India or Death?

The new French teacher Cécile made an interesting comment the other day: "When you tell people you're going to India," she said, "you might as well be telling them you're going to commit suicide." There's definitely some truth to that - some people are highly enthusiastic by the idea of visiting India, or knowing people who are about to visit India, while others think it's a pretty crazy place to go.

There's a funny commercial on television right now, for a shampoo that adds body to hair. A sweet-looking Indian girl gets harrassed by an East Asian customs official saying "Not your picture!" in a strong Chinese accent. When they search the Indian girl they find her shampoo and realize that it really is her picture, she just improved her hair a lot since it was taken. We find this quite amusing, because it implies that the Indians see other countries in Asia as having scary immigration personnel.

The big movie in the cinemas right now is Salaam Namaste, a story about an Indian couple who lives together before getting married! We are going to try to see it tomorrow, if we manage to get in. I haven't been to a Hindi movie since "Black," which was a remake of "The Miracle Worker." But Bangalore seems to be boycotting US movies at the moment - all we have is "Cinderella Man" and "The Interpreter."

Continuing our water saga from last time, our shower has begun to leak into the apartment downstairs. So the neighbors chased me down in the stairwell last week and asked if they could take a look at our bathroom. They determined it was the shower and said they would send a plumber and talk to our landlord. We said fine, but no plumber ever came. So this Monday, they rang our doorbell at 8:30 am to tell us that their ceiling was still leaking and that we'd better stop taking showers. I guess that's one solution, but not the cleanest one...