...trying to describe to an American friend the smell of the dung fires in the shantytown near your apartment, you use the adjective "folksy."
...your morning commuter train arrives only five minutes past the scheduled time, and it puts you in an inexplicably cheery mood for the rest of the day.
...you decide to start buying first-class tickets for the commuter train, even though it costs twenty-five times the regular fare and involves sharing a caged railway carriage with armed state police officers who look at you funny. But here's the alternative:
...a colleague in your department tells you he paid 500 rupees (about $10) for an hour long massage, and you refuse to believe it was only a massage, for that price.
...a student asks if he can make an appointment to see you and insists on setting a time. Can you imagine--a time! Your colleagues tell him, in Hindi, that he should not make impositions on visiting scholar sir.
...after work, you stop at a chemist to buy a bottle of hand sanitizer. He gives you KY Jelly. Rather than try to explain the difference, you thank him and pay. It was pretty close, and you're not actually that disappointed.
...you miss your train home because you are too busy haggling with the tea-stall vendor over a bottle of water.
...it was the last train on your line, so you have to take a tuk-tuk home, adding an extra hour and a half to your commute. However you did succeed in getting the criminal tea walla to knock 20 rupees (about $0.25) off his original price of Rs 35, which justifies the inconvenience.
...you remember that in the Shanghai airport, you once paid $8.00 for a liter of Aquafina. Then you remember that China owns most of the US national debt. As far you can tell, most Indians prefer to own motorcycles.
...in the tuk-tuk, you read newspaper stories about the protests in Egypt. Cairo looks sparsely populated to you.
...you arrive home two hours late. Your daughter, who has picked up Hindi, decides it would be a fun prank to pretend she no longer understands English. Acting as your translator, she convinces the cook that you want raw onion for dinner and nothing else.
...feeling guilty about your inability to speak any Indian languages, you force yourself to watch an hour of Bollywood videos on the channel that prints the lyrics at the bottom of the screen. You translate a few of the phrases and realize you could be arrested for saying these things to strangers.
...later that night, in a movie on the English-language channel, you see footage of so-called "humane" slaughter of cows (bolt in the head, the animals don't feel a thing, etc.) and it nearly brings you to tears. You finally understand what all those "Meat Is Murder" punks were talking about, and you vow never to eat meat again. At least none with eyelashes.
