I think I'm going to open some sort of weird American retail place here. Something like "Johnny USA's Hamburger Joint" that fits with the cartoon image America has...I'm told that in the finest restaurants in the city, they play Britney Spears and other American chintz pop stars non-stop. I'd wear a cowboy hat and chaps, and pull out pretend six-shooters when greeting people. And exclaim "Yee-Haw!" whenever excited. I would ask my regulars, "Another hamburger, chap?" because the American narrative voice seems oddly Brit-inspired. But it would be authentic faux-American.

People here are getting sick of us figuring out how much stuff costs, and spending with glee. Although there's a 50 rupee/1 dollar conversion, and I have yet to see anything that costs more than 30 rupees, they say that 1 rupee feels like 1 dollar here. So taking our 4000 rupees from the bank is pretty ostentatious, as is tipping people more than 5%.

There's an odd dynamic when it comes to technology. India is weirdly advanced in some ways, and weirdly backwards in others. You'll see a guy with a digital phone about 5 years ahead of anything in the states, walking by a trench where they're laying fiber-optic cable using some 400-year old farm implement. And everyone is defensive, talking about the new technopark that Bill Gates visited, or how many software engineers there are, but they still feel obligated to act interested in my digital camera, although I think they've seen plenty of them before. And that's the sort of polite/fake curiosity that Johnny USA's will be feeding on...