Make that connections works for you

Rama Bijapurkar look at branding and market in everything around the clock of life, yet the life reality writes:

• (S)he was the drag queen, a superb dancer with a troupe of gifted musicians with traditional instruments. When she balanced a flaming sword on her head, I involuntarily shuddered and said “be careful” in English. She looked me in the eye and said, in polished accents of Indian English, “Don’t worry, I will.” In fluent English, she later explained that the sword was from Egypt, used by belly dancers, and she had modified it to be able to add the flame “in order to go with the folk music effect”!

• The tour guide spoke English with a strange European accent though, much like some of our well-travelled corporate big shots. He then said that he spoke French fluently, learnt it from tourists by writing the words and the pronunciation in Hindi. He couldn’t read and write the language, he said, but he could speak it well. We then discovered lots of little kids in the markets who spoke Spanish, Italian, European-accented English, but couldn’t read and write in any language, including their own. We figured that in a “we are like that only” manner, trickle-down had happened, only it wasn’t the pure economic trickle-down that we were searching for, but global culture that was trickling down. And equally, the global Indian was being born, only not in the way we assumed it would be, and with many global Indian stereotypes.