Whenever I have displayed signs of brilliance and managed to outshine peers, my dad has always said, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
And even though my husband thinks that intelligence is one of my more attractive qualities, I have to agree with the man who once told me that Tarzan was his friend and that he would let me have any animal from the jungle. I, of course, chose a puppy dog but I digress here. So Dad, who once also told me that he was God, was right when he called me one-eyed king in the land of the blind.
The more people I meet, the more I'm convinced that this is true.

I once had a teacher who marked me wrong on a question that I had answered correctly. As a matter of fact, I was the only one in my entire class to get it right. But Miss Catherine insisted I was wrong and the rest of the class was right. It was a General Knowledge test and I don't remember the question now, but the answer to it was the city of Aberdeen.
And I answered it correctly...A-b-e-r-d-e-e-n.
But that wasn't enough for Miss C.
"You've spelled it wrong," she barked at me, "The entire class got it right except you. Shame on you!"
What the entire class had done was mug up the spelling of Aberdeen from our GK text books, in which the famous Scottish city was misprinted as "A-b-e-r-d-i-n."
So Miss C stuck to her guns; the GK book was the word of God, all my classmates were God's little angels, she was St. Peter at the pearly gates. I, of course, was the fruit of Satan's loins and so got 19.5 out of 20 on the test, which by the way was the highest score in the class!
(Hey Sis! Do you remember this incident? Happened when we were in Class 8.)

Strangely enough, typing Aberdin in Google throws up a few links. But I still maintain that I was right and the damn text book and Miss C and the entire class were wrong and I deserved that .5 she cut for my spelling "mistake".

In junior college / high school I had a classmate who went around telling people that she was Italian. Nothing wrong with that except that she seemed to think she was Italian because she was Roman Catholic! It didn't matter that her ancestors were actually the original inhabitants of Bombay who, at some point in India's colonial history, got converted into the Roman Catholic faith. But the thing that really takes the cake is that even with a name and appearance like hers, some people actually believed her!

In the same college, I had another classmate who thought credit cards were what smugglers and gangsters used to get free meals. "You know, I went out with this guy," she gushed, "And I think he is from the underworld because he didn't have to spend any money. He just took out this gold card and the waiters got scared and settled the bill."
Now, I know that 1991 was way back in the last century but the concept of credit cards has been around for a while, has it not?

In think sometime in the 80's, we had this neighbour who bought a new fridge. She stuck a container of milk into the fridge one night and went back the next morning looking for curd!

When one of my relatives send us cards she never fails to write "RSVP" just before the address on the envelope. We stopped wondering why when we realised she started doing that after receiving my wedding invite, at the bottom of which, of course, was "RSVP" followed by our address. So dear old Cousin O thinks we live in an apartment building called RSVP!

This one place I worked at when I was in Madras was hilarious. From the woman who copied a chunk of text from Microsoft Word and tried to paste it in Windows Explorer to the guy who seemed shocked when I told him that Bombay was in Maharashtra, they were all a riot. Then there was this female who, upon hearing someone else ask me what language is spoken in Goa, said, "Half the people speak Konkani and the other half speak another language."
"Really?" I asked, "And what is that other language?"
"I don't know," she said, "I just thought they had another language."
And she sat next to a female who was surprised that my parents didn't speak Tamil. That too after knowing that my parents are Goans who have lived in Bombay for most of their lives. She probably thought I gifted my folks a "Learn Tamil in 30 Days" when I moved to Madras!

Once when I was talking to someone in Bombay she asked me if it was 8 pm in Madras as well.
She probably thought that India has suddenly grown into the size of USA, where the time zones change as you travel from coast to coast.

Then there was this time when people asked me if I was Anglo-Indian......because I wore pants to work!


P.S. Short story up on Clouds Cut