An exception in the landscape

One thing you have to be aware of in India, and you have most importantly to accept if you want to make a living here, or even spend a holiday, is that there will constantly be people around you not only looking at you, but staring at you. Except in big towns like Mumbai and in tourist areas like Goa, you are an exception in this landscape. You are definitely something different, sometimes something scary, sometimes something worth looking at in details. Especially if you go out of Nasik for instance, and you go to some small peaceful farmer village, then you are probably the event of the year. One weekend we went to this small place, 60kms away from Nasik, with Pritam, an Indian friend of ours. 10 to 15 children were following us all the way long, as we were walking towards a Hindu temple at the other end of the village. They just followed us, and sat down when we stopped, stared at us all that time, saying nothing. If you look at them in the eyes, the boys will sustain your look and at some point you will be the one looking somewhere else as it is getting quite uncomfortable for you. The girls will not dare looking at you too long. From the moment you look back at them, they will turn their back to you, talk to each other and laugh and smile.
But if you try and speak in Hindi to those people (which I can’t much for the moment, but Greg is quite good at it), they will be surprised, and/or enthusiastic, and they won’t stop start talking and talking and talking to you in Hindi too, which you mostly (still) won’t be able to understand. It ends up with laughers and smiles, showing there was a successful contact, even if it was not, say, “productive”.
However, in 90% of the cases when I smiled back to those eyes I got a wide, white enthusiastic smile from them. Here you will find people living in conditions you have never imagined in your worst nightmares, but still, they will smile. This is probably one of the biggest differences I can tell so far between the Indian way of being and ours...

More pictures? Try http://fotoalbum.web.de/gast/Cam_in_india/Todi_Village/