After making our purchases, we headed next door to one of the fanciest Pizza Huts I’ve ever eaten at. Instead of a place you’d go for a pitcher of beer and a pepperoni pizza, which would be consumed at a dimly-lit table covered in sticky soda stains while listening to classic rock blaring out of a jukebox, this Pizza Hut had menus, tasteful pizza “art” on the walls, and plush booth seating.
We ordered the seafood appetizer, which included fish sticks and fried prawns. The prawns were the best I’ve had during this entire trip: a crisp breadcrumb coating, with a hint of garlic. It’s sad, actually, that my best prawn experience was at a chain pizza restaurant.
Afterwards, we went outside to find that Santa had arrived. Dressed in the usual red suit and fake beard, St. Nick was sitting in his sleigh, which was, in turn, parked on a small flatbed truck. A female announcer was just saying goodbye to the crowd, and even though Santa wasn’t quite finished shaking hands, the lights on his tree were unceremoniously shut off, perhaps in an attempt to get people to walk away.
Soon there were three Santas on the back of the truck, which made me remark to Danny, “This would never happen at home. How would we explain to the children why there are three Santas?”
Christmas isn’t really a holiday that is celebrated in India, being that there is only a small population of Christians in India and also that it’s not a part of the cultural heritage. In fact, up until this visit to south Delhi, I hadn’t seen Christmas decorations anywhere else in the city. Christmas really seems to be something that has been appropriated by the wealthy. In the west, we like to show off our worldliness by decorating spaces with Tibetan prayer flags, statues of the Buddha or Ganesh, and African musical instruments. Here, I guess, they do a similar thing with fairy lights and inflatable snowmen.
The shops take advantage of Christmas as well, in order to bring in the customers. What better reason to have a sale, and therefore increase sales, than Christmas? And if it involves Santa playing a saxophone, I’m sure they’ll be drawing in more customers than ever.
While I’m really looking forward to going home for Christmas, seeing this purely commercial version here in Delhi left me feeling a little annoyed. It was all the things I can’t stand about the holiday: the mad amounts of shopping, the over-the-top decorations, the jangling pop music, and the lack of the true spirit of Christmas. But then, if the people here are drawing what they know of Christmas from what they see us in the west doing, all they must understand of the holiday is the commercialism, and so that’s what they celebrate – which is an unfortunate result of western influence on Indian culture.
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