Sick of Having to Fight to Get Anything

I'm beginning to get really fed up with having to haggle for some of the very basic things one would need living in this country. I can recall an incident recently about getting a cab when I was in Delhi. So we were traveling from Dharmasala, which is at the very northern (west) tip of India, to Delhi and the trip took 5 hours on the bus followed by 14 hours (overnight) on the train. Needless to say, we were all very very grumpy when we arrived at the Delhi Train Station. We get out of the station, right away there were about 5 rickshaw/cab drivers offering up their services. We had to get to the airport to catch our flight to Hyderabad (back to ISB!) and since we had spent 5 days in Delhi the week previously, we knew the ride would not cost anymore than 300 Rs. (~$8 cdn) for a 15 km ride. So the first cab driver says "750 rupees"...... I didn't even look at him and I just kept walking. Next guy goes "500 rupees"..... so I kept walking. As we were walking to the pre-paid taxi booth, which was about 100 m away, we came across this one guy who was very serious about getting our business but he was offering 350 Rs so we continue walking to the pre-paid booth thinking we could do better. As we fish for better deals among the sea of rickshaw drivers and I noticed all of them were hesitatant to even negotiate with us. Then I noticed the same dude was shouting something in Hindi everytime we would try to talk to a driver. It hit me that this guy has been calling everyone else off because apparently we were "his". We finally get to the pre-paid booth and my friend Bram asked for a taxi to the airport. For some reason, the man behind the booth told us "no taxi, no taxi"... and this was about 10 o'clock on a busy Sunday morning. We looked at the price list posted just above the counter and it clearly said "10-20 km.... 98 Rs." So we were like what's the deal? After a few more minutes of communication with broken English and no results, we gave up. So with no other options, we turn to the same punk who has been calling the other drivers off and finally settled on a ride for 250 Rs.

It was especially frustrating because EVERYONE, including the "official" Delhi Station pre-paid taxi, around the station was in on ripping us foreigners off. It's not unusual to go through something like this 4-5 times a day, especially when you travel through India like we did. This is just the reality when you're a foreigner in a country like India. Maybe I'm a little burnt out from all the traveling in the past two weeks but I'm pretty fed up with it. Talking to a few of my exchange friends, I found out many of them feel the same way.

~ Hoping to have more patience for this nonsense,

WaLLy