When we were in Ooty, we took a hike of the countryside and happened across a small village along the way. The kids there kept bugging us to take their pictures and show them the picture as it came up on the digital camera screen. While the more urban areas of India are pretty high tech, you can definitely tell that rural communities are behind technology-wise. (Even though having a cell phone is pretty common, even for rural people, because it’s so cheap to own a cell phone there.) For awhile, we did go along and take photos of the kids. It’s kind of funny how some of them look so serious in the pictures but were so happy and smiling like 5 seconds before! Are they trying to show some funky attitude? I have no idea. Of course after we took the photos we got the normal set of questions by any Indian child:
- What is your name?
- Where are you from?
- Do you have a pen?
- Do you have any candy?
- Do you have any chocolate?
- Do you have a coin?
Obviously we got tired of answering these questions (NO! We do NOT have a US coin! Oy!), but it just went to prove that in general Indian people are a lot more inquisitive and outgoing than their US counterparts. Then again, I’m sure that kids in the US would be like this if we didn’t drill that whole “Don’t talk to strangers” thing into them at an early age. I’m pretty sure that us walking through their village was the most exciting thing that happened to them all day.
I have the address of one of these little girls (I forget which one) – I guess I will order an extra set of these photos to send to her!
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