One of the highlights of the Pushkar Camel Fair is the “Foreign Indian Bride Contest”, which essentially means that a bunch of foreign ladies are dressed-up in traditional Indian garb and paraded on stage before hundreds of hooting desert nomads and an equal number of crossed-legged Western tourists trying to make sense of things. Whilst the foreign brides–mostly from Israel–looked very shiny-shiny and played their part well, it was the arrogant, incompetent, patronising hosts that kept the Western contingent amused. It reminded me of that one fateful 1989 Brit Awards, cringingly hosted by Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox.

The ceremony was mostly held in English, with occasional, ad-hoc Hindi translations when the male host fancied it. Given the hosts’ own idiosyncratic grasp of the English language, we took great delight as the respondents gave well-formed, fully fluent answers leaving the hosts to scratch around, cherry-picking and repeating the few words that they recognised. I’ve attached a couple of videos below to highlight the experience. The first is from an American girl giving a wordy answer being snubbed mid-sentence by the obnoxious female presenter.

The second, and funniest, sees the dim male presenter reform his “what’s the difference between an Israeli and an Indian bride?” question several times to another apparantly Islraeli girl, only for her to correct him that she’s actually French — watch his unhappy reaction to the jeering crowd and the following vigorous head-nodding to mask over the fact that he’s just brilliantly humiliated himself on national TV.