From Hindustani at Heathrow to Vanilla Ice Cream in Edinburgh—A Personal Tale of Discovery in the UK

When Steven Kapur, aka Apache Indian, first came to India after the huge success of his song Arranged Marriage he said in an interview that he had always thought that Punjabi was India’s first language, until he landed in Mumbai and found out otherwise.

Now, something opposite happened to me when I landed at the Heathrow Airport in London in July, knowing fully well that English was the first language of the people living in the United Kingdom(UK). But the only language I could hear around me at Heathrow was Hindustani—the lingua franca of the people of North India and Pakistan.

The feeling did not leave me during my first couple of days in London, and wherever I went I could hear only Hindustani. Of course, as any idiot can possibly tell you, Hindustani isn’t the lingua franca of the British. People in the UK speak English—or at least something that sounds like English to us Indian ears.

Pretty soon I started registering other sounds as well—Telugu, Tamil, Bangla, Marathi, Malayalam—the Indian languages came first, and were followed by French and Italian, the only European languages that I can recognize. Nonetheless, by the time my two weeks in the UK had come to an end, sounds from a whole host of languages had made it into my ears. Of course, I have no ability to map a sound to a language and I could not recognise many of them.

So, what happened here? I was limited by my experience. My ears are primarily used to picking up the Hindustani sound and some amount of Marathi. As soon as I hit London, my ears picked up all the Hindustani and drowned out everything else. It took me a few days to get over this limitation, only to make me realise all over again how limiting our limited experiences from which we try and make sense of our lived lives can actually turn out to be. An old lesson was learnt all over again.

Dear reader, if you are the kind who looks for pointed takeaways of the kind that MBAs and CAs offer when they make powerpoint presentations or give uninterrupted gyan on LinkedIn—you know, six points per page and only four words to a line or perhaps vice versa—then this piece is not for you. Please stop reading it immediately. I am no snake oil salesman or in the business of pretending to manage other people’s money (OPM) by supposedly selling new products which are nothing but old wine in a bottle that is perhaps being reused. This piece will be totally all over the place and in the end might leave you with the feeling: Why did he write it?

The one thing I really enjoyed in the UK was walking uninterrupted, unlike in Mumbai where a walking pathway can suddenly come to an end, or someone could possibly be squatting on it, or running a business on it, or an entrance to a building can be built over it.

Also, the walking pathways in London are pretty wide, almost signalling that the local government thinks that walkers should get precedence over vehicle owners—something that seems to work in the opposite direction in Mumbai, where a lot of expensive physical infrastructure is built to help car owners to get to their destinations faster.

That aside, what I found most interesting was the behaviour of walkers while crossing a road. If the signal for walkers to cross a road was red, people would typically stay still until it turned green, indicating it was safe to cross the road, unless one individual or a couple for that matter decide to ignore the red light and simply start crossing the road. This would immediately motivate the others to do the same as well. I found this fascinating. Everyone stuck around following a rule until someone decided to break it. Then almost everyone broke it, including me.

What will come after this is my favourite UK rant. From what I could gather during my two-week stay I can safely say that when it comes to making payments, the three places I visited in the UK—London, Oxford and Edinburgh—have gone totally digital. In London, I encountered so many sellers from fancy coffee shops to shops selling curios and even those selling street food, who refused to be paid in cash. They wanted to be paid digitally.

What I could not understand is that how could someone refuse a legal tender? I don’t know what the laws in the UK have to say on this. Nonetheless I found it very weird. In fact, it is safe to say that most people have moved on to paying digitally.

One set of service providers whom I found to be not very comfortable with digital payments were the London black cab taxi drivers. While they were accepting digital payments they were more comfortable—for whatever reason—taking cash. Quite a few of them even had notices stuck in their cabs saying so.

This reminded me of the kaali peeli taxi drivers of Mumbai, who unlike their autorickshaw counterparts, are still very uncomfortable with digital money. I guess there are two main reasons for it. First, many of them are over 50 and hence are generally uncomfortable doing things digitally. This wasn’t the world they were brought up in.

Second, and more importantly, most taxi drivers don’t own the cabs they drive. They rent it. And at the end of every day, the dhani—as the taxi owner is known as—has to be paid in cash. And this requires cash. So, the reluctance. But then shouldn’t this logic apply to autorickshaw drivers as well? Well, I never claimed I had all the answers.

Anyway, dear reader, if you are wondering why this isn’t quite sounding like a rant I said it would be, well, I haven’t come to the actual story yet. My usual habit of blabbering quite a bit before getting to the point isn’t going to go away in a hurry.

So, me and my younger sister were on a tour bus that was taking us through the beautiful Scottish Highlands. I mean even Lonavala puts on a show on a rainy day, but this was something else. The only other comparison I can make given my limited travelling experience was that day in December 2006 when it had snowed in Gulmarg. Okay, I am blabbering again.

Now, around an hour after we had gotten on the bus, the driver started selling us a tour within the tour that we were taking. Basically, a one-hour cruise on the Loch Ness. And he wanted cash.

There were two problems with this.

First, I don’t think anyone on that bus was carrying cash except me, at least that’s the impression I got. Well, I grew up in a city which in May of 1992 had a power cut lasting two weeks. So I like to be prepared. Also, if you keep talking about diversification of investment for a living, it sort of creeps into your daily life as well.

Second, there were no ATMs at the place where we were making our first stop. I guess as digital payments have taken off, the ATMs are being looked at as a cost, and have been shut down, like it seems to be have started to happen in India as well. Anyway, there was a simple solution to all this. It was called a “cashback”. And one of the shops at the location we were stopping at would make it happen, or so the driver of the bus told us over the sound system.

Now, this cashback has nothing in common with the Indian cashback. Which is why I found it very fascinating. So, you go to the shop guy, give them the card, they swipe it and give you the cash. Wait, wait, wait… So, how does the shop guy make money? Well. Let’s say you need ￡30. The shop guy swipes for ￡32 and gives you ￡30 in cash. A profit of ￡2. QED.

They first nudge you towards digital payments. And when someone doesn’t want to be paid digitally, they turn around and tell you, no problem, we have a solution for that as well. The market and its makers make money both ways.

It’s like a company that sells you a razor to shave your beard, and when a new generation comes along and the fashion choices change, it sells you a machine to trim your beard. And this, my dears, is how markets work and win.

I made three other observations regarding how a market works. The first one concerns water. Almost everywhere and anywhere you go in India, the Rs 20 water bottle is available. Well, in the UK water prices can fluctuate a bit too much.

The cheapest water bottle I bought was from the Tesco supermarket—70 pence for a two-litre bottle. And the most expensive bottle was a 500ml bottle I bought after climbing up a hill to see the Royal Observatory in Greenwich through which the Prime Meridian passes. I was extremely thirsty and couldn’t find any tap water around.

So, the market dictated the price of water. The easier it was to find water the cheaper it was. And the more difficult it was to find water the more expensive it was. I am so used to not carrying a water bottle that I ended up paying for it almost everywhere. Bad habits, I tell you.

Second comes the Wharf—or as some people like to elaborate, Warehouses at the River Front. While the full-form thing is complete rubbish, it doesn’t change the fact that many London Wharfs were actually warehouses on the Thames River front, at a time when London was a big port. But once big shipping containers became the order of the day, the business model of warehouses came to an end. And they were turned into offices and apartments. Ever heard of Canary Wharf? The market has always won. (This reminds me of the textile mills of Mumbai, which have also been turned into offices and apartments.)

The third good market story I heard was from an ice cream stall owner at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, who was doing brisk business on a hot day, and who sold me an ice cream with some whiskey in it, which apparently was their bestselling flavour. Six months of the year, the vendor sold ice cream, and the remaining six months they rented it out to someone selling Korean ramyun, when it was cold as hell in Edinburgh. The market always has a solution.

If it hadn’t been for the cash versus digital story, what follows would have been my favourite rant from my UK trip. Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap opened in London in 1952 and has run constantly since then, except for a break during the pandemic when shows were suspended from March 2020 to May 2021. It has been running at the St. Martin’s Theatre from March 1974 onwards. And which is where me and my sister went to see the play’s 29,697th performance, all excited.

The excitement ended as soon as we entered the theatre. For starters, it had no AC. While that would have worked in the 1970s, we are in 2024, and climate change has impacted London as well. So it was pretty hot inside.

Further, the seats were designed for people living in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. (Well, I checked, the St. Martin's Theatre opened in 1916.) There was simply no leg space. Now, I am tall and have a leg space problem almost everywhere. But these seats were really, really small. Plus, seated in the dress circle one had to concentrate extremely hard to be able to hear what the characters in the play were saying.

Also, what did not help was the fact that I had read too much of Agatha Christie over the years. A bunch of characters stuck in a location where one of them is the murderer is a formula she used so often that one could see the resolution of the suspense, or the “twist”, as soon as the character who carried out the murder appeared on stage.

So within 30 minutes of the play starting, I realised that this had been a mistake. Also, progressive lenses help you see things clearly only when you see straight and not look down, as I had to because of the dress circle seating. Ah, the things you realise as you age.

Anyway, the experience reminded me of my days of watching movies at the Sujata Cinema in Ranchi, where the ACs would almost never work and sometimes even the fans would be switched off because there was no electricity, and the show was being run on a generator.

One particular winter day in January 1994, when we were watching the first day first show of the Govinda-Karishma starrer Raja Babu, the ACs stopped working and it became extremely hot and claustrophobic inside the cinema, despite it being a winter’s day outside.

The film was also a bit of a bore and a stretch. So we sweated and waited for something to happen on screen. And it did happen. The item number that had taken the country by storm came along. And we were all dancing in the aisles. The paisa vasool happened. Something that did not happen with the Christie play in London when we watched it in its seventy-second year on stage.

Nonetheless, I guess I was the only one thinking along these lines. When the play ended the audience couldn’t stop clapping. In fact, when the big reveal happened and the murderer was revealed, there was a collective gasp in the crowd, like they were so surprised by the “twist”.

Many clearly did not see it coming even though it was visible from half a mile away. The funniest bit happened after the play, when the actor playing the murderer came on stage and told the audience that now that they had seen the play they shouldn’t go out and reveal its end to others. Given the way the audience gasped when the big reveal came, it makes me believe that those who see the play rarely share the end with others.

This behaviour reminded me of something that George Orwell wrote in an essay titled?Propaganda and Demotic Speech, which is a part of a book titled All Art is Propaganda, where he writes that any speech or piece of writing aimed at a large public has to take the ignorance of the people into account. Therefore, it needs a popular and everyday language.

Which is why Christie and her writing still remain popular, though I find it very boring. Also, what it told me was that you could get away with quite a bit in the name of tradition and nostalgia. Bad seats. No air-conditioning. Difficulty in hearing what the characters are saying. And at the end, a standing ovation. Paisa vasool for the customer is not the only business model going around despite what management gurus would like to say. Sometimes torture also works. Just kidding folks!

So, dear reader, as you can make out from all that I have written up until now, I generally had a good time in London and the UK. Serendipity ensured that the Tower Bridge—or the bridge we Indians typically refer to as the London Bridge—decided to suddenly open up on a day I randomly decided to take a boat to Greenwich to see the Prime Meridian.

And it opened up to let through a barge, with a very long flag, pass, thus holding up traffic on both sides of the bridge. In fact, a perhaps apocryphal story goes that the bridge once even held up Tony Blair and Barack Obama, who were supposed to drive through at some point during the day and at that very point the bridge had to be opened up to let something pass through. Tradition can be such a thing.

I also discovered some of the best bookstores in the world. Just the military history section at the Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford is bigger than many bookstores in India. The Blackwell’s Bookshop in Edinburgh has the most bang for the buck. The London Review Bookshop has an excellent curation of books. So is the case with Daunt Books in Marylebone, London. And the Foyles at Charing Cross Road, the Waterstones at Piccadilly, and the Hatchards, also at Piccadilly and the oldest bookshop in London. All these bookshops are huge and have an amazing collection of books.

Finally, I have a question for all the vanilla ice cream manufacturers in the UK. What do you guys put in the ice cream? Why is it so tasty? Is your special ingredient—eh, milk? With a chocolate stick dipped in it and the right amount of Oreo sprinkled on it, the taste becomes just so heavenly.

I say this as someone who stopped having vanilla ice cream in the early 1990s, when other softy options became available in the city I grew up in. And I had vanilla ice cream in different forms almost every single day I was in the UK.

The best vanilla ice cream sprinkled with Oreo dust, I had, was at the bottom of the Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh—after having unsuccessfully tried to climb it on a sunny day—and giving up and deciding on climbing up the Salisbury Crags, or that’s where I was told I had ended up. The pleasure of that ice cream at the end of what turned out to be a hard climb was unparalleled.

All this reminds me of something that Vladmir Nabokov writes on the first page of Speak, Memory—An Autobiography Revisited: “Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.” Ah, sigh! Life will never be the same again.

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Written by Vivek Kaul

Edited by Feroze Jamal

Produced by Vertika Kanaujia

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