I rarely miss an opportunity to have a dig at our ‘Americanised’ friends about the average American’s blinkered vision and his horizon not extending beyond his home town – at best his State; or their great ‘institutions’ - McDonalds and Coke; or some of their great Presidents, like Watergate Nixon, Rancher Reagan and Golfer Bush. This ‘great’ nation’s citizens annually gorge on 15 billion dollars worth of hamburgers and guzzle colas worth an equal amount. At a McDonalds outlet a dinner roll is called an ‘American Biscuit’ and a sandwich of course means a mountain of bread, mayonnaise, lettuce, chicken ham and what have you. Yet many of them will tell you – without batting an eyelid – that they don’t eat any lunch, they only have a sandwich! Not to take all this lying down, our All-American young niece – who blatantly baits India – commented that ‘”Indians park on the driveways and drive on the parkways”. Now, everyone parks on the driveway but why did the crazy Americans have to add parkways to their already bewildering array of highways, cableways and beltways? Why do Americans call their toilets ‘rest rooms’? Why do they go back to ‘school’ after college - all their post-graduate institutions are known as schools (Medical School, Business School, whatever)? Further, they call their public schools ‘private’ and the State-run ones are termed ‘public’. And they play ‘football’ mostly with their hands’! They wear their hearts on their chests. When a bomb exploded at the World Trade Centre in New York, almost all the office-goers in this great complex wore T-shirts the next day emblazoned with the logo ‘Survivors’. What often starts as a fad - like ‘stuffed croissants’ - becomes a billion-dollar industry overnight; of course the ‘stuffing’ quickly became almost anything. And then the ‘industry’ dies equally quickly; no one even remembers that ghastly stuff now. Only in America are you presented a printed slip along with your restaurant bill, stating, ‘May we suggest that in order to appreciate the good service you tip a minimum of 15 per cent for the waiter and another 5 per cent for the captain’. Almost every tourist bus sports a bold placard, stating, ‘Gratuities not included in the fare’. So we were not surprised when our boat guide at San Antonio said at the end of the Canal Cruise, “If you ‘ve any comments about my job, please hand them over to me before leaving”! Driving from Houston – perhaps the only word they don’t pronounce phonetically – to San Antonio on a recent trip, I was quite intrigued to see ‘Loves’, among several ‘normal’ signs like Rest Rooms, Food, Drink and Gas. I was wondering if their permissiveness had gone too far, till our friend clarified that ‘Loves’ was a gas station chain. One American sign that a Sardarji from Phagwara found real weird was ‘Gas & Eat’, because to a Punjabi it’s always ‘Eat & Gas’.
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