Rob and Anna's travel adventure

My View - Mosque Men, gift givers, and other beggars [Rob´s India Entry (#14)]

Beggars come in many forms in India. As mentioned before, there are the shop personnel that insist 20 times to see their store. Ran into a couple of new variants while in India however.
The first was when staying with a friends family in India. They were kind enough to take us sight-seeing and we ended up in a very large mosque. Very quickly we were escorted by a man that began pointing out all sorts of 'who-cares' trivia about the mosque, and I must add, not doing a very good job at that. As Anna and I have seen just about everything in India, we quickly smelled a scam, and I informed the man that we don't want a guide, and will pay him no money for such services. I was immediately informed that he wasn't a guide, but a "Mosque Man". He continued his tour of the mosque, but Anna and I were still very skeptical and we drifted behind him and one of my friend's relatives. At the conclusion, he hit Anna and I up for money. We just laughed in his face and walked away, sorry- been there/seen that. Sell that story to someone who's buying it. Next, he began working on my friend's relatives, one of which seemed particularly susceptible to his flavor of pressure. When she began to pull money out, I intervened stating that he was getting no money. Once the 'mosque man' saw money, he all but pushed me aside to get at it. In the end, he got his undeserved payment, and tried to be friendly, asking us what our names were. I immediately informed him that 'my name is F*** OFF!!', almost yelling across the mosque. One of my friends also yelled the same. I was extremely angry at the situation informing the outside guard that the so-called 'mosque man' was nothing more than a ******** beggar (and to get rid of him)!
The next in interaction of this variant was when at a prominent tourist attraction (Ellora and Ajanta). A man approached us while we were off by ourselves with a free gift. We immediately have two issues with such a notion. First, nothing is hardly ever free (there have been a few exceptions), and even if it is truly free, we much rather prefer that they keep their modest resources for themselves. The free item offered was some polished stones. Nice, but really, who cares? The last thing we want to haul around is a bunch of rocks. His insistence of accepting his free rocks was an introduction to consider buying better rocks from him. No, we don't want the free rocks, and don't want to buy others. He kept trying to make us take the freebees, and buy others. This kept up for many iterations and covered the usual "no thank you's", "I'm not interested", "I'll come find you if I want some", and so on. He explained how he was a farmer, not a rock seller, but still insisted on selling rocks. After about 20 minutes of this pestering, I offered him some water. He said that as a farmer, he had plenty of water. OK, so if a farmer has plenty of water, they are probably growing things, and isn't hungry, and therefore not too poor. In any case, I explained that we didn't want any of his rocks, and his insistence constitutes begging after the twentieth refusal. Well, that did it. He informed me that he was NOT a beggar, and that I was not a good person (in fact, a very bad one)! Incensed and outraged, he left, but not before collecting his 'free' rocks given. Oh well, at least we were left alone again.

posted by Rob and Anna @ 1:03 AM