The Trials of Snake Boy

Some of you know that I went to India last January as part of a study abroad program for grad school. I've always wanted to go to India, in large part because I've had a lot of Indian friends my whole life. Plus, I like to travel to places that are really different from what I'm used to. If anyone wants to go to Thailand let me know, I hear it's very nice in January...

Anyway, I thought I would share some of my more memorable moments with you. Perhaps one of the best known stories from the trip involve our encounters with a kid who is only known as 'snake boy.' One of the most discomfiting things you will encounter if you go to India is the begging (bathrooms come in a close second), although Bangalore is not particularly tourist-ey so it isn't nearly as bad there as it is in places such as Delhi. Well, some people apparently know how to take this to the next level.

One day a couple of us were walking back to our hotel after visiting the HP campus and a kid, probably five or six years old, carrying a wicker basket, runs up to us all excited about something. He didn't speak English so we couldn't understand was he was saying. Anyway, he takes off the top of the basket revealing some long, brown coiled object. I didn't know what it was right away (honestly, my first thought was "why is this kid showing me a gigantic piece of poo?"), but upon closer inspection it had scales and was obviously a snake of some kind. The girls of course ran away screaming, but I was more bewildered because at the time I couldn't figure out what the hell he wanted.

It turned out that this kid apparently "works" this strip near the Leela Hotel, a rather swanky Indian palace looking place with some very upscale shopping, not far from our nice but not quite so swanky hotel. We concluded his gig was to basically extort money out of foreigners by scaring the crap out of them with his snake. We ran into him a number of other times, usually he would see us from a block away and come running with a huge shit-eating grin on his face. He must have been doing this for some time, because a lot of the security guards seemed to know who he was and tried to chase him away, and one of the locals came up and slapped him in the back of the head. I felt sorry for the snake though (a cobra, presumably de-fanged), because the kid kept trying to agitate it to make it more menacing-looking I guess, and the snake always had this "leave me alone, I want to lie in this basket" look on its face.

I don't think he ever got any money out of us, but we can only hope that not all Indians are this doggedly persistent, otherwise they are going to take over the world.

(NOTE: This is not an actual photo of snake boy, just a wannabe I pulled off of Google Images; however, if you can imagine him with the aforementioned shit-eating grin, chasing young women down the street, that should give you a rough picture of snake boy)