A list of curious facts 

One: As we contemplate an ever hotter planet, here’s a reminder of just how harsh Indian summers were for the punka wallahs during the colonial era. Tasked with keeping their sahibs and memsahibs cool, they were expected to pull the ropes of cloth fans night and day—and were punished if they had the temerity to falter due to exhaustion. Here’s one English gentleman on the insufferable burden of employing punka wallahs:

They pull your punka till you fall asleep, then stop, lie down, and go to sleep themselves… By this time one’s temper gets started, and out of bed, he flies, and out he goes and finds the punka man stretched out on the cool marble pavement asleep and snoring. Well, you give him a good kick, or a resounding slap on the side of his head, at the same time calling him a sewer [suar ka baccha].

Other more civilised Englishmen preferred to exoticize the ‘punkah coolie’ like EM Forster in ‘A Passage to India’: 

“Almost naked, and splendidly formed, he sat on a raised platform near the back… he seemed to control the proceedings. Pulling the rope towards him, rhythmically, sending swirls of air over others, receiving none himself, he seemed apart from human destinies, a male fate, a winnower of souls.”

To save their exhausted arms, punka wallahs would resort to a simple hack—of tying the rope to their toes. It allowed them to rest their weary bodies—just a little bit. Scroll and Times of India have more on the punka wallahs. Paper Clip explains why they used their toes. The photo below speaks volumes about the nature of colonial rule. More images here.

Two: Did you know that when you use multiple adjectives, there is a correct order that we all unconsciously follow? For example, we never say “my Indian, big fat wedding’.  It’s always ‘silly, old fool’ rather than ‘old, silly fool’. That’s because adjectives have a hierarchy that determines which goes first: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose.

But, but, but: There are exceptions to this rule—such as, the big bad wolf. And that’s because there is a far more powerful diktat that governs “reduplication”—that’s when “you repeat a word, sometimes with an altered consonant (lovey-dovey, fuddy-duddy, nitty-gritty), and sometimes with an altered vowel: bish-bash-bosh, ding-dang-dong.” In such cases, the order of the vowels is that ‘i’ always comes first—followed by ‘a’ and ‘o’. Hence, always zig-zag and never zag-zig. Mark Forsyth has lots more on English’s odd linguistic tics over at BBC News—or you can listen to Merriam Webster’s fab podcast episode.

Three: Meet Ankush Dutta—every hotel’s nightmare guest. He booked a one-night stay at Roseate House in Delhi on May 30, 2019. The date he actually checked out: 603 nights later on January 22, 2021—without paying his bill of Rs 58 lakh ($70,000). Of course, he had the help of the front desk manager—who deleted his expenses, transferring them to other guests. FYI: this isn’t all that uncommon. In January, a gentleman conned the Leela Palace in Delhi of Rs 23 lakh ($28,000) pretending to be a wealthy Emirati. 

Bonus trivia: In a kookier kind of hotel scam, back in 1859, an American gentleman called AV Lamartine would check himself into Midwestern establishments—and pretend to have attempted suicide: “Once settled in, he would ring a bell for assistance, and when someone arrived, Lamartine would point to an empty bottle on the table labeled ‘2 ounces of laudanum’ and call for a clergyman.” Lamartine would be revived with great difficulty and sent on his way with a hefty donation raised to help him get back on his feet.  NPR has more such tales of goofy conmen of yore.