Usually, when travelling on business to India, I would stay in five-star hotels (at the time for Mumbai there were really only two: the Taj and the Oberoi – I preferred the Oberoi). However, occasionally these would be booked out. On one such occasion I found myself in a three-star hotel called The Ambassador. Nothing wrong with that in principle, and truth be told, I usually feel I’m overpaying for those last two stars anyway. However, in this case the room was smelly and not very clean. I can live with that, though. It was what happened at breakfast the morning after I arrived that I will never forget. There was a big buffet (as these hotels all tend to have), laid out with an abundance of fruits, breads, cheeses, yogurts, cold cuts, and the like. As I was walking up I saw one of the waiters replenishing the cold cuts display. To my surprise, he wasn’t using a utensil, but rather his bare hands to do this, which I thought was fairly unhygienic. I told him: “Shouldn’t you be putting out the food using a fork?”. Besides having trouble with my English (fair enough), clearly, he had absolutely no inkling of the point I was making. After he asked me to repeat my comment two times, his face lit up and he happily answered (while bobbing his head from left to right and back): “Oh, no problem sir, you can use a fork if you want!”.