Being aggressive is really not my cup of tea.. I can't bargain to save my life... I give in too easily... I hate to have confrontational conversations with anyone, be it the waiter and the restaurant or my close friends... I think its okay to adjust... All these personal traits of mine are coming to bite me in my butt now... because to live well in India and not to be taken for a ride, one has to be aggressive... every where!
The other day I was in the department store waiting to pay for my things, I was standing behind the yellow line, which says "wait here" and two early twenty somethings come right in front of me... they dont even bother to check with me who is standing there, with a bag full of things...! What I have noticed is that if there's even a tiny inch of place between one customer and the next, the others think that its okay to squeeze in between. So I had to remind them to get in line and they had the audacity to give me a dirty look and say "why were you standing so far away?" and i gave them a mouthful.. saying that I didnt want to breathe down the other persons neck while he was paying his bill. The entire experience of shopping was ruined because of this.
Then there are restaurants, where you pay a fortune for the food, and you get clumsy service. One evening we opted for outdoor seating at one of these new pricey resataurants here... we got our beers and a fly dived in to our pitcher, which still had a decent amount of beer. So we called the waiter... and asked him to take it back and give us a refill... and that guy had to push back... and say i will have to ask the manager... i mean, really? so my friend had to give him an earful! There goes our nice evening down the drain.
Everyone is in a hurry... the other day at the airport... our cab driver just pulled the vehicle curbside and and we were getting down when the guy behind us started honking without a break... there I was getting down with a baby sleeping on my shoulder and a diaper bag and that fellow has no empathy! I was so damn pissed that I showed him the finger... and it so happened that the guy was a fellow passenger on our flight. I dont understand what he was honking for? We are all getting down and going inside, did he want my cab driver to move one centimeter forward so that he could be that much closer to the entrance? Give me a break!
There are many many more such instances... I agree India has changed, just being modern, wearing jeans and talking english is not enough. We seriously need a mentality shift.
