Odds Games, Etc.

I have some things that I need to move out of my head and into the public domain. It's the same principal as co-location for servers, so that if the data is lost or destroyed in one place, it's backed up somewhere else. In my case, the biggest danger is forgetting once the moment's passed.

Thought 1: The Odds Game

As I ride around in the back of rickshaws through the city, I've noticed that there are certain probabilities of seeing certain things as you go by. I guess it's like the road bingo game we used to play when were kids on long trips in the back of the family station wagon. This game can be played alone, in teams, for money, for surreptitious shots of booze, whatever your pleasure. To illustrate your chances of seeing these things around town, I've compiled a mental list which will now be immortalized on the stones of Planet Grelican.

Odds (per 5 km travel distance) of:

Seeing a leper: 40%
Seeing someone urinating (male): 90%
Seeing someone urinating(female): <5%
Seeing a cow in the road: 50%
Seeing a diseased cow in the road: 10%
" someone praying to a Hindu god (various): 30%
" someone praying to Allah: 10%
" someone praying to Jesus, etc.: <5%
A rickshaw driver who actually goes by the meter: 80%
A rickshaw driver who takes the most direct route: 60%
A rickshaw driver who understands more than 1 word in 10 of your directions: 20%
Smelling something nasty other than pollution: 35%
Driving by shanty housing (tarps and tents): 90%
Seeing a large open fire: 15%
Seeing a fellow westerner/white person: 5%
Seeing a dog getting into something it shouldn't: 70%
Smelling incense: 50%

That list is in no particular order, and may be added to if more things come to mind. Just something to pass the time.

Thought 2: The Indian Peasant Diaper (IPD)

IPD is a term I came up for men who wear a large amount of fabric below the waist tied up in a way that makes it look like a diaper. IPD's are too common to include in the odds game. I'll try and get a good picture of an IPD and post it on here if I can figure out the HTML. It's something that you see on the side of the road; a man standing there with a vapid look in his jaundiced eyes, puffing on a beedi, waiting for something to happen. In a diaper.

Thought 3: The Indian Head Nod (IHN)

The IHN is anthropological proof that the up-down for yes, and side-to-side for no are not universal, ingrained traits in the human psyche. It's maddening to someone from the outside. To illustrate, it's sort of a bobbing from side to side like a go-go dancer or something, making a sort of infinity symbol with your head. For anyone who ever played Mike Tyson's Punchout for the original Nintendo, it's the exact gesture that the Indian tiger guy did before you were supposed to sock him with an uppercut for the K.O. To me it looks like some sort of non-committal gesture, like, eh, maybe. An example of its use:

I flag down a rickshaw, ask him to take me to Magadi Road and Majestic, right by the Leprosy Hospital (where I live). The request is made in pidgin English with a bad attempt at an Indian accent for clarity. The driver does the IHN. I ask, "Yes?... No?" IHN, smile. "Uh..."

As a matter of practice, the IHN has about a 75% probability of meaning yes, but it's always good to get some kind of secondary confirmation. Now I'm doing it. We'll see if it confuses you when I get home.

The Jerry Springer Final Thought:

The common thread of these bits of information is probability. It seems that fuzzy math is really the best way to negotiate this city. There are no absolutes; you need to know the odds of a certain event in advance, and play the game accordingly. I think quantum theorists could have a lot of fun with it. It's the predictability of unpredictability, really stretching the bounds of traditional logic, Newtonian physics and all those things I was never really good at. Odds games are simpler, and they must have driven generations of starched British colonialists mad. For me, the uncertainty is comforting in its predictability. It only works when you grow an intimacy with a place that no science has really tackled. I think that's still literature's jurisdiction.