Leftaaaaaaaaaaa Rightaaaaaaaaaa

I think that the majority of my friends would probably agree that a lot of addresses in India are notoriously difficult to locate. In Bangalore alone there must be hundreds of 1st Mains and 2nd Crosses, and probably a dozen or more 1oo Feet Roads. Even that wouldn't be so bad if the roads followed a logical and sequential progression, but they generally don't.

To take a hypothetical address, you might be looking for the 5th Cross [road] off the 3rd Main [road] and blithely counting the roads off as you go: 1st Cross, 2nd Cross, 3rd Cross, 4th Cross, 8th Cross. What! Where the Dickens have 5th, 6th and 7th Cross gone to? So you ask the nearest gaggle of auto drivers who all point in different directions, and then you give up on them and after much to-ing and fro-ing, discover that the road you want is on the other side of 3rd Main. You can see how frustrating that can be, can't you?

Little wonder then that most people in India always throw in a landmark as well. "Yes, we live at 5th Cross, 3rd H Main which is just behind the Sai Baba Temple." I'll come back to landmarks later.

Now though, I read in this morning's papers that all this fuss and bother about finding addresses could soon be a thing of the past. In Bangalore there's a new service called MYHOME which enables you to register your address details (and landmarks) so that when your friends are looking for you, they text MYHOME with your address and get your directions sent back to them as a text message. Clever isn't it?

Well no, actually. I personally can't see what advantage MYHOME has over the tradional method of just picking up the phone and shouting at your friend, "Hey Sanjay, where the hell is 4th Cross?" And then Sanjay, if he's a south Indian, will say:

"5th Main-aaaaaa. Left-aaaaaaa, rrrright-aaaaaaa. Left-aaaaaaa, left again-aaaaaaa, just aarposite the Infant Jesus Mutton Chiken staaaaal."

And I suppose that's exactly what you'd have to type into your phone: all that left-aaaaa, right-aaaa business until your A key is fairly worn out. As for landmarks, giving a landmark is all well and good if the description pertaining to it is accurate. But in India, "behind" can mean immediately behind, or two streets behind, or half a mile behind; whilst "aarposite" is never opposite, but generally five hundred yards up the road tucked behind a shopping mall or temple. We always tell people we live behind our particular landmark, when actually it would be more honest to say, "You know that new office building at the end of 80 Feet Road? Well we're miles away from that..."

Hindu Temple (aarposite 7th L Main, 3rd Cross) courtesy of TripAdvisor.