Question: Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow. “The night I arrived in Delhi on a visit in January 1996, the elevator at the Maurya Sheraton took us up to the twelfth floor in a breath-taking six or seven seconds. “Remarkable,” I commented admiringly to the friendly hotel employee in a maroon sari and business-like pageboy haircut, who had draped a three-kilogram marigold garland around my neck as I stepped across the threshold. “We couldn’t have ascended faster in the U. S. of A.”
She took my praise in stride, as well she should have. Jet-lagged after an eighteen-hour journey from New York, I had failed to notice that this was not some superfast new elevator technology that the Maurya had brought to Delhi, but rather some highly creative labelling. When I finally woke up and looked out my window, I realized that what the elevator buttons had called the twelfth floor was in fact the second. The gleaming Maurya elevator had merely taken me for a ride – and a shorter ride I’d imagined.
I couldn’t help the accusatory tone out of my voice the next time I ran into the maroon sari. “Twelfth floor, huh ?” I said pointedly. “I didn’t think liberalization meant being liberal with the facts.”
She was surprised that I had taken offense. “Our foreign visitors much prefer to think of themselves as being on eleventh and twelfth floors than the first or second,” she replied with wide-eyed innocence. “And they don’t look out of the windows that much.”
Welcome, I thought, to the new India. An India I was discovering for the first time: an India of five-star hotels, welcoming garlands, and smooth-talking hotel staff, where nothing is quite what it seems (not even the elevator buttons), where windows are not meant to be opened and appearances are the only reality. [Shashi Tharoor, India : From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond (Arcade Publishing, 1997) 275-276]
