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Shaun
The Japanese isn’t that good but you can understand that he says the price of the items. 150 yen roughly $1.50
Meghan
Well, he speaks French, Italian, Irani, Japanese, and that’s all I got out of it, but he speaks the Italian pretty well. His French isn’t too decipherable, but he’s saying “Good, pretty, and cheap, only (I didn’t catch how many) rupies”.
Not bad for a street kid in Mumbai…I wonder where he learned all those languages…
fluff
Somehow it’s sad that he has to waste his talents on the street selling crap to tourists, and being some kind of annoyance/attraction. I understood the french, german, english and italian part. He basically always says the same thing; good, pretty, cheap and the price…
Adam Stanhope
He reminded me of this experience I had in India in 1988:
I was in the middle of nowhere visiting a mosque ruin. A bunch of kids like him mobbed me on the way in, trying to sell me chess sets. Every kid was holding a chess set, trying to push it into my hands, etc. There was a gate where you had to pay to get into the mosque, so the kids stopped when I reached the gate. I told them, “Sorry boys – I don’t play chess, I play backgammon,” and walked into the mosque compound and poked around for a few minutes.
I’ll be damned if upon exiting I wasn’t mobbed by the same group of kids – this time every single one of them holding a backgammon set.
Magazine Online
He basically repeats the following (French, German and Italian): Beautiful peacock, only 50 rupees (9 euro) one piece. Buy it, it’s very beautiful. Do you like it?
Eugenio MartÃnez Sierra
In Italian he said: Good, nice and cheap. Fan for 50 rupees.
But… it´s was not italian, it was spanish.
liz
Your find kids like this in Cambodia and Thailand too. They’ll even ask you where you’re from and then proceed to name all the World Book facts about your country in your mother tongue.
takhys
I remember that kid! I saw him on the hill outside the Tower of Silence in Mumbai. I didn’t buy a fan, but the languages impressed me so much that I wrote out how to do the talk in Estonian for him.
andrew
in german he says:
feather (something) lovely, lovely, 50 rupies, 1 euro,…
along those lines…
Alex
The sad thing is a lot of these kids are exploited: adults use them to sell useless things to tourists – it’s not uncommon to find kids selling stuff (in multiple languages) in various third world countries’ tourist traps.
chloe
does he fluently speak all of those languages he mentioned or just fluent english?
Miss Cellania
Chloe, I’m pretty sure he just knows enough to sell his wares.
Jerse
At the end when the man asks him if he speaks Arabic he says:
Look, look it’s a peacock fan, father. (I don’t know why he says father…) Fifty! Three for fifty! How much? Fifty! It’s a fan, father! Peacock! It’s fifty!
Jennifer
For Jerse – I’m not very well skilled in Arabic but if he did use ‘father’ in the pitch (I didn’t pick it up in French though) it’s not that strange.
I’ve been called ‘mother’ by many street kids who are selling or begging. It pulls at the heart strings horribly and it is good at guilt-tripping people into buying/donating. Even when I traveled with my parents as a teenager (like 14 to 17) kids would rush up and call me mother, urging me ‘Mother, please buy.’ and other variations.
brandon
i think it’s sad that we sit around here, galloping on this huge broadband horse commenting about how sad these poor, poor little brown children who live in india are, aww, how heavy is this first world cross we bear, step aside mother theresa, give me your poor, tired and hungry
just a guy
Brandon –
And yet you participate in the ‘galloping’ and commenting? At least these people here have some sympathy, aren’t too jaded to feel a moment of emotion (other than spite or self-disgust).
Plus, it isn’t our fault that we were born into societies privledged enough to have the internet access and some free time. If you want to feel guitly about that, then fine – you can feel guilty or do something to alieveate your guilt (like charity work). But don’t spread you guilt onto others. Perpetuating negativity never helps anything.
Jerse
Thanks Jennifer for clearing that up. He is actually saying daddy – but I didn’t know why.
Oh and when the boy says the word fifty in Arabic, he doesn’t pronounce it correctly. He says “kamseen” while in Arabic the first letter is not pronounced as a K but a Ø®. It’s not a letter in English but it’s transliterated as “kh”.
It kinda sounds like that noise you make when you choke on a popcorn kernel…
Beth
I think this is fantastic. The kid seems happy, and I hope this tiny bit of fame brings him good karma. He’s cute, I’d buy a fan from hime.
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Billy
