25/ 100 No Swimming Dog

India seems to be awash with official people, or people who have given themselves some kind of official task. On the other side of the wall that the chap in red is sat upon there is an ancient stepwell (photographs of that to come later) and the sign behind the dog, written in Hindi, is a warning from the police not to enter or swim in the water (thanks Google Translate).

Besides being built for entering and bathing I wasn’t planning to enter the dark green soupy water anyway, especially when I saw the size of the turtles that had made it their home. The man to the right of this image was some kind of official man. You can tell because he is wearing a body warmer and has a pen in his pocket – two essentials in his line of work. I don’t really know what his line of work was, exactly, but every time we walked past him he was quietly telling people not to do things.

This brings me to todays story about how I met the most annoying man in India, and he wasn’t even Indian. Yesterday I wrote a little about the lovely train journey we had from Jaipur to Jodhpur, where this photograph was made. When the train arrived it was complete chaos (you can read about a bit more of it here) because an entire train’s-worth of passengers disgorged themselves onto a platform that seemed to have only one set of steps to use to walk up and over the tracks.

Now, as much as I love Indian people, queuing and having a sense of orderliness are not, generally speaking, two of their strongest character traits. There was no neat line of passengers taking turns to reach the stairs and walk up them one at a time. There was just one large organic lump.

We were in no particular rush so we did what everyone else was doing and joined the crush. Very, very slowly we moved towards the bottom of the stairs, and our means of escape, as one huge symbiotic organism with 400 brains. Our only saving grace was that all of those brains did at least have a unified goal.

Now, on the whole almost everyone behaves in these situations. There are always a few young lads or self-assured men in leather jackets who think that they are better than everyone else and who think that the rules of the world don’t apply to them but they are very few in number.

After about 5 minutes, and 28cm of progress, a voice shouted in anger from somewhere behind me.

“Come on pal. If you have been in India as long as I have you’ll know that you can’t just wait with these people or we will never get through. You have to just push. You’re not in Britain now you know. Just push them out the way. You’re holding us all up. You don’t have to wait – you’re British” and so on.

The source of this voice? Not an uptight Indian man. Not a railway official. Not even an Indian person at all. It was a young Scottish man. At a railway station in the middle of India I was being patronised and told what to do by a person from my very own country. I was unamused. Even thinking about him makes me angry.

Despite being about twice the size of all the other people in the line, and often being given some kind of higher status because we were foreign tourists, there was no way I was going to mow down 25 old ladies to get out just because I physically could. I like to think I have enough respect to wait like everyone else.

There is a possibility I may have even purposefully held back the horrible guy, letting a huge group of ladies filter past me, just to be a little more irritating…