Pushkar 6-8 december
Here we experienced out first bout of ‘trouble’ based on the ethnic tensions of the country. But not only did the people involve misunderstand each other, causing a huge argument, but we completely misunderstood the issue as well. Well what can you expect when everyone talks in Hindi about you but doesn’t translate!
Anyway what happened was this. We met some Kashmiri guys in Dharamsla who were also traveling to Rajasthan. We gave them our hotel address in Pushkar so that they could come and meet us to celebrate my birthday (see ‘Birthday Bash’). The problem started before that night as they told us not to tell our driver that they were coming as they are connected to our drivers company and didn’t want him to know for some reason. Anyway we didn’t tell our driver what we were doing and went and saw them when they arrived in our hotel. We started out ready to have a party when suddenly there was a big commotion outside. The hotel reception rang us in the room and told us to come outside. So we came out wondering what the hell was going on and all the hotel staff were standing outside watching the driver and one of our Kashmiri having a heated argument. Not only did no one bother explaining the situation or translating for us, but we knew the argument involved us. Annoyed and worried, we walked back into our room and waited for things to calm down. Later the Kashmiri guys walked in fuming, saying this whole thing was stupid and that they were leaving the hotel. We felt like everything was our fault because we invited them to come, and were upset that the party night we planned for my birthday was wrecked. We were also annoyed with our driver because we prusumed that he didn’t want us to see any friends and that he was babysitting us like three year old kids! We wee also upset that no one was telling us anything, but that everyone else in the hotel knew about it. Later we managed to get hold of our driver and demand an explanation as too what was the argument and why he yelled at out friends when we were the ones who invited them to come here.
Turns out we were way way wrong about the situation! The whole commotion and arguments were based on the fact that the driver and hotel staff had asked the Kashmiri guys for their identity cards. In fact it had nothing to do with us but was based on the politics of Kashmir left over fro the conflict between India and Pakistan! All the driver wanted to know was that they were not terrorists from the Pakistani side of Kashmir, following us around and planning to bomb the hotel!!! (NB Kashmiri people have a hard time getting around in the rest of India precisely because everyone assumes they are militants or terrorists and so they need to show there ID card so that they prove they are Indian Kashmiris not Pakistani Kashmiri people)
Anyway how funny that an argument we thought was based on the driver treating us like three year olds not allowed to go out, was actually passed on ethnic politics. after all that the Kashmiris and the driver became best of friends and we all had dinner together. I just gotta add that cos all this took so long we had dinner at midnight at this random placed cos nothing was open!!!
