People sometimes say the funniest things. When they say these things, they betray some stereotypes, preconceived notions, prejudices and bigotry they have. Hopefully, this will be a recurring segment of the blog, like the Random Observations. But for now, let's assume that it's a one-off.
#1
Last summer, I was in Vijayawada for a couple of days. I had a laptop with me and stopped at a tea stall. A stranger approached me and asked, quite disarmingly, if I was a software engineer. Perhaps, the laptop suggested this to him. I replied in the negative. Then, he looked at me and asked, "Are you a Muslim?" Perhaps, the beard suggested this to him. I again replied in the negative. (Although in hindsight, I should've just asked him to mind his own business.)
Thankfully, the man was done guessing. This time, he just asked me, "What do you do?" I told him that I was a student working on getting my post-graduate degree in Communication. To this, the man again shot back at me, "Does that mean you take spoken English classes?" I laughed and told him that I was trying to become a journalist.
#2
At my hostel, I went into my warden's office to get his signature. As I was speaking to the guy in Telugu (my native language), another person asks me in English, "Are you from Punjab?" To be fair to him, my Telugu is pretty mediocre, so he perhaps assumed that I wasn't a native speaker. I told him that I wasn't. He then asked me where I was from and I told him that I was a Hyderabadi. He looked surprised and asked, "Telugu speaking?"
Desperately trying to prove to this random stranger that I indeed was a Telugu speaker, I defiantly said, "Yes!" in Telugu. He then delivered a strange monologue, "You are so tall. You are lucky. If you go to the Western countries, people will like to become friends with you. If I go, they will hesitate to move around with me. God has blessed you with great height."
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