Margaret Cho! Goes to India

Margaret Cho! She's so outrageous, so much more melodramatic than life, that even simply stating her name deserves an exclamation point: Cho!

(Other people in the exclamation-required category include Odetta! and Rekha!. Feel free to suggest further additions...)

Via Clancy, I caught links to Cho's (!) recent adventures in India. Some clichés, but also some very energetic and entertaining stream-of-consciousness writing:

Yet with the way that there are no real lanes, and the sheer variety of the vehicles on the road (tuk-tuks belching out black clouds of diesel smoke to camouflage themselves and everyone else, scooters balancing entire families, possibly three generations on two wheels, bulbous, gas guzzling Ambassadors filled with white tourists arriving from the airport, filled with dread and regret, wanting to turn back immediately, donkey carts pulled by old, old donkeys and driven by even older men, bicycles loaded down with sugar cane and roti and babies, then the undisputed kings of the highways, the enormous Tata lorries, painted in hallucinatory colors, swirling orange and purple monstrosities, blaring some kind of insanely happy Indian pop music, as the speakers sit outside the vehicles, to keep the drivers awake, so I was told, making me think that they are called Tata because that is the last thing you see coming at you, a cheerful goodbye - “Ta-Ta!” before you are crushed underneath their fearsome wheels, cows, just wandering freely, eating garbage in the way of oncoming traffic, dogs and pigs weaving in and out of it all, along with pedestrians who bravely cross because this is all absolutely normal to them) I can’t believe I didn’t see more carnage on the street, that the asphalt didn’t glow red with blood. (link)

My first instinct is to remind her to breathe. But then, she's right, it is odd: why do the speakers go on the outside of the Tata trucks?

Also amusing was this:

I called down at our hotel in Delhi one too many times for toilet paper. “We just sent you two rolls already! What are you doing with it? You Americans try to wipe wipe wipe all your problems away. You cannot do that here!” (link)

Chi! (Note: That is a joke in Hindi)