I've spoken of my exasperation with Boriswavers before. I've got Indian friends but they're generally the sort who moved here in the 70s/80s from Africa or their descendants, or some of the highly educated Westernised types. But now you can't move for fresh off the boat Dalits in menial jobs.
I had a rare positive experience with a Boriswaver today. I got given a supermarket voucher recently, so I decided I'd "break the bank" and blow it all on the ingredients for a nice and needlessly complex meal and some nice wine at the big supermarket. I'm always a bit dubious of using the self checkouts when you've got to scan a barcode so I went to the till. On the till was an Indian man who was probably around 50-60, an accent so thick you could cut it with a knife and broken English. I doubt he'd been here long. There was a woman up ahead of me who'd mostly finished packing her shopping, she'd done a big shop so had about 5 full bags-for-life in her trolley; I unpacked my basket and put the dividers down. He turned to me and said "you are last customer, nobody else, tell them nobody else" (without putting up a sign or anything) which I ignored, because I don't work there, so let him tell other people who came up to move on, which clearly was pissing him off.
Despite the fact pretty much everything had scanned and the woman had packed everything up, he was taking his time trying to scan a red pepper (bell pepper). He seemed to be having some trouble navigating his till's menu; I can only assume he didn't know what a pepper was called in English, or maybe he just didn't know how to use his till to weigh something without a sticker on it. Eventually he declared this single red pepper was £7 ($9,50). The woman laughed at him, and then had a brief argument about how there's no possible way one red pepper can cost £7, so he suddenly smugly declared "there is a till issue, yis, you must unpack, yis, unpack bags and I have to rescan" (surprisingly no head bobble).
She started arguing with him that she wasn't about to unpack 5 bags of shopping so he could rescan everything when clearly the only issue was he couldn't use the bloody till, and she didn't have time to go through rescanning and repacking everything and she might get ticketed for overstaying in the car park. He wouldn't budge - I think because she was black - so she just dumped all her bags out over the packing area and told him to forget it, she'd shop elsewhere. I gave her a nod to communicate I'd have done the same thing and she walked off.
He froze a bit, not knowing what to do. Then he turned to me and started insisting that I had to go to another till because "till is closed". Naturally I went full cut-glass ice cold
Angrez and told him that I'd already unpacked my basket, staring him down. When he pressed a bit further I told him to go get a manager, and wouldn't you know it, the till wasn't closed. I stood and watched him hastily shove all of the lady's shopping into multiple baskets and put them on the floor. Then he hurriedly scanned all my shopping and when I showed him my giftcard on my phone he started trying to claim they didn't take giftcards, so I again told him to go get a manager. He relented, scanned the giftcard and waved me off.
You're probably wondering how this is possibly a positive experience. Well, the positive experience was after I left the store, I checked the receipt, and cross checked it with my online giftcard balance. He'd managed to charge me a decimal out from the actual cost of the shopping, so I got a 90% discount on my very lovely dinner. I'm always patient and understanding with cashiers who are struggling, except when they're rude and clearly lying to cover their own incompetence.
I wanted to add this to my OP. "Singh" means "lion", "Kaur" means "princess". All baptized Sikhs are supposed to add the name to their own, according to one of the founding gurus, who wanted to erase caste-based differences and prejudices. Some folk use it as a middle name and keep their family name at the end, especially in the West.
All this to say, I thought some folk rated my post "horrifying" because having the same last name means they're all related. I mean, they probably are, but not necessarily.
Similar thing with Bengalis. "Begum" means something equivalent to Milady, so if you meet Mrs. Begum never make the mistake of saying "Ah, and you must be Mr. Begum" because they do not share a surname. There's also all sorts of weird stuff going on with South India, where they don't really have conventional surnames.
The closest thing is probably the Icelandic patronymic system like Emil Gustafsson and Anya Gustafsdotter, the son and daughter of Gustaf Erikson. Except when the woman gets married in Iceland, she generally keeps her name and the kids end up with patronymic names. Also Icelandic people won't mad at you if you make a mistake with their surnames, whereas in my experience Bengali/South Indian men absolutely will. Anyway in bits of South India they basically have a system where they do the equivalent of Charles David has two children, Sarah Charles and Michael Charles. But when Sarah Charles marries Ian Daniel, she becomes Sarah Ian. Except sometimes it's just rendered as Sarah C and Sarah I.
