Mr Morgan knew Best

A long time ago, back in the early 1980's, I had a maths teacher called Mr Morgan. He used to stand in front of the whole class and tell us to pay attention, because one day we'd need to know what he was going to teach us. I didn't know at the time how clever Mr Morgan was. How he knew that one day I would end up living in India where unscrupulous shop keepers would try to add extra charges to my bills, at a time when I didn't even know I'd go off to live in Britain for 17 years first, I'll never know...

One of the things I really like about India is MRP. MRP is Maximum Retail Price, and it's printed on every item manufactured in India. It's generally printed very small, so you have to go off and look for it in decent light, but it's always there. And as a legal requirement, items imported into India have a label stuck on them, showing the MRP. MRP is good, because everyone who wants to buy a product knows exactly what it costs. It stops the "white tax", as my friend Mary calls it, being added to your shopping just because you're not Indian. The "white tax" is much more prevalent in Hauz Khas than it was in Gurgaon. I'm not sure why, maybe it's because we're so much more foreign in Hauz Khas than we were in Gurgaon, where there is a large expatriate community. Trust me, the Fairweather family is actually no more foreign than we've ever been!

There's an "English Wine and Beer" shop in the local market, which by the way stocks no English wine or beer. It's full of spirits I've never seen before, some beers I've never heard of, and a small range of Indian wines, including a rather drinkable Indian Rose. This rose has a MRP of 420 rupees a bottle, which makes it one of the cheapest wines we've found here that doesn't make you regret drinking it later. Well, not the first bottle... Anyway, we've been in three or four times now to buy a bottle or two. I have no idea what he charged us per bottle the first time, but it wasn't the same as he charged us the second. Now when I'm in the shop handing my money over I'm sober, I notice things like that. So I had a good look at the bottle when I came home, and found the MRP. Never again was the wine shop guy going to get his "white tax" from me. The third time I went shopping I took Raju with me, so he could carry all my purchases. I put two bottles of Rose on the counter. Wine shop guy got out his calculator and did his sum. 940 rupees. I turned to Raju and said, very loudly, he's wrong Raju, it's 840 rupees. See, the price is here on the bottle! 420 add 420 is 840! Amazingly, the wine shop guy agreed he'd done his sum wrong, even while using a calculator, and accepted 840 rupees. Thank you, Mr Morgan. You're right, mental maths is important!

And it's not just wine shop guy. Thalia and I were shopping at a stall the other day and she wanted to buy some hair slides. I was after a loaf of bread. One stall had them both. The hair slides were 10 rupees a pair, she wanted three pairs: black, blue and purple (or kala, neela and jamuni if you like the Hindi). My bread had an MRP of 12 rupees, but the man in the stall thought I should be paying 22 rupees. He declared I owed 52 rupees. I turned the loaf around to show the man the MRP, proclaiming loudly that the bread cost 12 rupees, and 12 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10 did not add up to 52, but 42. Mr Morgan would have been so proud...