What Is Real?

I’m travelling in India with my family these days. We are crossing Rajastan with a small bus only for us, and I get to see India from a whole new point of view – top end hotels, comfortable beds, private car, expensive restaurants, tour guides and more. You got the idea. Anyways, weather I like it or not is a matter for another post, but right now I wanted to talk about something that came to my mind a few times already throughout this trip (which has only began…)

In Judpur’s big market our guide stopped next to an ordinary looking shop. He said we should see it, so we entered. Immediately a selling person appeared and started talking about the store. Apparently it has 8 floors. We started climbing and stopped in the third floor (I have no idea if it actually has 8…). The guy started talking and showing us fabrics, bed covers scarves etc. When we said we are from Israel he immediately gave us the names of three of the big clothing companies and said that the shop sells them fabrics. As he introduced the stuff he talked about the biggest names in the fashion industry all over the world and said those are items that they make for them. Introducing one particularly amazing item he told us the Richard Gir was there and he loved it so much that he bought 100 pieces of it. From the moment he started talking I started being suspicious about every word. When the Richard Gir part came up I already doubted him confidently enough, probably because I am a bit experienced with this kind of salesman that you can find in many places all over India. But then he took out a notebook and showed us a picture of Gir in the store, and a lot of articles about this particular shop in newspapers from all over the world. Then I started to doubt myself.

My point is – how do we decide what is real and what s not? How do we know when someone is lying to us? Of course we can sometimes feel it, but still we cannot really be sure.

In that particular case the pictures and articles made me believe. However, afterwards I thought about it and it is not that hard to fake that stuff.

We use our background and past experience in this kind of cases. My mom has been in the fashion industry for years, so she could check the fabrics and the designs and tell if they are of good quality. I had my experience with Indian salesmen from the past two years. But it is still not enough sometimes.

And maybe it doesn’t really matter after all. You can buy a ‘real pashmina’ in 200 rupees and believe it is actually real and be happy with it. When we talk about this kind of matters it might not be so crucial after all. However, we talk a lot in campus about matters of sources of information, the internet, and what you can or cannot trust – maters in which this issue can be much more crucial.

And, like always – I don’t have any conclusion. Only wondering…