Aswin writes about the life-threatening lack of ambulances in India. This is the root of the divergence on the India Shining question between the medical and technical partisans in my family

… this ambulance, as we found out a full fifteen minutes later, was a Maruti van with the back seat taken out and placed lengthwise. That’s it. No flashing lights, no oxygen tank… If you don’t have a car, if you don’t have neighbors who own cars and are at home at the time, if you live in a part of the city where autos aren’t easy to find, or if you have a medical emergency late at night, you’re in trouble. [Link]

Scott Carney appreciates the free government hospitals:

After paying the rickshaw too much we ambled into the casualty room (the equivalent of the ER in the United States) and filled out a couple forms. In a few minutes she had a consultation with a doctor and was administered two antibiotic shots that cleared up her condition in a couple hours.

When I asked to pay for the service, the doctor only raised an eyebrow and said, “This is a government hospital, there is no charge.” [Link]

I came down with a fever last year while visiting the Alhambra in Granada. Found a pharmacy by the train station which had the generic form of Tylenol. They don’t call it acetaminophen there, so figuring out what the pills were took some back ‘n forth. The bottle cost only 70¢ and worked well.

Local nomenclature is tricky. In Madrid, I had to describe saline by its components (salt! water! water with salt!) My dad was once at a grocery in Sweden, pointed to milk and butter and instead got buttermilk. In Bombay a toilet plunger is called a pump and laundry detergent is called powder, and five minutes of playing charades will get you the name and a headwaggle of sympathy for your obvious mental handicap. Saline is pronounced sa-LEEN and smoke alarms are something the hardware stores might have heard of at a trade show once The hardware guy didn’t have mosquito rackets, and besides he was Jain and wouldn’t stock them in any case.