Friday, August 05, 2005

Hotels and Patels !

An undercover sting operation in Georgia, to ferret out grocery store owners who sell the ingredients to make methamphetamine, is falling to pieces. The reason being is that most of the people "trapped" by these sting operations are of Indian origin, and apparently their lack of knowledge of American slangs, led them to being trapped.

For example,
when the undercover operatives told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to "finish up a cook," some of them said they figured he must have meant something about barbecue.

Another couple of interesting lines from that article...
Forty-four of the defendants are Indian immigrants - 32, mostly unrelated, are named Patel - and many spoke little more than the kind of transactional English mocked in sitcoms.

and
This corner of the state is still largely white; Indians began moving here about 10 years ago, buying hotels and then convenience stores, and some whites still say, mistakenly, that "Patel" means "hotel" in Hindi.

Hmmm...well, of course injustice has been done...but I also believe that a lot more Indian jokes and in particular Gujarati and Patel jokes will do the rounds now. As if the mocking "Apu" accent wasn't bad enough !

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