Ripon Building
When a person subordinate to you wants a favour - in my case, the cook wants a loan, the gardener wants leave - he or she approaches with a particular smile. It is the Smile of the Humble Petitioner. When I sat at the table with the Corporation Representative and the People's Representative, my face wore the same smile. They were smiling too, the smiles of people who are dancing through a formality, the outcome of which is more or less certain. I went through the nifty Talking Points that I had prepared; they told me I had no legal grounds for appeal; I cast myself on their mercy, all of us smiling away at each other. Corporation Rep said, "The judge is pleased with you. He grants you a 5% reduction." The whole thing took about five minutes.
I had to wait for forty-five minutes to sign a copy of the decree. In a cramped, narrow room, two women typed the decrees on manual typewriters - one original and three copies, three sheets of blue carbon paper, held together at the bottom with a clothespin to keep everything from flying up in the breeze from the ceiling fan. Six male clerks sat around laughing and chatting. I approached one of the clerks, who waved me to sit down. A friend had given me some tips for dealing with government employees: the lower they are in the hierarchy, the more you must show respect. Call them 'sir' and 'madam.' Try not to turn your back to anyone, they don't like it. And of course (this is a general point of etiquette), don't sit in such a way that you show the sole of your foot to anyone. Applying these rules, and smiling the Smile, I conversed with the clerk, who obliged by telling the typist to bring my decree from the bottom of her pile to the top.
All in all, I was pleased with my small navigation through the maze of Indian bureaucracy.
A link to Indian fotologs, from Just a Little Something.
An amusing page on Hindu hells, from Incoming Signals.
I've been surprised at the number of articles about Gregory Peck in Indian newspapers. Yesterday I saw an Indian angle, in The New Indian Express: the Hindi filmstar Suraiya "caused a sensation by stating that her greatest desire was to do a role with [Peck]. Dev Anand, who was said to be smitten by her, assiduously maintained his reputation of resembling Peck..." Gregory Peck came to India in 1954, and stayed at the Wellington Club in Bombay. "Both Suraiya and Dev Anand lost no time in meeting him. The encounters, from all accounts, were brief but exclusive..."
Dev Anand