Three Dumb Men!

This is the story of three unfortunate souls who happened to fall repeatedly into my line of vision and invariably all these times were when they acted quite dumb.

I'm not a feminist - gotto make that clear before I proceed as this might easily relate to women too.

Scene 1 - at the L'arret du bus - Bus stop

Strangers greet each other - Bonjour- and make polite conversation and wait for the bus. Three Indian men(TIM) walk into the shelter and shyly look around. One of them manages a murmur of greeting. After sometime I join this group and greet everyone. The TIM ignore me and continue talking loudly in Hindi. Everyone looks at them and then at me like an action replay - curious because we are all Indians but not greeting each other. One old lady asked me today why the TIM ignored me and the first thing that came to my mind was Dumb, then I remembered some cultural funda of men not looking at women etc. Whatever it is, it definitely makes me feel very odd when I encounter TIMs in such situations. They look the other way and completly ignore our presence (women) whereas the European neighbours are polite and friendly. People obviously think its wierd and I get incensed.

Scene 2 - Crossing the Road

Next, I encountered the TIM crossing the road some 50 meters from a zebra crossing. We have well defined rules out here to use the Zebra crossing. Unfortunately they were stopped by a policeman who asked them if they were blind or Dumb to ignore rules. Now, that I understand French I couldn't control my laughter and tried to run away but as these men couldnt understand a word of French the policeman asked me to translate. Maybe it's written on my face - Translator! Anyway they were fined 50 euros for illegal crossing and warned. Lucky that he didnt charge per head!!!

Scene 3 - In the Supermarket

My trolley was loaded and I was busy trying to get them billed. And Lo! Behold whom do I encounter in the neighbouring line - obviously the TIMs. There were having some argument with the superboy/man. Having lived here for some years all the superboys know me and obviously turned to me for help. You know the language barrier and the board on my face...guess what this time:

a. They picked up one banana, two onions, one brinjal, etc. which were difficult to measure.

b. They also tried to buy one shampoo, one toothpaste from sealed - ON sale packs of three each - again a difficulty to bill

c. Last but not the least they were trying to argue and ask for discounts on each item.

I tried to explain that this is not done out here and there were some basic rules of shopping and got thoroughly embarassed. Luckily it was a non-busy timing and I escaped by saying that they might be new to Belgium.

Unfortunately if some Indians behave this way, the entire race of NRIs abroad are likely to be considered nothing but DUMB - a polite version of anything. It might be funny to read but such encounters leave me frustrated and annoyed with the Educated NRIs living in style and behaving very you-know-what!

I hope at some point there might be a change and they suddenly become Three Wise Men! Let's Pray!

Note: This has no relation to anyone in particular and for the sake of writing it's been written as a story - but surely the incidents are true and have been observed over a period of time with various TIMs.