Reporters on the Job

• Hinglish Spoken Here: It is difficult for foreigner living in India, says staff writer Scott Baldauf, not to get sucked into the vortex that is Hinglish - a blend of Hindi and English (page 1). "Little phrases creep into your speech, including vestiges from the former British Empire," he says. "If you haven't seen a friend for a while, you'll say, 'My gosh, it's been donkey's years.' If you see a young man 'eve-teasing' a young woman, you might expect to see her give him 'one tight slap.' (Why tight? And why one slap? asks Scott. But he does draw the line. "One day, I heard the host of a music video show utter this sentence: 'Commercial breaks necessary evil hai,'" which is, being interpreted, 'Commercial breaks are a necessary evil.' If there is already that much English in the sentence, I'll just use the English verb, too. If I don't, it might be time for a transfer."

• Rodeo Break: Staff writer Danna Harman ventured out into the Chilean countryside, looking for a farmer shipping grapes to the US who might provide some color and local context for today's story about free trade (this page). She didn't find the farmer but did stumble upon a Chilean rodeo, called "la fiesta huasa." "It was completely different from any rodeo I'd ever seen," she says.

Huasos are Chilean cowboys. The the rodeo officially became the national sport in 1962. Danna watch one of the highlights: the bull-herding competition. Two cowboys in traditional clothes gallop sideways with a bull between their horses. They bring the bull into a "half-moon" corral and suddenly one horse moves out of the way, and the bull is slammed into a wall. "It's brutal, and the animal-rights groups complain," she says. "But it was a welcome break from the meeting halls and alphabet soup talks about free-trade pacts."

David Clark Scott
World editor