bus driver: each one of them costs 12.30 so three tickets cost hmm
me:uff
bus driver: 12 and 12 make 24, 30 and 30 make 60 thats 24.60
us: omg!( lolling)
bus driver: we need to add another 12.30
me: its 36.90.
bus driver: thanks for that
I sometimes wonder how they manage to live like that. When I talked to my aunt here she said the bus driver was probably not educated at all. i know my grandpa. He has never been educated and he used to run a shop. I just passed my 5th class and got into 6th class. I went to him to the shop. He asked me if I knew how to add. "Of course I do! do you think i passed my 5th class without knowing that?". He smiled. We went to the shop. There was a customer and he gave a big list of things and my grandpa scribbled the prices beside each item and asked me to add. The list was about four pages long and each page had about 25 items. I definitely added things in my life but never such a big list. I start adding and I would suddenly forget/miss if I added the number i was looking at. I still remember him making fun of me. He does this job really fast obviously. He bought a calci but never used. When asked he says it takes too much time to punch in the numbers.
When I remember these instances I recall "necessity is the mother of invention".
In america people spend all the time reading instructions rather than using common sense. The systems are designed that way. Though I initially felt that the average american is dumber than an average indian I came to see the reason after sometime. Will you ever see such an instruction in any restroom in India? Well if you did in some restroom in start hotel - ladies and gentlemen we are on the way to become dumber. My first reaction to this instruction was "how can someone be that dumb to not recognize that it would be wet in a restroom?"
Now please stop bothering about how I took a picture in a rest room and just enjoy the post!
P.S. I still dont get why people call toilets as restrooms. I found neither a bed nor a chair in any of the restrooms I have seen so far though they are particularly clean.
ok! another random pic in mens bathroom :P I just found it funny thats all. @females reading the blog - I am not trying to be chauvinistic
Though I call it land of instructions it really is a land of opportunities. I saw a guy sitting in puerto rico with two paper fish (the origamis) on a table. we went and asked him what he was doing. He said he would make the paper fish fight(ya with his hands) and we could bet on of them! There is no way you are making a paisa of money that way in India :)
1. I do have a lot of cribs abt the US. But not the ones you raised. Infact, the wet-floor caution is put only when the bathroom is being mopped with water, and it is not very obvious to the naked eye. This is not done always. How on earth is this dumb??
ReplyDelete2. Bus driver calculation is nothing to laugh at. While in India, a second standard kid spends lot of time trying to memorize multiplication tables until 21*20's, in the US they spend time on other less memory intensive more art oriented stuff. Which system is better? Well, I hv no answer; but each has its own merits. Though we make tall claims on our brain power, and intensive education system; it somehow happens that these are the people who are lot more advanced than us. Amidst all this apparent dumbness, there should be a more profound reason for studness, shouldn't there be?
@jimmy - welcome to my blog. I am not sure if it was put when it was mopped. When I went in, it was pretty dry. If what you said is true I have no arguments with that.
ReplyDeletebeing able to do 12.30x3 does not show any brain power or memmory to me. I am not sure if it does to u either :). I was only wondering at the fact that people could get away without being able to do such simple things(simple looking atleast to me!).
About their studness - I used to think of it the same way. There probably is some reason for their studness. I wont go to the extent that there is. United states basically has a lot of wealth. go check out their per capita wealth. They have huge amounts of wealth. You get a class of problems when things are scarce which usa will never have to deal with.
It probably is cooler to say the traffic there is systematic but try infusing 10 times the population and talk about it. You could say that its our fault that population grew this much but we did not get independence 250 years. I dont need to tell when we got independence. You can get a taste of what I am speaking when we go to times square. But I do appreciate the fact that you dont hear horns in usa.
I met awesome people here. I was just trying to point out things which I found funny.
Watch the following vid for even dumber stuff:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE &
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp4iI59BfpQ
Cheerz
Well the wet floor board makes a lot of sense as Jimmy said. Especially when the practice in the US is to keep everything dry including the bathroom floor. Thats why you dont see them using water to wash themselves after taking a dump. They take this concept of dryness to such an extent that they use tissue paper to clean themselves. Or it could be that the wet floor board is used when the common areas outside the restroom is being mopped and they would like to warn the pedestrians against a possible fall and hence when it is not being used, it is stored in the restroom.
ReplyDeleteBut otherwise I have heard that there are a lot of common sense instructions (which are TNR) put up in the US just to serve the average and the below average citizen.
And yeah the average American is way dumber than the average Indian, but the reason for their prosperity (as in a capitalist state like the USA) is a few awesome, way above average people who create enormous wealth and give back to the society. These way above average people are identified by the society and schooling system in the US and given a great impetus to become even better. In India the problem lies in low rates of identification of "above average-ness" early. I am sure if the same percentage and conversion rates are achieved here in India, we would do much much better than the US.
@prashant - you should appreciate americans for the openness they have in letting the world know that some of them are ignorant. I am sure with the illiteracy we have here we can find loads of people. we equate literacy with knowing english but thats not the case here in america(their mother tongue is english!)
ReplyDelete@adarsh- This post just made me a friend yesterday. His name is surya and people call him harsha! what an intersting combination. It seems there is an american law that people have to reveal any possible risk if they know of. If they dont its a crime.
i think the above averageness is a good point. Also if u think there are no americans as such everybody moved from every other country and settled down there at some point of time :)
I guess the key issue is philanthropy. Rich Indians only care about making more money. They never give back to society. This is not the case in western countries. I hope things will change
ReplyDelete@nair - ya. I dint think about it. The habit of donating money is lost. Its also the case that you can earn very easily in USA. its difficult in India compared to USA
ReplyDeleteAnd I thought them being dumber was just self-praise for us... on the lines of 'parampara aur sanskar'... if u know what i mean
ReplyDeletei got what you mean jaanwar :)
ReplyDelete