The Ear Cleaners - Goan Charlatans
“Hello, my friend, you have something in your ear!”
This pitch often comes from men in white shirts (presumably to make them look a little more medical) with black eyes and an altogether evil vibe. Withdrawing a small case of unsterilised metal instruments, they nab ingenuous tourists on beaches and markets and, right in the middle of a flow of people, they proceed to stick tweezers and scrapers into his ear and then withdraw something absurd like a stone or an insect.
“Look! You see? I clean ear for you!”
Only the truly stupid would fall for such an obvious trick and allow some unidentified charlatan to stick anything in his ear and risk deafness either through human error or the subsequent infection, but every week people fall for it.
I got to the stage where I would begin to pick fights with these guys if they approached me. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could be so low as to pull such a scam that seriously risked the health of the target. Anyone with any medical training knows that you shouldn’t put anything smaller than an elbow in your ear and these guys just seemed the worst variety of shyster going.
The truth is that in a country like India, where huge chunks of the population can barely read or write, concepts like bacteria may mean nothing to a guy who gets roped into putting on a white shirt and trying the ear cleaning scam. And if someone’s foolish enough to allow them to poke around inside, well that’s their karma.