Today I got a call from my car dealer at work saying that my Demand Draft (i.e. certified check) has been rejected. Why? Because it’s been made payable to “FortPoint Automotive, Mahim, Mumbai” instead of “FortPoint Automotive Pvt. Ltd., Mahim, Mumbai”. Well, I don’t use checks all that often, but this was a new one to me – I mean, what were they thinking, really? That the car dealer faked the check? That they found the check on the street and it was really meant to go to Mr. FortPoint Automotive, who happens to live in Mahim, Mumbai as well?
Maybe this is better than Chase Bank in NYC, which once cleared a check that I had forgotten to sign, but please! Of course, everybody I talked to seemed to think that surely, there must be a good reason that such a check would be rejected – no, there isn’t, it’s pretty unambiguously clear whom this check was intended for, so any reason there may be is just legalistic nonsense, by definition not a good reason. Well, the upshot was that I had to go to the dealer yet again, pick up the check and have it changed at the bank – except that, of course, banks around here close at 2:30pm. I am pretty sure they are need to close that early, so they can manually spell check every single Demand Draft. Or maybe they just look at all the passport pictures they’ve collected that day.
In other news, I found a college bar. On Saturday, I had gone to Mocha, the better one of the two Indian Starbucks, and started talking to some hipsters, who told me where to get a beer on a Saturday afternoon. The place was packed. It’s right accross from a mall (that’s bad) and is called Temptations (that’s really bad). But it’s just your regular drinking hall, a dark but large space where they spill their beers, watch Cricket and sing along some rock tunes. At first, I actually thought I had hit the Jackpot, because when I walked in they were playing Eminem. This was followed by some cheesy rock ballade, but at least that one was somewhat more recent than the usual pre-1987 stuff, so I can’t complain too much.
Since I no longer have any inhibitions in terms of acting inappropriately (well, not too many anyways), I quizzed the hipsters about a bunch of things, like who is hanging out here, what do they do, etc. Turns out that this Mocha cafe and this Temptations bar are both heavily frequented by students of St. Andrew’s College, which is right next to these places. Now, St. Andrew’s College is a catholic school, there’s also St. Andrew’s Church right there, so most of these students are catholic. As it turns out, around here, the catholics are the progressive/modern types, if those labels mean anything, which I found a bit surprising.
So these kids have no inclination of having arranged marriages (which, by the way, don’t strike me as all that preposterous as they might seem at first glance), and apparently being catholic means three D’s – drinking, drugs, and dancing. Well, I didn’t see too much dancing, but there certainly were drugs – albeit only in the form of waterpipes, and at Temptations there was a good amount of drinking, too. I guess now the name Temptations also makes a whole lot more sense. Hm, I should tell the Pope or maybe Mel Gibson about that!
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