The American Citizens Support Association

Throughout the last year, you have heard me make reference to the American Citizens Support Association or ACSA.  I have referred to it as the “American Embassy Club” or simply “The Club.”  I think it warrants further explanation as it plays a significant role in the life of an American Ex-patriot in New Delhi.

ACSA is an arm of the US Embassy here in New Delhi and is located on embassy property adjacent to the embassy residence compound.  It is a fairly large campus consisting of a main building, a pool, a baseball diamond and a few out buildings. Anyone who has ever been on a military base will recognize the feel of the place.  Everything is whitewashed, well marked with clinical signs and very little overall personality.  In the main building, there is a bowling alley, a gym, a bookstore, a coffee shop and usually a local vendor hawking their wares.  The centerpiece to the main building, though, is the newly renovated restaurant. 

Before you get you hopes up that the restaurant is some cornucopia of super-deliciousness, it is not.   It serves average food, by waiters with a below average work ethic.  It does, though, have many things that you will never find outside the hallowed walls of the US Embassy.   For that reason, and that reason only, I frequent it often. 

Reason #1 – It serves beef! Yes, the illegal meat of Delhi is served freely on this little plot of US territory.  You can get Philly Cheese Steaks and Hamburgers with impunity.  They are not great Philly Cheese Steaks and Hamburgers, but after a year, I am not picky.  They also have a nice selection of Mexican food, like fajitas and taco salads which you cannot find anywhere in Delhi.  But that is not the entire story. 

ACSA also accepts US dollars and, if you have an account there, like we do, you can pay your monthly bills with a US check.  This is hugely convenient as I am paid directly into my US account and, although I have a Indian bank account here, it is ludicrously expensive to have money transferred to India.  Being able to pay with a US check saves me a great deal of money and makes ACSA a convenient place to hang out. 

Now, many of you are probably thinking that the other benefit is that you get away from the local population and get to interact with you fellow countrymen alone. Well, you would be wrong.  A large percentage of the population of New Delhi are naturalized US citizens and feel that it is important to join ACSA for their image.  After all, it is a club and Indians must join all the clubs to be considered important.  They bring with them all the habits and rudeness that most of us are trying to escape when we cross through the gate of the US Embassy.  Many times, I have had to remind Indians at the pool that behavior that may be acceptable outside these walls is not acceptable inside.  It is the one aspect that is most disappointing.  AS well, many other nationalities are able to join to club which makes for an interesting mix – especially when the French schools are out. 

Overall the place is, though, a nice get-a-way from the overwhelming dust, noise and aggressiveness of Delhi and, for those nationalities not allowed to join, is a point of jealousy within the ex-pat community.   For me, it is where I go for a swim and a beef fix and that sometimes is just enough to get me through the week!

Sick – Part 3

Well, I am still sick. Still have a hacking cough, headache and have cough so much and so hard, I have actually pulled muscles in my abdomen. To add insult to injury, I am still unable to sleep for a period longer than 20 minutes at a time. This, I guess, is the irony of having whatever it is I have. You need rest to get better, but the disease creates symptoms to prevent you from sleeping. Hum?

This other epiphany that I have had since being sick is that Indian doctors are no better than the beggars on the streets. As you know, I went to the clinic last week and was prescribed a ton of medicine after going through a blood test and throat culture. Of course, the prescriptions were given long before the test results come back. At the beginning of this week, my secretary called the doctor back to tell him that his prescribed treatment was having no impact and the test results were all negative or neutral. The doctor was adamant that I would have to come back into the clinic to be re-evaluated. Now, there has been absolutely no change in the symptoms from when he examined me the first time, so why could he not simply change the prescriptions, up the dosage or send me to a specialist? Well, I will tell you why?

In order to see the doctor, I would have to check into the clinic again. This would cost me 600 Rs or roughly $13. Then, the doctor will run another battery of irrelevant test at $40 a pop. Once those are done, and not waiting for the results, he will then prescribe another bucketful of medication that may or may not impact the hacking cough. In the end, I will be out a couple of hundred dollars and will have in no way altered the natural course of the virus.

My other option is not to go back to the doctor, feel exactly the same way for the same amount of time and save the money, the time and the frustration. I guess in the end, you get exactly what you pay for!

Happy 4th of July!

Saturday night was the 4^th of July celebration at the American Embassy.  As many of you will remember, I went to the wrong place last year and it did not really pan out the way I expected.  Since then, I have been looking forward to this celebration as many of the American expats have said it is the highlight of the year for them.  I really had no idea what to expect, but I did hear that the food was very Americana and that was really all I needed to be motivated – even in my sickly state

Arriving at the gate, you can see that someone had though through the process …  on paper.  Everyone attending was supposed to have RSVP’ed with your passport number, so verification of citizenship could be done before the event.  Very smart.  As well, to expedite the process all ACSA members (this is the club at the Embassy to which I so copiously refer) could buy their tickets in advance (which I had) and only needed a quick check in at a separate booth before being allowed to enter.  This was the theory…

I arrived at the embassy around 7:00pm and the entrance was simply mayhem.  They had set up a tent in front of the compound and had designated separate lines for people that needed tickets, ACSA members and those not on the list (i.e. people that did not RSVP).  So, at least the structure was there.  What, apparently, they had not factored in was that “Indian Variable” (patent pending on that phrase, by-the-way!).  

If this process had been executed by a group of middle school children from Alabama, it would have had a better chance of success.  Unfortunately, it was delegate to the low-level Indians who work at the US Embassy.  This meant that even the simplest tasks, like enforcing a line, completely broke down.  The more complex tasks of, for instance, checking passport numbers against a list, created paralysis.  In the end, a US embassy employee had to step in and bark out direction to the thoroughly overwhelmed cadre behind the tables.

To add fuel to the fire, most of the people in line were Indian.  At first, it seems a bit odd, but let me remind you that half of Delhi has been naturalized as US citizens.  You see, the Indians have figured out that if they go to the US, get a job and stay for 10 years, they can get your US citizenship and qualify for Social Security.  They can then move back to India and disappear in one of the thousands of tax loopholes and collect their social security when they retire.

Anyway, when you combine the utter uselessness of the Indians working the tents with the aggressiveness and rudeness of the Naturalized US-Indian citizens, you inevitably have a mess - people pushing their way to the head of the queues and the Indian gatekeepers unable to sort the wheat from the chaff, while the US born citizens look on in disgust.  I heard someone in the crowd tell a woman that if she is going to hold a US passport, she needs to start acting like an American and behaving in line.  It was priceless. 

The celebration took place on the baseball field with a large stage at first base and a huge area with a bar on the pitcher’s mound.  The food was correctly positioned in the outfield and there were tables everywhere.  It was wide open with plenty of room to move which is good, because it was about 100 degrees and 87% humidity.  You just do not want to be too close to anyone.

There was food and plenty of it:  Hamburgers, hotdogs, Mexican and BBQ.  They had french fries, chicken nuggets and onion rings, as well - kind of a state fair menu, if you will.  Now for many of you, this menu of fried food and heavy meat may not seem like nirvana, but for us here in India, this is the holy grail of celebratory food.  These are all the things we sit around and pine for, dream of and the first thing we get when we are released from India.  The only thing missing was that none of it was on a stick (Minnesota state fair joke). 

It was hot and I was not feeling well, so a grab a BBQ sandwich and some onion rings, scarfed the meal down and headed out.  I was actually in the embassy less time than it took me to get through the check-in process.  It was worth it, though, as I have not had BBQ in almost a year and that was worth the time invested. 

As I was waiting for my sandwich, though, the festivities were kicked off by the ambassador and other government officials.  We even had our own personal greetings from the Secretary of State and the President.  While Clinton gave her greetings from a sofa in neutral setting, Obama’s were given appropriately from the floor of a factory in which there was no one working.  There he sat alone giving us his best wishes surrounded by idle equipment and parked forklifts.  You were almost waiting for the lights to be turned off half way through his speech. Seriously, did nobody in his brain trust realize that maybe an idle factory might not be the best setting?

All in all, it was a decent little event.  The BBQ and Onion rings were good and my only regret was that I was not feeling my usually self and could not go back for a Philly Cheese Steak!

Happy 4^th of July!

Indian TV

I remember when I was a kid, the biggest benefit of being sick is that you got to have that tiny TV from the kitchen put in your room and were able to watch the Price is Right from the comfort of you bed.  No matter how bad the illness was, watching TV on a 4 inch black & white screen made it all better. Here, Indian TV is almost as painful as the disease itself. 

We have satellite TV and amongst our 335 channels, we get many Western or pseudo-western channels.  I say pseudo-western, because they are not TNT, FOX or NBC explicitly, but are stations that buy the programs from these cable channels and run them. This is all good on paper, but the issue is that all the programming and timing is controlled locally by the satellite TV providers which are the same geniuses that provide the Internet.  Worst yet, even if they get a good show, the content is controlled by the government censors.

Yes, the censors.  Everything that the hypocritical Hindu culture finds offensive - swearing, sex, references to swearing and sex, things that are not swearing and sex, but could be construed in the outer reaches of insanity as related to swearing or sex - are bleeped or simply removed. I was watching “Two and a Half Men” the other day and they actually bleeped the phrase “That sucks!” Then there is the violence.  Any violence of any kind is completely removed.  I was watching Beverly Hills Cop and when anyone got shot or punched, it was removed. For the love of God, I saw that movie when it came out in the 80s with my Grandmother Dorothy and she loved it. How graphic could it be?  

Next is the programming. Like all things Indian, the programming is done haphazardly and typically does not follow any logic in the way that it is done.  For instance, they recently decided to run season 1 of Modern Family.  Good choice.  They ran a new episode every night for 2 months straight and when they had exhausted the episode, they reran them … every night … for 6 months.  How about spacing it out and giving us something to look forward to each week.  They also advertise shows and then never run them.  A few months ago, they ran ads for a new season of NCIS, gave a day and a time and then forgot to run it.  Even when they do get it right, though, you wish they hadn’t as every time slot is more full of ads than show.

Advertisements are a huge issue when watching TV in India for both frequency and content.  When watching a movie, even on HBO, there are 8 minutes of ads for every 10 minutes of show.  This is an outrageous ratio.  You can actually go the bathroom while fast-forwarding through ads on DVR’d shows.  On normal TV shows, they run 5 minutes of ads every 10 minutes.  The best part is that in each of the aforementioned time slots, they only actually run about 5 different ads, but they repeat them over and over again for the entire 5 to 8 minutes only to take the last minute to recap all the ads in a “presented by” statement. Remember back in the 50s and 60s, when the announcer would come on at the beginning of the show and announce that Hee Haw was “brought to you by Kellogg’s Corn Flakes?” Same thing, except here it is done in an overly deep Indian voice trying desperately to sound American.  It borders on the insane!

As frustrating as the frequency is, he content of the ads is enough to drive you to drink.  The ads in India are so poorly thought through, that when we see a new ad, we have a running contest to figure out what they are selling. Sometimes, neither of us can guess it.  The basic premise of all Indian ads is to showcase a Bollywood actor or actress in situations that simply do not exist in India regardless if the context actually supports the product.

An Example:

(Click on the links below to watch.  
After watching, click on the back arrow to return to blog)  

Titan

In this ad, the charming Aamir Khan picks up a woman in a bar and they dance.  Firstly, in a country of arrange marriage, this just does not happen. In most clubs in India, men dance with men and women cower in the corner.  Secondly, what does that have to do with a watch?

Another example

Coke

Coke is an advertising giant and this was the best submission from all the Indian Advertising firms? Really?  I have seen more creativity from dolphins at Sea World.  

And this one!

Tata Manza

OK, first of all, if the tag line of "A Class Apart" means that no other car could be this poorly designed, than I am with the creators.  Secondly, they just make up stuff like "Digital Intelligence."  What the heck is that?  I surmise, it is a radio with a digital tuner.  Imagine seeing this ad in a loop 4 times for 8 minutes and every 10 minutes for three hours.  Give me a bottle and a gun!

USHA

Finally, there is this one.  Can someone tell me what the hell a guy dancing through the streets with a samosa has to do with a fan.  Yes, in case you did not catch it, it was a commercial for a fan.  

Unfortunately, I could not find any of the truly annoying ads, as it seems Garnier Skin Whiting Cream has not discovered "You-Tube."  Eventually, I will find them and show them to you, so that you may experience what torture truly is.  

So, as I lay here hacking up a lung and simply trying to breath, TV is my only outlet.  It may be the best incentive never to get sick again!