leave your rubbish and the length to which your grass is allowed to grow (not more than 6 inches in case you were interested).

In India when any electrical item breaks or goes wrong it would be absolutely inconceivable to simply go to the shop and replace the broken item with a new one as there will always be a shop or a man, or a man with a shop (a table outside the front of his home with a sign saying ‘repairs’) within a 10 meter radius of wherever you are standing that can fix said item. When my colleague’s friend in the US’s laptop broke she took it to the nearest computer shop and asked if they could repair it. She thought that it had broken because some dust had gotten into the laptop and that all that needed to be done was for the laptop to be unscrewed and the dust to be cleaned out. The shop attendant confirmed that this was what needed to be done but said that unfortunately he would not be able to perform the required task as he did not have the authority or the right to unscrew the laptop. The laptop remained unfixed and my colleague’s friend was yet again confounded by what seemed to her to be a totally ridiculous rule and explained in frustration to my colleague, ‘It’s so ridiculous! They don’t even have the right to screw in America!’

Singing in the rain

On Friday evening the rain finally arrived. One second the sun was beating down and the next it had disappeared behind a sheet of dark grey cloud and the wind swept in from nowhere whipping up great clouds of dust and dirt. And then the rain came. Great buckets of it falling in huge, fat, wet drops, washing away the dust and the dirt from the streets and replacing the hot dry air with clean fresh air. The temperature plummeted from 43 degrees to an incredible 28 degrees in the space of a few hours. It’s the strangest feeling to go from forgetting what it feels like not to be hot and sweaty to suddenly feeling a slight shiver go through you from the cold (28 degrees, my new benchmark for cold!).

Delhi is many things to me but it’s rare that I’d describe it as a beautiful city in its totality but after the first rain it really did seem as though I were seeing the city again for the first time. The day after the rain the sky was the deepest, brightest blue I think I’ve ever experienced here and with the dust washed away the city’s true colours are revealed underneath, the lines of buildings appear sharper and everything is pulled into focus again. The sweet, sticky smell of summer is replaced by the smell of rain water, wet leaves and damp earth and after weeks of breathing in hot, dusty air you feel light headed with excitement at being able to breath in lungfulls of clean, cool air. There’s a palpable sense of relief and excitement that ripples across the city.

I know that in the UK there were days when I just wished I lived somewhere else where it didn’t rain quite so much – much like everyone at home is probably feeling right now after the 191^st day of rain this year – but I hope that when I am back home on one of those rainy days that I’ll at least remember on occasions how much I appreciated the rain out here and how lucky we are to have so much of it.