Cochin and Mumbai

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  Mumbai (Bombay), India
Friday, July 27, 2007

My last entry was written in the hot little internet cubicle in Cochin, and the day after I wrote I got sick again.  This time it was the beginning of what became some serious sinus and head problems, but I didn't know that on our last night in Cochin.  I think it was all brought on my mold - the hotel room had no seal on the sliding door/balcony, we overlooked the river and it rained quite a bit.  We are doing hand wash every day and nothing dried during our time there!  My head felt like it did every time we went to Tampa - complete congestion.  I went through a box of hotel tissues yesterday and completed the day's academic activities through sheer will power.  I got eight hours of sleep last night (in spite of my desire to finish Harry Potter - 100 pages to go!), and woke up feeling normal again.  Hooray!

Even though we only had a few days in Cochin, it became more interesting with every day (as usual - we have felt like we are on a whirlwind tour this whole trip)

Our second home

.  On our last day we visited "Jew Town," an awful name that still makes us all cringe, but from a high of some 6,000 residents hundreds of years ago, there are now only four Jewish families in the Synagogue, and all those people are in their 80s.  Their descendants have all moved away. 

(August 27, 2007:  Today's Washington Post has an interesting article on Jew Town.  I have copied it and put it at the end of the previous entry #18.)

Cochin was plagued by a municipal strike, which meant no garbage pick-ups (thus huge piles of trash) and potholes that almost ate our bus.  Truly, the bus rides made us all sick, and we imagined that we would capsize on the bus more readily than on the boat tour we took.  Cochin is actually several islands connected by narrow bridges, with bikes, walkers, scooters, motorcycles, cars, buses and trucks (no water buffalo on the bridges) competing for the lane.  I was more terrified on these bridges (as were many of us) than at any other time of the trip.

Cochin was also the site and source of a quite remarkable 6 inch long, 4 inch wide oval black bruise on my upper left leg

Looking forward on our bus

.  We were at a Science Center, out in the rain, and I was playing around with a display of levers and fulcrums.  I was at the model in which the weight was greatest, and I guess that I used my body weight in addition to my arms to push down the lever so as to lift the weight on its end.  Everything was wet, my left hand slipped off and I rammed my upper leg into the crossbar and flipped over, completely on to the wet ground.  Ouch!  Other than my pride, I thought nothing was hurt until later that day when I saw the bruise developing.  I also got one on my left upper arm, so I must have hit something when I fell, too.    

The highlights of Cochin: 
-the 5 am Call to Prayer every morning:  lovely, and again, because the door had no weather stripping, we could hear it clearly every day,
-the spice shops where I bought pistachios, figs and coffee beans and made friends with the owner
-the internet café I described last entry, located at the top of ancient wooden stairs and down a dark hallway.

We began our first day in Mumbai with a dark, rainy morning in Cochin - our wake-up was 5:30 am

Dabbawalas deliver food

.  However, by the time we boarded the plane, the skies had cleared and we had a wonderfully clear flight up the coast.  I was at a window seat on the east side, so I got to see the verdant green of south India, interspersed with huge, brown rivers that collected together in their course for the coast.  There were no gridded, rectangular plots of land, but as we descended, I realized that property was defined by irregular hedges and plantings.  Villages, for much of the flight, were few and far between.  The green was the most varied and intense I've ever seen, and even the brown rivers were beautiful.  The green flat land soon segued into hills and canyons - a real surprise for me. 

The closer we got to Mumbai, the hillier it became, with some very dramatic canyons and ancient man-made structures on the tops of plateaus.  One minute it seemed that we were only a thousand or so feet up, then the brilliant green hills would fall away and our altitude was considerably higher.  We zigzagged for a bit and then made almost a full 360 degree turn coming in to the airport, so I got the water view, too.

You may have seen images of Mumbai's slums under the flight path of the airport.   To see these from the air will be one of my most powerful memories

Dabbawalas

.  Highrises abound, and the city (16 million people?) stretches for miles before we land.  The airport is in the northern end of the city, while the older sections are in the southern end of the peninsula.  Imagine coming in over green hills, which open to a huge delta and flatland, with every kind of structure imaginable, then the slums suddenly appear - a fabulous concentration of humanity - no trees, no apparent roads or even alleys, just blue tarps, corregated aluminum, and/or tile roofs, on the flat land, kissing the hillsides, up against the rivers.  And so it goes on for miles.  Then more tall buildings.  Then slums. 

There are few walls that I have seen in Mumbai that don't have as many tiny hovels as can be placed along the path.  Daily functions such as bathing, barbering, cooking, sleeping  on cots, and of course, socializing are done in public view, but I no longer have the desire to photograph these people or record the images to share (and I haven't done so).   What appears to be impenetrable from the air is closer to the idea of neighborhoods on the ground.  There are alleys and pathways and markets and shops.

Our hotel is in one of the nicer sections of Mumbai, but unlike (what we think was) last year's Fulbright hotel across from India Gate, we are a bit away from the really posh center of town -we're not on Marine Drive.  But that's okay.  It's a very nice Taj Hotel and we have walked the neighborhood for two nights and found shops and an internet cafe nearby.  I now have enough confidence to check out alleys and side streets (but always with someone - I'm not that reckless!) here in India.  Our local internet café is a tiny Nokia store not 10 by 10 feet, with two computers, three phone booths and more business than most mall shops have at Pentagon City

Do Not Park or Tyres Will Be Deflated

.  Oh, and lots of incense that fills one's nostrils and clothes, but that's everywhere!  I'm writing now in the hotel only because it's so late (we went to a Bollywood movie tonight - in the home of Bollywood!)

My final comment for today may be my last for this blog - our academic program ends tomorrow; we return to Delhi on Sunday and then head over to Agra and the Taj Mahal.  If I am moved to write, I will, but what could I possibly say that has not been said about the most beautiful building on the planet?  I am already humbled to know I will see it next week, then again a week later with Ron.  Twice!!
 
So I finish with some "musings:"
Resin chairs are ubiquitous in India, maybe through the third world.  Only our 5 star hotels lack them.
No parking signs are painted in front of many driveways.  My favorite is here in Mumbai:  "No parking.  Tyres Will be Deflated."
The bouncing we take on the poor roads here has been described by Amanda:  "like we are beans in a rattle."
A restaurant advertised itself as "partly air conditioned."
Men often/usually ignore women here - the examples are too many to recount, and I'm tired of it

India Gateway

!
Standing in line is only for foreigners.  At the airport s it is particularly bad - appallingly rude, we would say.
There are no trashcans or waste paper baskets.  We have seen none in any school, office building or public place except for our hotels and the UNESCO World Heritage Site we went to in Chennai.  When one goes through a box of kleenex in a day and has to hold on to them, it becomes a problem.

But still, I love India, and I think Mumbai will be my favorite place - but then I still have Agra, Japirur, Bhartpur and Udaipur to see!
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A Riotous Rickshaw Ride Into the Soul of India
Rally Takes Tourists to 'Real Roads' of a Changing Nation
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 2, 2007; A12

MUMBAI -- The auto-rickshaw driver had never laughed so hard. Or been so confused. Or so worried, he confessed, as his eyes widened at what he saw.
"No!" gasped Dilip Kumar, a 30-year veteran driver. "It can't be."
Roaring and rattling up the hill, there they were: a cluster of 32 noisy auto-rickshaws

Mumbai Monsoon

. Piloting them -- even revving the handlebars like pros -- were foreigners.

"White people and even women, and so many driving rickshaws! And all weaving the traffic so smartly," marveled Kumar, as a crowd of other auto-rickshaw drivers gathered in amazement one recent muggy Friday night.

These "brave and determined souls," as organizers of the Autorickshaw Rally 2007 called them, had driven India's iconic three-wheeled auto-rickshaws straight through the southern part of this country and into frenzied traffic in Mumbai. For fun. And to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the auto-rickshaw, South Asia's most omnipresent mode of egalitarian transport.

"We've made it alive. Although, I've never had so many near-death experiences with buses. Or cows," said Raj Solanki, 31, of Takoma Park, Md. She stumbled out of her rickshaw wearing fly-resistant, wrap-around sunglasses, Laura Ingalls-style braids and a greasy, car-mechanic button-down shirt.

The auto-rickshaw is the common man's ride in India

Mumbai Street

. The vehicles provide little shelter from the country's parade of child beggars, street vendors, circus performers and herders, who routinely swat at their goats, cattle and elephants in the fast lane. And yet, for the participants, the rickshaw rally was a way to see India unscripted.

In cosmopolitan cities here, creeping in with the double lattes and imported cars is the concern that India's authenticity may be lost to development, especially in tourist quarters. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, based in London and New Delhi, tourism in India is expected not only to generate $61 billion in 2007 but to grow significantly in the years ahead.

"It's a question being asked all over the world: How do you see the heart of a country when world cities are looking more and more similar?" said Arun S. Chaudhari of the Rotary Club of Mumbai, which helped sponsor and organize the rally. "Anyone can see a five-star hotel. They look the same whether you are in Dubai or Delhi. But on this journey, you see the real roads, the real villages, the heart and soul of India."

The not-for-profit rally was billed as a sort of madcap Mardi Gras for rickshaws

Mumbai Atomic Energy Central Schools

. Since the clunky vehicles can't go faster than 31 miles per hour, the rally was more about completing each stage by dusk and keeping the rickshaws running -- many participants brought a tool kit -- than actually winning.

Auto-rickshaws were a logical choice for travelers in search of an antidote to the conventional modes of transport. Developed by N.K. Firodia, a protege of Mohandas Gandhi who believed the two-stroke engine could provide the poor with an affordable ride, the vehicles are so simple and cheap as to be irresistible.

With their canopies and tin shells, auto-rickshaws sound like lawn mowers, look like toy insects on wheels and provide a bumpy, fun and sometimes harrowing ride that is always "air conditioned," as the sides of the vehicles are open, with no overbearing doors.

Among those participating in the 13-day, 2,500 mile Autorickshaw Rally were a financial analyst from Fairfax County searching for the "real India," a cancer survivor with one leg and a passion for living life boldly, an Irishman residing in Brooklyn, and a 72-year-old retired nurse from Canada on a last hurrah with her two sons

Mumbai Street2

. The trip was marketed as "an amazing race for the clinically insane."

The driving tips handed out for the rally advised the following:
--A rough rule of thumb in any situation is that cows have the right of way.
--Honk as much as possible.
--And don't be alarmed if pedestrians sleep on the edge of the road. There is nothing wrong. They are just resting.

A medic and translator were always on the mapped-out routes, along with a luggage bus.
The rally raised money for schools and villages along the route, and each two-person team donated school supplies and medicines and met with local leaders to learn about India's varied cultures. There were no Indian citizens in the rally.

"I think Indians travel in auto-rickshaws enough without wanting to do it for fun. When I came to know of this race, I was perplexed," said Shri Suresh Shetty, state minister for tourism, who attended the final night's events. "It's a challenge for all of us to even travel in autos normally, and this is an amazing endurance test. I am so proud of these people."

The teams had wacky names, including Rickshaws Without Borders, Wrong Lane, Dukes of Hassan, Poppadom Preach and Autocrats

Mumbai Dabbawalas Making Transfers

. A British couple dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Princess Leia, complete with sabers and hooded costumes, dubbed themselves Return of the Chennai.

The rally organizers encouraged the participants to personalize, or "pimp out," their rickshaws, just as Indian drivers do, often with pictures of their favorite Indian film stars.

"It's been real. Maybe too real," laughed Jen Cook, 37, of Rickshaw Grrlz, clutching a bust of Elvis that rode with her and her partner in their auto-rickshaw, also adorned with faux fur and hot pink boas.

Cook and other competitors said they liked the rally because it was a chance to have fun and do some good at the same time.  "When we handed out school supplies at some of the poorer schools, and the girls were in their blue uniforms with ribbons in their hair, I just lost it and bawled," said Solanki, the Takoma Park resident, who works as registration specialist for loans at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian.

Solanki, whose parents were born in India but who now live in Connecticut, said she didn't want to worry them, so she told her father she was just visiting India, "not driving an auto-rickshaw through the countryside!"

In addition to dealing with the emotional vicissitudes of travel, those in the race said they were often physically exhausted

The Taj Hotel We Didn't Get to Stay In

. They had "rickshaw hangovers," the result of a steady hum of traffic and wind in the ear for eight hours a day, along with wrist strain from gunning the engine.

Many of the rickshaws broke down -- clutches got stuck, breaks failed, mufflers fell off -- too many times to count.  Some Indian reporters embedded with the race asked female participants questions including: "What kind of salary do you make and are you married?"
Joe Pyrek, a 24-year-old participant who works in Richmond, Va., said he first came to India to help set up a call center. He wondered what was behind the curtain of the swanky hotels and over-air-conditioned boardrooms.

"When I heard about this race, I had to do it. I learned so much about Indian culture. I loved that when we broke down, dozens of Indians would help," Pyrek said. "In America, they would probably just give you the finger."

At the rally's closing ceremony, Rotary Club officials handed out certificates to each team that read: "You are shining examples of courage in the face of adversity and have a sense of adventure and exploration and concern and compassion for humanity."

They also gave out horns, perhaps a mistake in a country where a prevailing rule of the road is, if you can't repair the brakes, make the horn louder

Mumbai Dabbawalas at work

.  "Friends, our roads may not be that good," said Shetty, the state minister. "But the road to the heart of every Indian is open."  With that, everybody blew the horns, for about a minute. It sounded like the noise from an authentic Indian street.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2 007/09/01/AR2007090101185_pf.html
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From the NY Times Magazine:  http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/travel/tmagazine/10well -mumbai-t.html?ref=travel&pagewanted=print

Excerpts from
Mumbai's Moment
by ALEX KUCZYNSKI,  September 23, 2007
....Mumbai is an enormous city, cruel and heartless in the way huge cities are. The official population is about 20 million, but some demographers put the number closer to 24 million because of an influx of immigrants and the complexity of measuring the population of Dharavi, the city's central slum. Most estimates put the Dharavi population at one million, but the newspapers report frequently on thousands more shanties sprouting up.

Mumbai is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world.  By 2015, the United Nations predicts it will be the second-largest metropolis on the planet. As Suketu Mehta wrote in his book "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found," in Mumbai, "the greatest luxury of all is solitude."

Solitude is not easy to come by

Our Final Welcome from BTTC

. Simply walking along a city street is an exercise in yogilike self-composition. If you walk, you must be comfortable with the press of warm bodies and the dense, meaty smell of skin and hair that has not been washed in weeks, perhaps months.
In a car, taxi or auto-rickshaw, the vehicle bearing you will knit itself into the complicated ballet that is Mumbai traffic, which makes the 405 in Los Angeles at rush hour seem like a Nascar speedway. There are men on bicycles; couples on moto-scooters, mobile-phone headsets attached to their ears; three or four spaghetti-limbed teenage boys stacked up on motorized tricycles; and hundreds of taxis with ornately scrolled Victorian luggage racks secured to their roofs, balancing luggage, rucksacks and animals in cages.

This is a city of almost unimaginable contradiction. It is home to more millionaires than any other city in India yet is also home to the largest slum in Asia. The ladies who lunch don't speak of their philanthropic work to end the city's abject poverty. "There are simply too many suffering," one socialite explained. "So we focus on things we can actually have an impact on, like art and gardening."

Bollywood produces movies in which co-stars playfully peck each other on the cheek rather than kiss on the mouth, and when an actress gets married in real life, she is often banished from the screen

Quite Elaborate, Don't You Think?

. Juhi Chawla, who for many years was India's cinematic sweetheart - the Indian Meg Ryan - told me that once a female Bollywood star is married and has children, she somehow becomes sullied in the Indian imagination. "The audience wants to believe in her purity, on or off the screen," she said. Chawla is hoping to reverse this trend by making a comeback in a movie in which she plays a doctor.

The culture seeks the kind of innocent enchantment Bollywood movies promote, yet the city's red-light district, Falkland Road, is populated by prostitutes who pose in cages, and the country now ranks third in the world in people living with H.I.V. (roughly 2.5 million), according to a 2007 report from the United Nations. And in the face of incredible wealth and technological advances, Mumbai seems perpetually on the verge of infrastructural collapse. Directly behind the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, a five-star property built in grand Victorian style in 1903, children bathe in a trash-filled rivulet that runs along the side of the street. (Nearly half the city's population lacks running water or electricity.) Street names have been changed so often in recent years that taxi drivers simply refer to "the street by police headquarters," or "the roundabout by the modern art museum."

At night, a yellowish corona of light hangs over the city, a cocoon of pollution from open cooking fires mingling with the soot from auto-rickshaws, diesel buses and coal-fired factories

Lovely Sounding Tablas

. On a bad day, Mehta reports in his book, breathing Mumbai's inversion-trapped air is the equivalent of smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes.

Against this backdrop, however, Mumbai's social and economic life has in the last few years begun to resemble that of New York or Moscow. The country's booming economy has created a pocket of wealth in every city (in 2005 alone, 13,000 new millionaires joined India's rank of the super-rich), but Mumbai, with its combination of industry and entertainment, fashion and art, offers the most fertile ground for an American-style consumer culture to flourish. Chawla told me that Mumbai is "much more relaxed than the rest of the country." Caste divisions, while still rigid, appear to be slowly giving way to a more American model: merit, or fame, or infamy divide those who have from those who have not.

"Mumbai used to be like Boston," explained the wife of a billionaire over lunch at Tiffin, an airy power-lunch spot in the Oberoi Hotel where the wealthy dine on sushi. She spoke on the condition that I not use her name, because she is a member of the city's old-money crowd and would rather remain discreet about her opinions. "There was a very closed, entrenched society, and there were the kingmakers, the people who said who could be a part of society and who could not." Now, she explained, "there are many social circles, not just one, and with enough money you can buy your way into almost any part of it."

The nexus for social life in Mumbai is the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower. It sits just behind the Gateway of India, the city's most famous monument, a wedding cake of basalt and concrete built in 1911 to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary

We Were Just off the Plane - Mumbai Beckons

. The hotel is home to seven restaurants of various global cuisines with names like Souk, Masala Kraft and Wasabi by Morimoto....

....Sangita Sinh Kathiwada, a real-life princess who wears an 11-carat diamond on her finger, owns a high-end clothing boutique here called Mélange and has lived in Mumbai for 30 years. "The city is a mess," she said during an afternoon visit. We drank water flavored with saffron and sugar; she sent one of her houseboys from her house to the store on foot for ice cubes made from purified water, as a friendly gesture to a foreign stomach. "A 12-minute walk is a 30-minute drive. It's easier to get a mobile phone than a land phone. But the city has nevertheless become the heart of the country's art, culture, theater, society and fashion."

The change is one toward Americanization, said Gayatri Jhaveri, who runs an arts foundation. "I grew up when India was a socialistic society," she said over tea in a cafe in Colaba, the city's shopping district. Despite the fact that she was raised in a palace with 30 servants, India's culture then, she said, was not one of constant acquisition: "We had a lot of money, but there wasn't anything to buy." Now, she continued, "there is a burgeoning middle class, and they are very excited about being able to buy things." Jhaveri and her husband decided to send their children to college in the United States rather than have them continue to grow up in this new India

Shelter

. "I thought my kids would grow up with a better life here," she said. "But I had a better life."

In addition to the poverty, the slums, the terrible chasm between rich and poor, the pollution, the noise and the daily reports of corruption in the newspapers, the city presents hygienic challenges to hyper-clean American sensibilities. More than two million people in the city reportedly have no access to a toilet. I met the American filmmaker Tracey Jackson, who was filming a documentary about her daughter teaching at a school in a slum. One morning at 5:30 a.m. she watched hundreds of men walk to the ocean's edge in Khar, a neighborhood that is home to both the poor and the upper middle class, and defecate.

At 6 a.m., hundreds of women did the same thing, only closer to the water so their personal issue would wash away into the ocean faster.

The auto-rickshaw is a sublimely apt symbol for contemporary India, one that combines both the desire for progress and the dubious methods by which that progress is sought. Only here, in the most densely populated city in the world, would it have struck someone as a good idea to take an already unstable means of transport - a seat with no seat belts, a platform with no doors, a steering wheel and windshield, all supported on three small wheels - and add to it a powerful engine, enabling it to hurtle along a highway at up to 35 miles per hour. Being driven through the narrow alleys of Khar in an auto-rickshaw felt like the most dangerous risk I'd taken with my life. Yet, as I clung to the vehicle's flimsy metal frame while we sideswiped buildings and endured the shaking fists from threatened pedestrians, I couldn't help but feel that I was being transported inside the very symbol of India - and of Mumbai

Dabbawala Tiffin Coding System

. The city's population has swollen at such a pace that it has overwhelmed its economic and physical infrastructures. India is emerging as a world player, while much of its society remains intensely spiritual and extremely poor.

Toward the end of my visit, exhausted, I decided to spend the afternoon in Dharavi. The car I was driven in could barely move as we passed miles and miles of people living in cardboard huts held together with metal tape, thatched in plastic, bamboo, mesh, scraps of corrugated metal. Their clothes lay on top of the roofs, the only place to store them.

I transferred to an auto-rickshaw in order to go deeper in. In most of Dharavi, open sewers run between the shanties; these are the playgrounds for children and where mothers wash their cooking utensils. (Typhoid and malaria are common.) There were beggars, leather makers, ironworkers. The place was both a hive of activity and the picture of lassitude.
After my trek through Dharavi, I headed to the airport on the Western Express Highway. As we picked up speed, I aimed my camera out the window, clicking away, hoping to capture images. We stopped for coconut juice, and I took pictures of a boy with a wandering eye who drew himself up, as formal and vaguely bewildered as any subject in a daguerreotype print from the 19th century

My Favorite Kids in India

.

When I turned off the camera, I saw a tableau that remains impressed in my memory in the way that some images remain with you forever, lapidary and durable: a girl of maybe 4 years old, her lithe, nude body splashing around in a brown stream. She kicked up one leg and executed a perfect fouetté, turning and spinning on one leg, propelling her body into the dark hole that was her home, her body divided momentarily by sunlight and shadow.
The name Dharavi translates into "loose mud" in Tamil. Weeks after my visit, an intense monsoon submerged the slum entirely. I wonder what happened to the girl. Was her tarpaulin home washed away? As I imagined the all-night parties continuing at Privé, the Bordeaux flowing and the young investment bankers paying for bottles of Stolichnaya with black American Express cards, I wondered: was she able to even salvage a T-shirt, a pair of underwear, a favorite book of cartoons? I have no answer. The city of contradiction carries on, oblivious.

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