Drinking tea and crossing the street, among other challenges

I think I may be a tea thief. Today, as I was leaving work, the man who brings tea to everyone at various points during the day stopped me and seemed to be asking for something, but I didn't understand. Hamid, my driver, talked to him and the man left. When I asked Hamid what he had wanted, he said that he wanted money for the tea I've been ordering. For some reason, since the guy has not requested money from me since I've been in the office, I figured the tea was an office-subsidized phenomenon (like soda is in Chicago.) But alas, it is not, and I'm not sure if I have a weeklong-plus backlog of tea money that I owe him, or if my coworkers have noticed that I don't get the system and have been paying for me (a source of this suspicion is that they sometimes won't accept my fair share of lunch that we order in, which is silly to me since I can expense it.) So tomorrow I'll have to ask and find out. I feel really bad, though -- I don't want to be the jerk who won't pay for her 3 cups of tea a day.

This kind of misunderstanding makes me wonder whether I'm just totally clueless and being rude all the time, and it makes me crave my home context where I don't have to question how I am expected to respond, and social life makes a little more sense. Fortunately for me, I have been surrounded by English speakers for most of my stay here, so they've made life easier for me. I asked Hamid today how many languages he speaks, and the number is 5: Urdu is his mother tongue, and he also speaks English, Hindi, Marathi, and Arabic. And he's a driver, not a professional interpreter or some such glamorously multi-lingual worker. Unbelievable.

For those who are interested, I read up on Urdu on Wikipedia as well. Very interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu

For those who refuse to click the link, Urdu is notably the official language of Pakistan, and "it developed under Persian and to a lesser degree Arabic and Turkic influence on apabhramshas during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1526-1858 AD) in South Asia." It is apparently somewhat similar to Hindi, so Hindi and Urdu speakers can understand each other fairly well. I ride by a huge, beautiful mosque each day on the way to and from work, and attached to it is an Urdu school. I need to try harder to get the picture of this place, which has been eluding me behind traffic and blurred windows.


On a totally different topic, I keep forgetting to mention another funny thing that I have seen repeatedly during my commute. It's possibly the worst name I've ever seen for a restaurant: Aaswad. That's just unfortunate. And hilarious.

To end, I will leave you with a video I took of crossing a busy street, Linking Road, yesterday. It doesn't capture some of the vehicles that were inching up behind us (although you can hear them honking), but it helps illustrate the frogger scenario that Mark has described:

Meet the coworkers

Today was my first day in the office, and I basically spent it getting to know my coworkers here: Purnima (who I met previously in the US), Sujoy (who I also previously met), Pallavi, Mayuri, Pranita, Hari, Biswaroop, Nitesh, Brijesh, Ashwini, Abu, Indranil, Harshada, and Uma (ha! that was from memory.) In short, they are all fantastic. The day flew by, and I really just got to know them and tried to spend some time with them as they worked to answer some of their pent-up and incidental questions. Tomorrow I will again "play the field," but I will also spend some time giving a training on online data set-up and processing, as most of the studies that they have seen so far have been ones where the interviews were conducted door-to-door, which has a different format than we receive when the interviews are online. Anyway, enough shop talk, but that's the plan.

We went out to lunch together to a nice buffet restaurant, and the highlight for me was not only the authentic naan (just like what I get on Devon, which makes me even happier to live so near to Little India), but also a dish called "Veg. Diana," which nobody else recognized either, but as far as I could tell consisted of mixed veggies (carrots, peas, green beans) in a creamy sauce with rosewater in it. It was fragrant and delicious. Of course, the 4 different desserts I tried weren't bad, either. :) On the way out of the restaurant, I got to try some breath freshening sweets/herbs (not sure what exactly they were, but sort of like a handful of small candy/seeds...Sujoy didn't know what they were either, just that he liked them) -- these were really nice as well. On the way back from lunch, our black & yellow cab took us past Mahalaxmi racecourse, which is situated near Mahalaxmi temple, a landmark of the city and, as Hari told me, what some Hindu faithful believe is the reason why Mumbai is India's financial capital (Mahalaxmi is the goddess of wealth.)

Other interesting tidbits:

• Brijesh informed me today that it's typical for a man to order for both himself and his female companion in a restaurant -- this explains some awkwardness with waithers that I've detected when Mark and I have dined out together
• Hari was interested in why I am a vegetarian because the idea of a vegetarian-by-choice is pretty rare here -- he said that the large number of non-meat-eaters here is mainly accounted for by tradition and culture, not personal conviction
• Among my coworkers, only one, Nitesh, is a native Hindi speaker. He is from Delhi, which is in the northern part of India, where Hindi is spoken most purely. Everyone else teases him that his Hindi is so pure that they can hardly understand it, as they are used to central-to-south Indian Hindi, which is largely mixed with other languages like Marathi, English, etc. The rest are native Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, and Malayalam speakers, although their English is also excellent, as evidenced by their responses of comprehension when I can't help but lapse into a bit of slang.