Bagels & LA ladies

“There was a girl who stole the sunlight
She used its touch to make the flowers grow
Its rays made sunsets, colours, sights — I was left in darkness though”.
From Bachchoo’s Laments

This, please note, is the only column written from Los Angeles this week which will not mention the Osc... oops!)
Everyone knows that the Americans drive on the wrong side of the road. Very few people know why they do, so I am about to enlighten you. After copious enquiries among traffic experts I am confident I have found the correct answer.

The road culture of America, the big chunk of real estate discovered they say by Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci or Shilpa Shetty — it doesn’t matter — begins with single horses and develops into rough carts and then stage coaches. We’ve all seen them in the movies, rambling along the desert road with the spokes of their wheels turning, miraculously, the wrong way as they go forward.
Most of these stage coaches had a team of four and sometimes even six horses. The horses, let’s say four, were harnessed to the sprung coach in two rows of two, one to the left one to the right. You can see it, I hope. The coach was driven by a coachman who sat on an unsheltered bench behind the horses and above the cab containing the ladies, gentlemen and the bags of the then King’s Mail (or was it privatised and Wells Fargo from the inception?).
As elsewhere in the world from time immemorial, one of the ways in which the coach driver exercised his will over the horses in the team was through the use of a whip. If there were six or even four horses, this whip had to be pretty long to reach the rump of the front runners.
Now most coach drivers are right handed. This is a statistical fact based on the evidence of the majority of “folk” being right handed and coach drivers being randomly selected from the human population. In order for the whip to reach both sides of the equine team, right and left, evenly, this right arm of the coach driver had to be equidistant from both its rows. In other words, the coach driver had to sit on the left of the bench so that his right arm would be above the centre of it.
This not only left room on the right of the bench for the person who “rode shotgun” and protected the coach from Jesse James, Billy the Kid or others who fancied a free lunch, it also made sure that the horses were evenly beaten to spur them to greater effort. This was of course necessary as a little thought will tell you that if the horses on the right ran faster than the horses on the left, the coach would veer to the left and come off the road — and vice versa of course, leading to the same disaster, frightening the ladies, inconveniencing the gentlemen and holding up the King’s Mail.
It stands to reason that if the coach drivers all sat to the left of the coach and had to see the traffic coming from the opposite side, that they had to be positioned in or towards the centre of the roadway and not be tucked away to the side of the road. This was made possible by the law that forced the coaches and carriages to drive on the right side of the street or highway. Do you see it?
Now one may well ask “why then do the British and the Indians drive on the left side of the road?” This is a very difficult question and several explanations have been put forward but none of them convince me so I shan’t relay them. The closest explanation is that the British are traditionally eccentric and perverse and the Indians were colonised and submissive, but these are rather insulting hypotheses, so one shouldn’t pursue them. What does occur to me, though, is that it is quite possible that even a few days in LA have brain-washed me into accepting the theory of driving on the right as perfectly logical and arising out of the biological preponderance of right-handedness. It may not be the case.
But one finds that Americans do claim a natural right to innovate. For instance, people from Los Angeles always refer to their city as “LA”. They ask me where I am from and when I say I am from “P”, they invariably express puzzlement. I am forced to elaborate and tell them I meant I was from Poona, now known as Pune, but most of them still don’t get it. They work on the conceited assumption that only Americans should be allowed to abbreviate the names of their cities into initials and be readily understood when they do.
The common idea that most Americans don’t know terribly much about the world was reinforced by three reports and incidents   these last few days: I was talking to Ashok Amritraj who told me that when he first came here and talked to even educated Americans they thought Singapore was in India. Then I meet a young lady who says she is trying to break in to film-making and because I am holding a book asks me what it is. Would it make a good movie? It is in fact the autobiography of Groucho Marx and I tell her that.
“Who is he?” asks this person who wants to make films in Hollywood!
“Oh he’s the fellow who invented communism”, I reply.
“Interesting”, she says.
And in the breakfast room of the motel where I am staying the comestibles are laid out on a table with several varieties of bread and bagels at one end. Next to these bread baskets is a plastic and steel contraption which at first sight startled me because it was nothing but a large toy guillotine. What was it for? The young lady at the breakfast-dispensing table serving herself before me unwittingly demonstrated. She picked up and neatly cut two organic wholewheat, seedy, vitamin-reinforced, bran-rich, low-calorie, unglazed, oil-free, anti-yeast allergen fortified bagels into lateral halves under the guillotine and stuck them in the toaster.
“Let them eat cake”, I remarked.
She turned round “Pardon me?”
“Marie Antoinette”, I said.
“No, I’m not, I’m Krystal with a ‘K,’” and she stuck out a polite hand to shake mine.                  
(See? Not a word about the Osc...)