India Ink

You can buy Indian hair online here.

I got spammed today, my first spam. Isn't it cute, that adorable, baby-waby cutie-patootie spam?
The message they left was fine. They liked a photo I took. Fine.
The messenger, however, was "dry erase clapboard," someone I had never heard of. Hmmm, I thought, and clicked on their name.
This is what came up: Hollywood Megastore, supposedly based in Hollywood, California.
But according to my Feedjit, Mr. Dry Erase was from Pune, Mahrashtra, India.
Boy, did I get pissy when I saw that.
Pune's not my favourite place at the moment and it's ironic that my first spam came from there.
Haven't they done enough? Do they have to spam me too?
The moral of this story is you really have to watch what you're ordering online. Hollywood Megastore claims to be based out of California, but the link on my page sends me to Pune.
Maybe the store is real and they pay a company in India to run their website. And maybe the person who left the message was just a bored employee in Pune surfing the internet for something to do. Maybe he really did like the picture.
What I'm thinking, though, is that employee is paid to travel online and leave links to the Megastore on everybody's blog. Which may not be illegal but it is immoral and kind of a pain in the ass.
Let me digress for just a moment.
Last night I saw a documentary on TV called Good Hair, in which comedian Chris Rock talked about what African American people have to go through in order to have straight hair. One of the things they do is buy weaves, really expensive weaves (generally they start at $1,000 U.S.) made of human hair. According to Chris, most of the hair for these weaves comes from India. The majority of it comes from temples where devout Hindus shave their heads. The people who have their heads shaved, by the way, have no idea that their hair is collected and sold to hairdressers in the U.S.
Rock also says there's a black market for stolen hair. Thieves break into homes and cut hair off the heads of sleeping women. They even sneak into movie theatres and cut off women's hair there. Seriously!
Not that I need a weave but you can bet I would never buy one now knowing that the hair on my head was stolen.
I mention this because lately it seems that EVERYTHING comes from India.
Today I looked around my house and was amazed at how much stuff came from India. My favourite tea towel. My son's jeans. My husband's shirt.
I don't think we realize that, the more crap we buy from places like India, the more we are putting Canadians out of work.
I don't make New Year's resolutions, but one of the things I will be more conscious of is buying domestic whenever I possibly can.
I really believe it's the best way to keep Canadians working.