Using my digital camera to make friends

Yesterday I went to Maria’s house for lunch. Maria is the cook for the family who’s apartment I stay in and I’ll admit I was a little scared to have lunch at her house. Here’s why: a few days earlier we were at her sister’s three-room home in Bandra, which doubles as a general store/ shop. The three rooms are a kitchen, dining room, and bedroom/ tv room; it was probably 500 sq. ft. or less and opened in the back onto a garbage-ridden waterfront. What scared me was when Maria described herself as “poor” and her sister as “rich”. If this was “rich”, what was Maria’s place like? It turns out that Maria’s home is about the same, just not in such a convenient and central location; it’s at least 1 hour away from anywhere in Mumbai no matter what transportation you use. There’s no running water (there was a well right outside) and the electricity only worked about half the time I was there, but it was clean, well-kept, and reasonably spacious.

I was a celebrity in the neighborhood; everyone came out to meet me, the white foreigner. Since my Hindi is quite bad and I can’t carry on conversations, I passed time before lunch entertaining the neighborhood kids by making videos of them on my digital camera and then showing them the videos. Even though the videos were rather simple, this was endless entertainment for both the kids and me. They, of course, became shy when the tape was rolling, unwilling to dance around anymore, even though Sabina (the short-haired girl in red) was a totally hilarious spaz the rest of the time. She also got the biggest kick out of the videos.The parents of the kids came to watch the videos as well, and quickly asked me “kitne paisa?”- how much money- for the camera. At $200 it’s a little out of their price range, but it made me think maybe there’s business opportunity for low/ medium quality video transferred to DVDs. Most people in this neighborhood had TVs and many had DVD players.