Crooning with a K

KTV as an entertainment phenomenon gives Ekta Kapoor’s K-serials a run for their money. And no, KTV is not a television channel (naive as it may seem, Kalanidhi Maran hasn’t spread his wings to China yet and Rajinikanth hasn’t taken over either!) According to Wikipedia it’s Karaoke TV and has its origins in Japan. 

 The Chinese are obsessed with KTV’s .  And for lack of creativity, all of them are called KTV. It’s like adding ‘Bar & Restaurant’ to most eat out joints in Kerala. My favourite one being the Gaylord’s Bar and Restaurant. I suppose it would be imperative to my Mallu brethren to know whether it serves alcohol or not!

 Melody KTV is one of the most popular in Beijing.  Well there is a reason why my Chinese friends did not take me there. My singing is far from melodious!  So I had to be content with Uranus KTV. Not that it made a difference to me. I was after all going to a karaoke bar that was playing Chinese music, so the cheaper the better, I thought.  Well to add to my disbelief, they actually did play English music and I was asked to, no, forced to sing. The crowd favourite was” Everybody” by Backstreet Boys. The last time I heard it was in high school.

After the first couple of lines my friends decided to put themselves out of their misery and asked for the mike to be passed on.  Serves them right for not heeding to my husband’s advice on my disastrous singing skills!

But KTV as a phenomenon is fascinating not because I have not witnessed such a thing in India. But because of the sheer size and scale and even opulence of some of these operations! They are restaurants, bars, pimping joints and family hangouts all rolled into one. And they are open for business till about 7 in the morning.  

What often renders me speechless is the sheer size of these things. They usually cover about three or four floors and have these massive chandeliers that are probably as expensive as the real estate itself. These places are then divided into smaller rooms and you pay for a room depending on the size of your group. Some of these rooms are bigger than whole houses in Mumbai!

These huge buildings with multi-coloured neon lights are hard to miss.  Beijing’s full of them. Some of these places remind you of Paharganj in the night, especially the tacky neon lights and obvious underground illegal activities.  Some places have these huge LED display screens at their reception which is usually displaying these tacky, hypnotic patterns that annoy me no end. It’s like Pink Floyd meets Annu Mallik. So you walk into a KTV and pay for a sound-proof room which usually consists of a 40 -50 inch LCD screen and a two large sofas and a table and a funky touch-screen console which lets you play your songs.

And singing is the not the only thing that happens in these places. Some of them are known to be just fronts for high profile pimping. Of course, if you are with a mixed gender group then you are unlikely to ask for these services. But even the high profile ones have girls on hire. They sing with you, flirt with you and for a few hundred yuan more, are willing to oblige even more. So boys, if you are on a trip to China ALONE, you know what to do. There are also two kinds of KTVs. Ones which you can take your girlfriend to and ones you won’t! I guess sound proofed private rooms have their benefits.

As for us, we picked our poison and sang the night way. A couple of beers down my singing voice came out. Though I doubt I’ll get invited for karaoke again! Ever.

Dog and the bone

     Shopping in local markets in China is quite a delight. Most of the so-called local markets are actually these huge air-conditioned multi-storeyed buildings, not like the crowded and dingy by-lanes of Janpath or Sarojini.  And they’re organised floor wise. So you have an entire 40 or 50 thousand square feet of just bags, shoes, clothes and other trinkets! What more can a shopper ask for? The one thing that’s common with markets back home is the colour and noise, with the collections nicely displayed to tempt an avid shopper like me.

But here is the cool part! Guys enjoy shopping here more! Surprise, surprise! The pretty Chinese sales girls are usually all over them, touching them, holding their hand and coaxing them to buy wares from their store.  Have to mention, it’s a definite plus if you are white and blue eyed! Infact it’s common to see sales girls hold your hand and guide you into their store. And boy, it’s a pretty strong hold. So much so, my first instinct when grabbed like that was to get angry and defensive. I guess after all these years of having lived in India and being grilled to be defensive if anyone as much as touches you, this comes as no surprise! It took a little getting used to smile politely and walk into the store till they loosen their grip and then I just flee for dear life!

An incident I witnessed while waiting for my husband and a friend to finish haggling over half a dozen shoes deserves a special mention. There was this white guy and his mom trying to buy shoes from the store right next to where we were buying from and the girl was fawning over him so much that if I were his mother, I would have been quite embarrassed. But to be fair, he was encouraging it in the hope of more discounts, I suppose. Letting a girl feel you up is a small price to pay, if it is one at all!   

A definite plus is the fact some of the best English speaking Chinese are in these markets. Here’s the weird part. You could walk into a real Louis Vuitton store and the sales girl wouldn’t know English, but walk into one that sells fakes, and the Queen’s English comes rattling out. I remember going into a high-end store to buy my husband a suit and we spent close to an hour trying to tell them that they need to make alterations. My husband and I tried our very best to make them understand in our broken Chinese English and not to mention a liberal use of charades. Finally we gave up and politely smiled and walked out while all four of the sales staff there breathed a sigh of relief. The only good thing to come out of all this: try beating us at dumb charades now!

But the best part of the shopping is yet to come, the thandav between the Indian and the Chinese. And to quote a prominent Chinese businessman it’s not a question of who is able to outsmart the other, but simply which one will give up in absolute frustration!! And after moving to China this is the only place I have seen the so called India-China rivalry. Otherwise I don’t think the Chinese particularly care!

The difference between the bargaining in India and China is that here they start their negotiation at astronomical prices.  For example in Janpath if you want a top which you think is no more than a hundred bucks worth, where will the shopkeeper start? 500, 1000, mebbe even 1500? Here in China it starts at something like 1800 yuan that is 12500 Indian rupees. You must be kidding me! You can buy whole of Palika Bazar for that kind of money! So yeah we finally end up paying like 30 yuan, but of course if you were American or British i guess 400-500 will sound like a good deal to you.

Moreover, if you can’t afford the Coach bags and Jimmy Choos just yet, the Chinese markets are there for your rescue. They make the best quality fakes I have ever seen. Even light them on fire to show you how good their quality is. But they don’t always put them on display, its usually hidden in their backrooms. But if you get chatty you can definitely find whatever you are looking for. I have to add they are bloody good at faking things.       

On one such visit to these markets we were shown fake i phones and the shopkeeper was proudly displaying the “Chinese i-phone 4”   as opposed to the Apple i-phone 4! He even had four different qualities of the i-phone 4.  And you could actually tell the quality difference, the most expensive being the very best. But, it’s still a steal compared to how much you have to shell out for a real I-phone. And also I-phones are a huge status symbol in China, so fake or real you need to seen to be owning an I-phone and not to forget drive a fancy car and own a nice apartment. That’s your ticket to China! Huānyíng nín dào zhōngguó!