ANYWHERE, INDIA
This guy is making paan. Paan is a generic word for stuff wrapped up in a betel leaf and chewed, sometimes as a breath freshener but usually just to get kind of high. The betel leaf itself is a mild stimulant, but it’s usually combined with tobacco and areca nut (which you may know as ‘betel nut’, though it’s from a different plant) to produce a totally sweet buzz.

The problem is that paan is nasty as hell. It doesn’t taste bad, but it requires the user to spit enormous wads of brick-colored slime wherever they happen to be standing. It also leaves your teeth a lovely blackish-red color. This is probably why the practice is dying out in many places – you’ll never see anyone chewing paan in cosmopolitan Thailand or Vietnam anymore, and though it’s still everywhere in Burma most youngsters seem put off by it.

India, however, has gone the opposite direction and streamlined the whole process. Making paan is a little labor intensive – you have to mix the nuts with lime, arrange the ingredients and wrap each serving just right – so you can now buy a processed version in little packets for anywhere between two and ten cents US (below). The result is that everything in India is covered in paan spit.

But still, totally sweet buzz.