I remember seeing dozens of people on the ground in Beijing cutting the grass with scissors. Also in Mysore, on the grounds of Tipu Sultan's Palace. Definitely a solution to unemployment when there is no shortage of manual labor. But who do you call to do the groundskeeping at a World Cultural Heritage Site, like Shah Jahan's famous "teardrop"in Agra? Cattle? Cows? Bullocks! Yes, bullocks! Not exactly "horsepower," but why be so ethnocentric in our language use? The men on the side were there to pick up the fresh cuttings and pile them into the cart. You can see this in stunning pseudo-3-D in the "Better Anaglyphs 3" Album (you will need your red-blue glasses, of course). For mortals, here is the original 2-D image. It is real,not "Photoshopped." Who could make up something like this? Only in India, where a new verse to the national anthem could begin with the words, "Expect the Unexpected." By the way, after you have seen Slumdog Millionaire, get "Loins of Punjab Presents," a much funnier and less nauseating tale of talent on the rise. THEN, get a copy of Outsourced from Netlix and watch it for a glimpse of our global future. Our President is preparing us for the worst. Start learning a useful language: Hindi, maybe, but Kannada, Tamil, Mandarin perhaps but Cantonese may be better. Who knows? I am considering the establishment of a voice-coaching school so that folks in the U.S. can learn "Hinglish" and be prepared to help consumers on the other end of the line, when this sort of work becomes more available here. What's with this Americanization crap in the international call centers? But I need to do this fast before the work ends up in Vietnam, or, dare I say it? North Korea? (stranger things have happened)
Posts
2 comments:
Hi Michael! Something like this truly does happen only in India. You see once at my agriculture college, the grounds had overgrown grass right after the monsoons and nobody was doing anything about it, so we complained to the authorities. Guess what we saw the next day. Some 40 goats and 10 buffaloes had been let loose on the grounds to get rid of the grass. It was all gone in 3 days. No labor charges whatsoever! Someone could learn a lesson or two about cost-cutting (or misery) from my college’s management guys.
Great shot! Our gardener in Patna used a sword for mowing our lawn! Now I need those bullocks for my lawn here (I don't care for mowing and my garden needs fertilizer). Goats are bad for lawns, they pull up grass by the roots; we had one for a while in Patna and the lawn was never the same thereafter.
Post a Comment