silliness

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Jenna and i have decided that India is a very silly place. Not in a bad way and for no single reason; just in general... a very very silly place. There ARE rules here and laws and social conventions that are all very strict in title. There are simply too many people here to ever fully enforce anything. It is sort of beautiful but is as also sort of annoying at times.

One case is that homosexuality is strictly illegal here but on the flip side it is highly common for men to walk around holding hands and showing various forms of physical affection. These are practices that would set off the gay-dar of anyone in the west but here its common place and not considered "homo" at all.
Another case is traffic. Penalties for law breaking are posted and traffic cops are rather present but indian roads are pure fucking chaos. Most highways are 2 lanes and undivided. Those lanes serve many functions such as the passing lanes for the opposite direction, the sidewalk, grazing land for cattle, pigs, and goats, as well as the perfect place to dry the recent rice harvest. That latter one REALLY got me. We were in a bus that can barely fit inside the painted line for our lane with buses and motorcycles passing each other in both directions at all times. Most of our trips on highways are spent in the opposing lane, facing down trucks coming towards us. Most drivers do the same.. in both directions at all times. But the rice; it just really put a frame around the whole picture that there are just no real rules in effect here. Then there are the cows; they rule this silly country and most of them are aware of it. They just have this assertive look in their eyes while walking down the middle of a busy highway.

Another case in money. Everyone who can hoards money here and every person and business does as much work as possible to not pay taxes. From what a business owner told us most of them succeed and he then pointed out the 3 places he know of that pay taxes in that town. No sale be it land, material or other is every sold for what the receipt says. Every deal is followed by a suitcase full of untraced money that is never on the books so land and good values may seem low to outsiders but the cost is often 10 times the posted amount. And this isn't isolated, this is everybody. A politician from the north even got nailed recently for having a staue made of her out of her own money in the form of a giant mass of rolled up 1000 rupee notes totaling over 500 million rupees. (40-1 on the CA dollar) She got nailed because government employees are supposed to have low salaries as they are public servants and India is impoverished. She had not much to say about the source of her fountain of money.

There are about a million more examples out there but that is enough for now if i were outside i am sure i would see something very silly that would be worth writing about but i am slowly being desensitized to silliness by the day. On a different note, we have found a truly beautiful beach town called palolem. Quaint but still busy enough to not be boring with lots of cheap accomedation and food and one of the nicest beaches i have ever seen. We have a family of pigs with piglets as neighbours to our guesthouse that tromp around feeding and having sex with each other every morning. Kind of an odd thing to wake up to but it beats out screaming children.

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Comments

[Ana]

Beats out screaming children?
Tromping around feeding and having sex all morning sounds like a dream. I wish I was your pig neighbours.