Sex on The Streets

If anything is confusing to the long-term visitor in Mumbai, it’s the question of sex.

Within weeks of my arriving here, it became clear that, in public, Mumbaikers generally like to behave modestly. Women wear pants, very rarely skirts; they wear sleeved blouses, rarely showing bare shoulders; very few couples hold hands or kiss when out strolling (though men-friends do hold hands – but that’s another story).
What’s more, those who break these norms get stared at quite hard.

In this atmosphere, it seemed almost predictable when a newspaper reported that one young actress had turned down a film role because she would have had to do a kissing scene (yes, not a lovemaking scene, or semi-nude scene, but a kissing scene...). Indeed, the Bollywood movies I have seen are almost brilliantly imaginative in the way they manage to be about love and love affairs, and remain virtually sexless!

My impression is that in India generally, sex seems only to be appropriate in private. (Let’s not get into the ancient-erotic-temple-sculptures discussion. The Indians I speak to seem faintly embarrassed by their forebears’ enthusiasm for erotica, and by foreigners' rather obvious and salacious interest in such).

And yet… here in Mumbai, India’s most modern city, things seem to be different – at least somewhat. A different kind of attitude to Sex (or the temptation of it) seems openly omnipresent in this city.

The most obvious example is that Mumbai’s red-light area, in the Falkland Road & Kamathipura districts, slap bang in the centre of the city, is (I’m told) the largest in Asia. From their doorways, the girls are even more blatant in their gaze than those in Amsterdam.

It’s also true that western attitudes toward sex are inexorably finding their own comfort zones in this, India’s most cosmopolitan city.
Inside the walls of expensive nightclubs and luxury hotels, starlets and fashionistas will flash arms, shoulders, legs and cleavage. (The local newspapers are often on hand to make sure their flesh gets extra exposure, in their party pages).
Quite a few brave young students will even experiment out of doors - with tight jeans and bare-shoulder halter-tops.

As for the media, well, the promise of glamorous, if less accessible sex, is given lots of space in, oddly, the leading liberal newspapers.
These papers contrive to get a dozen or so pictures of pretty girls (a good percentage of them being American film stars in bikinis or other revealing clothes), into their “Entertainment Sections” every day.

Incidentally, it strikes me as very odd indeed that it is the liberal newspapers (which in this country are the heavyweight English-language dailies) that are the ones to be peddling girlie pix of the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears in pouting poses. It’s as though the British Guardian had a special section called “Half-Naked Girls!”; and it’s just one of the contradictions in this city that the thoughtful papers should want to display their liberal attitudes in this way…
What’s more ‘The Doctor Says’ sex-advice pages in these papers are almost as blush-makingly frank as anything in European women’s mags.

Meanwhile, in the city’s main art gallery, the Jehangir, sexual images are quite openly part of nearly every show (though there was one arrest a few months ago when one objector thought things had Gone Too Far).

Well? You say. So what? Not so different to Manchester!
Well, not quite.
You see, it’s that the contrast between what happens in public life and what happens in private life that is so wide here. Sex is everywhere, but under constraint.


One instance should serve to illustrate this contradiction. Openly sold on the newsstands (see pic above), there are lots of magazines with misleadingly inviting young women (wearing just bra and pants) on their covers. However these fleshy and raunchy covers are just teases: the images in their inside pages are as innocent as spring lambs.
(… more on girlie magazines below.)

For in fact there is great sexual conservatism here in what is said and done publicly.

For example…
For the most part even very educated young men and women are disturbingly giggly about sex; it is clear that many have little experience of close relationships before they are married or the significance of sex in life.
The kinds of adverts and posters we are used to in say London or Rome, which use alluring women as objects to sell products, are much fewer here. (One of the few exceptions to this rule is the kind of poster used for Bollywood B-movies, which uses the same kind of kitsch sex appeal as did the Hollywood posters in the fifties. No one seems to object to those though!)
Bars and clubs and resto-bars hardly ever employ the pretty women that they would do if they were in Britain. Most waiters and bar-staff are men. “Dance-bars”, which were banned from the city last year, did have women dancers – but they were modestly clad in full dress. (These bars were only banned because men were spending too much money in them).
Public art, which in Europe would feature lots of nakedness, is stylistically much more monumental here. I can only think of two public statue groups featuring nudity, and they are over a century old, and from the British Victorian “classical” tradition.

Yet, in contrast, as I’ve said, a very vocal combination of the intelligentsia and the “filmy”/arty classes is calling for more openness, and seems to be challenging those conventions, though also while paying a degree of lip-service to them at the same time.
Mumbai leads London in the size of this kind of gap between fantasy and reality.
The oddest thing of all is that when a model in next-to-nothing is used in magazines and papers here, she is, nine times out of ten… a blonde European. How schizophrenic is that?

Incidentally, before you ask, I have never, except once, seen a nude-girls magazine on sale here, even on the street-stalls.
The one exception occurred when I glimpsed the edge of what looked like a film magazine at a newsstand. I was quite surprised to realize it was an effort at pornography, albeit fairly tame and confused, with its combination of juvenile smutty jokes, topless European models gazing out of windows (not fully nude of course) and, strangely, health advice.
What was clear right away was that, in England, it would have barely raised a few snickers even among fourteen-year-old boys. Yet, as the newsvendor embarrassedly took it from my hand (and offered me The Economist instead!), I realised that it was quite a risqué magazine for Mumbai.
I never saw poor pathetic ‘Temptation’ (I noticed that that issue was Volume 1, Number 1) ever again.

Meanwhile, in the expensive bookshops in the city, where the middle-class men go, there is a new trend in trying to supply this thirst for soft-porn.
First, bizarrely, is the number of glossy, up-market lingerie magazines! This presumably is a supposedly “legitimate” way to sell images of half-dressed women.
Secondly, I’m afraid I do have to report that imported Brit "men's mags" such as FHM, which are now on sale in these expensive bookshops, are supplying the adolescent male’s desire for provocative women. The panting teenager will have to pay the price though – at a hefty Rs 450, these Brit mags cost ten times what the ordinary Indian mag costs – so this recourse is only open to the very well-off.

(Yes, yes, I’m sure there must be lots of under-the-counter pornography that I have not come across. Apparently internet porn is very popular here too. But I’m only reporting what I can see on the public surface of Mumbai society).

**

Where there are people testing the boundaries, there must be a conflict and then resolution, right?

A certain tension certainly seems present in Mumbai, though quite how serious the city’s “moral guardians” are in forcing their point across is actually now open to doubt.

(In the rest of the country, the moral guardians seem to be able to raise quite a lot of heat whenever they see matters that they regard as offensive to Indian standards.
In fact, recently the government turned against the idea of sex education for 10-12 year-olds in school and has banned it. And, although cable TV recently expanded hugely, there is already a crackdown on channels that concentrate on broadcasting shows with models in skimpy clothes – one such has even been banned.)

But, in Mumbai, generally, no one (as far as I can tell) is getting too upset. Even the leading political party in the city, the Shiv Sena, once a byword for strict standards, appears (for now) to be making a kind of peace with the liberal pacesetters here. It would be interesting to try to figure out why.
Perhaps the way in which young people have such a stake in this city – with their thriving music and clubbing scenes, their involvement in Bollywood and in the financial markets, their vigorous artistic life, as well as their openness to the idea of sex (if not always the practice of sex) – is holding the balance? Perhaps.
The city’s future too, with its yearning for riches, glossy status symbols and internationalism in its dealings, appears to mean a drive toward liberalism is likely – at least for now.

It’s odd how this city does so often remind one of Victorian London. Not just in the contrast of rich and poor, and between great beauty and terrible ugliness, but also in this ambivalent relationship with sex.
How will Mumbai move on this issue? It will be interesting to watch how the game goes.

++

ADDENDUM (Later)
Some people have said they don't get what my standpoint on sex in this article is. They try to make me strike an attitude. Do I approve of the fact that sex is only appropriate in private in Mumbai? Do I think women in the West are exploited - but respected in India? Do I think girlie mags are a Bad Thing? Am I a liberal or a conservative? Do I support or want to discourage sex before marriage?
Well, I'm quite pleased people should be confused.
The idea of the blog is to report (hopefully without prejudice or favour) what I see, and try ot make some thoughtful guesses (it's up to you to say if I have plumped for the right answers). Then, try to compare what I see with my own culture back home so that my target readers (both European and Indian people who travel) can understand what I'm trying to describe.

So, the answer is: I hope I have no standpoint but that of the interested observer.


To leave a comment, just click on “comments”, below/at bottom of page.
Commenting on this site is open; so you do not need to register, and you can even leave an anonymous comment if you wish

Posting in Mumbai

In England, I like sometimes to send a parcel of T-shirts and books to my nephews in Italy. I put the stuff in a small cardboard box, wrap it in brown paper, take it to any post office, sign a small customs chit, and pay the postage. From home and back again the operation takes ten minutes.

But here in India, it’s different. Here, on my first occasion of trying, it took me half a day…I kid you not. Not for the last time was I to be astounded at how involved and laborious certain processes can be in the sub-continent.

The first puzzle arose at the local Post Office. They didn’t like the brown paper I had wrapped the parcel in. The paper? I said. What’s wrong with the paper?
It has to be a “special wrapping”, said the counter-clerk stubbornly – and she refused to allow me to send it.

An Indian friend and I scoured the stationery shops. Everyone, from friends to shopkeepers, was confused by this “special wrapping” demand, and, very unsurely, I eventually settled on some laminated paper.
No, said the counter-clerk again, that’s not it. Her description of the wrapping and my ability to understand what she was describing clashed.
Impasse.

So I decided to try the main Post Office in the centre of Mumbai – the one next to CS Railway Terminus.
The Mumbai GPO is a huge, imposing Victorian building with a giant dome on top. It is as big, and with as many nooks and crannies, as Notre Dame Cathedral – somewhere in there it is quite possible an Indian Quasimodo lurks. It is a monument to Trans-National Communication. It is gloomy and it makes one feel small, and it has floors to which No Unauthorised Person is ever allowed. And, in the main foyer, there are over thirty counters – so, someone in some part of this impressive building must sell this elusive wrapping. Surely?

As soon as I arrived outside the GPO I was under surveillance.
Someone like me is a dead give-away to the practised eye of the Bombay hawker.

Wondering doubtfully which massive entrance I should take (and a little concerned that I would even be allowed in, as the security guard was eyeing me suspiciously), I was halted by a man who had run across from the other side of the street. He took my parcel from me.
He knew what I wanted: Wrapping, right? For an international parcel, I said. Of course, he said.
At last!

He led me across the busy road. Under the shade of a huge banyan tree, and directly facing the GPO, were a dozen men, each seated at a small table. These, I gathered, were “package-wallahs”.
My man sat down at his table, expertly folded down the cardboard on my parcel, and grabbed a length of thin cotton cloth sacking, which he measured out around my parcel.
This was the special wrapping. Who would have known?
(And what was so important about it?)
I was about to thank him and pay for the material, when he pulled out a large sewing needle… and proceeded to sew the cloth tightly around the parcel.
Sew? I was dumbfounded.
Is sticky tape disallowed? Is sticky tape illegal maybe?
But, in Mumbai, you don’t question anything. There is a reason for everything. You may not know it - or ever know it – but there is a reason.
He made large looping stitches, and pulled them tight.
He handed the wrapped parcel back. Thirty rupees, he said. I paid up.

Now – you’d think the day was over. All I had to do was take my correctly wrapped parcel to a counter, and all would be done. In a trice, maybe, I hoped.
Nope.

The help desk in the GPO was vacant. Of the thirty counters, half were also vacant, and the rest were pressed with anxious jostling queues. But then, a man who was staring at me said – next building, third floor. This was, as it turned out, good advice.
(One thing I have discovered about Mumbaikers is that, if they offer advice, it’s worth listening. But don’t ASK them for advice; that will only lead to confusion. I’ll explain that conundrum another time.
Conversely, in London, if someone had offered me advice, I would have been suspicious immediately.)

But following the advice one gets is not always easy.
For, in Mumbai, signs are an optional extra. The Indian way is to ask for directions, time and time again, gradually narrowing down to your search until you reach your final destination. It is a good way of meeting people, and is a demonstration, if one needed it, of just how friendly Mumbai folk are. Of course, this method may mean a few wrong turnings, but then the signage method is hardly perfect either, is it?
Fifteen minutes later, having explored many of the inner bye-ways of the GPO labyrinth, and having made my way up three flights of dirty and dingy stairs, I was in the ‘Foreign Parcel Export Department’. Piles of packages (all in “special wrapping”, which reassured me) lined long ancient wooden tables, the sort of tables that seem to be a part of all post office delivery rooms all over the world.

I was directed into a high steel cage in which were a number of desks, at which sat my next interviewers. A ‘Customs Postal Appraiser’ – I presume, for so it said on the nameplate over the door into the cage – gave me a customs form to fill out, in triplicate.
But he was most puzzled by my parcel. “The wrapping…?” he said. Of course my heart sank. Not Again.
But, no. This was a different problem.
“Why is your parcel wrapped? How can I see inside it when it is wrapped?”
Well, it was a good question, and I had no answer.

He explained patiently, as to a child. As a customs officer, he had to examine the contents of the parcel.
But, couldn’t he just, well, believe what I told him was in it? I asked in a small voice. He smiled grimly.
A man was summoned (there’s always a man to do these small menial things) who sliced along the stitching with a knife. The customs officer pulled out the T-shirts inside, and then stuffed them back again.
I got dejected. How would I get the parcel stitched again?

OK, he said, and he stamped the customs form. As I turned to leave with my wrecked package, he looked puzzled again. Give it to the man, he said, he will stitch it again; you cannot send it like that! He was finding my behaviour as bizarre as I was finding his. Sure enough, the man wordlessly stitched the whole thing up again.
In the meantime, the form had been passed to the desk opposite my officer’s, where my officer said a woman who wasn’t there would examine it.
I was asked to sit.

In this intervening period of rest and relaxation, I pondered why the business was being conducted inside a cage. I supposed suspect packages must be stored in it at night, but it seemed impolite to ask.
What was strange though was how filthy and dusty the place was. The small windows, seemingly unwashed for years, admitted only a little grey light, and on the horizontal bars of the square grilles that made up the cage were thick dust-balls. The desks and the people were clean enough, and the place seemed well used, so the dirt remained a mystery.

As time passed, and we waited for the woman who wasn’t there, the whole experience was beginning to seem like a story dreamed up by Kafka. I wondered if I might wait for days.

Ten minutes later the woman who wasn’t there arrived, and, after a conference, the form was approved. The form came back to my officer who signed the parcel – and then stamped it for good measure.
I got up to leave. He shook his head. No – not yet!

The wrapper-man returned, and took out a long knife and scraped a large blob of an ugly, black, shiny tar-like material onto its end. Staring at me, he then heated the mass over a flame, which was burning thickly at the end of what looked like a Roman candle firework.
I watched. What would happen next? Torture…?

But instead, he started to wipe portions of the black-stuff, now hot and plastic, onto the corners of my parcel, onto the parts where the stitching had been ended off. That done, he picked up a metal stamp, and impressed its image on the cooling but still viscous tar. He looked at me.
My parcel was now completely, officially, and Without Question, securely wrapped. Using a method ten centuries old.

I think I was so impressed by this procedure, I must have appeared a little nonplussed. So the man thrust the parcel in my hand; indicated to me to pick up the (stamped) forms, and pointed me to the postage counter in the next department. He hadn’t said a word the whole time.

The man at the postage desk was by contrast very friendly and smiled a lot at what I said. It became clear he didn’t understand my English, and even less my baby-Hindi, but then what difference did that make? He knew his job anyway!
Carefully, he noted the address that I’d written on the customs form. He slowly transcribed it onto his computer’s database.
He weighed my parcel.
He sought a barcode from the computer, which then dutifully printed a barcode label.
He stuck the barcode label to the parcel.
He signed the parcel.
He stamped it.
He charged me 470 rupees for the postage. As I handed him the money I noticed my hands were sooty-black, from accidentally touching the tar blobs. He politely tried not to notice.
I asked him, after he gave me the change, what else I had to do? He smiled, shrugged his shoulders. What else could be done?

So it was over. An hour from reaching the GPO, I had finally got my parcel into worldwide transit. A triumph!

I seemed to need rest at this point, so I sat down by the only other person in the room, a woman who was trying to send packages to Australia.
“What,” I asked her “is the purpose of the men who sat outside the Post Office at tables wrapping the parcels… if one only has to have them re-opened for Customs?”
She obviously pitied me, but said she knew nothing of the “package-wallahs”. She had had her parcels sewn here, in this office. What else would one do?
Where was I from?, she asked. I told her I came from a place where it took only five minutes to send a parcel. I don’t think she believed me.

**

There are more questions than answers in Mumbai, though it is a mistake to think that there are that many fewer answers. There are quite a lot of answers; it’s just that it takes a while to get at them.
And, in the strange way that India gets to you, the whole meandering process of trying to discover the answers, not to mention the lanes it will take you along and the intriguing people it will put you in touch with, is one of the most enjoyable things you can undertake here.
With that in mind, I resolved to go right back to the package-wallahs and get some answers.

Then I thought: I’ve been sorting this out since 9am - and it’s now 1pm.
And then I thought: Maybe I’ll see them tomorrow.
Tomorrow will do.


ADDENDUM
My brother emailed me a couple of months later to say he received the parcel. “Loved the packing”, he said. “The kids loved it too. We couldn’t quite believe it when we saw it. But, you don’t need to go to all that trouble, you know.”


(Please comment if you want. You do not need to register, and you can leave an anonymous comment if you wish)

Toilets (2) - and Spitting

There is a political joke here, which goes like this...
Q. What's the difference between American democracy and Indian democracy?
A. In America, you can kiss in public, but not pee in public. In India you can't kiss in public - but you can pee in public!

Like a lot of seemingly feeble witticisms, in fact that joke has a lot of truth to it. (If you don’t believe me about India and kissing, just put the phrase "richard gere and shilpa shetty" into Google. Go on, do it now).

Open Urination, unlike "open defecation" which I mentioned in my last blog, gets very little attention in conversations at parties I attend, yet I actually think it is a subject more demanding of attention.

In Mumbai, men think very little of finding a convenient stretch of wall and relieving themselves - and at almost any time of day and in open view.
(Men in Britain tend to wait until the late hours of Saturday, when they are staggering back home from the pub, before doing anything like that…). The stink that accompanies the most favoured stretches of wall in Mumbai is pretty rank; the cloud of flies that one has to navigate is also truly unpleasant.

Yet, here again, I do have an ounce of sympathy with men. (I have never seen a woman do this incidentally).
Whilst public toilets appear to be more frequent than I thought they would be in this hard-up city, they seem none of them to be free. Which I think odd.
After all, in a city where a very poor man may earn as little as Rs 100 ($2) a day, I would guess he is really not going to want to spend two rupees to use a urinal. If you/the government wants men to use toilets, make them free.
It’s hard to know what men would do in England if conveniences were not free. I shudder to think.

Er… not that there are urinals in many of the Mumbai public toilets that I’ve used so far anyway! The fact is that the conveniences consist usually of private stalls and showers, and no urinals. I can understand why. If you can urinate into the nearest ditch, why would you trudge across the road to pay to use an "expensive" convenience?

Even more bizarrely (this no one can explain, I’m sure), many small ‘desi’ restaurants, which have a washbowl to wash one’s hands in, have no toilet! So, a man cannot even nip into a food-joint (as one might in London or New York) for fast relief.
I'm still puzzled why desi restaurants have no toilet though.

So … what should a man do?

**

Just a final quirky thought on this – and again, I’d appreciate the view of Someone Who Knows.

I’ve just finished Rohinton Mistry’s wonderful book set in Bombay ‘Such A Long Journey’. In it, one of the characters, who rather wishes people would stop urinating on the stretch of wall outside his home, persuades an artist to paint pictures of religious figures on the wall. The plan works. Sure, enough, out of respect, men thereafter leave his wall alone.
Well, strike me, but in fact there are many, many walls in Bombay on which figure paintings, tiles and drawings of gods and icons from nearly all of Mumbai’s religions. Are they too being cleverly “protected” by their owners?
Now, was it a trend before Mistry’s book came out? Or did Mistry’s writing inspire it? Someone tell me!

In a further twist, I began to notice that stairwells had also similar arrangements of sacred images along their walls. But why, in this instance? It’s doubtful that men would urinate there, inside a building.
Was it simply India's inherent desire to be devout?
Or, and I believe I am on the right track here, could it be another Rohinton-Mistry trick?
You see, Mumbai is plagued by men who love to spit. They chew a fragarant and intoxicating mix of leaves and spices, called paan, in a similar way to the cowboys who had their "chewing tobacco". As the excess liquid builds up in the mouth, they feel the urge to spit it out, as you'd guess.
Strangely however, they often like to spit the superfluous fluid out not just on to the floor but often toward an upright structure, mostly a wall, or - don't ask me why - the sides of a corner recess on a stairwell landing in a block of flats. In housing complexes, the consequent splash of spit creates a rather familiar garish dark red colouration on the walls (betel leaf, one of the ingredients, turns the mouth crimson when chewed).
Not surprisingly, spitting this guck on a wall outside your neighbour's front door is regarded in some quarters as a tad unsociable, not to say objectionable.
In fact, now I think about it, why does anyone do it at all?

Anyway, to get to the point, I was wondering whether the sacred images on the stairwell walls have a similar protective purpose - to ward off spitters. For who but a complete heathen would spit on such a wall?

Fascinatingly enough, the creators of these talismans know their enemy well. They deliberately place images from all the religions they can think of - a Hindu god might be there, alongside an image of Jesus, plus a depiction of the mosque in Mecca, and a portrait of one of the Sikh prophets. All bases covered.
Well, nearly. There are apparently not quite enough Buddhists, Jains or Parsis in the city however to make it statistically worthwhile to put up images from those religions. I guess so anyway... because I have never seen such.

Well, as usual, I think I'm guessing too much. I shall stop now. But if someone can put me right, please do. Comment away!

It’s a great city, this, isn’t it??!!


(You can comment by clicking on 'comments'. Commenting is open on this site. You do not need to register, and you can leave an anonymous post if you wish.)

Bottoms at The Sea

Every morning at seven, I get up to look at my view of the sea. In a high-rise I may live, but it does overlook the Harbour bay of Bombay, and at that time the sun is reflecting off the water.

It is also reflecting off about fifty bare bottoms.

You see, at this time of the morning the men from the nearby housing complex take an easy stroll down to the rocks that make up the sliver of coastline here, and, in a nice relaxed fashion, squat and make their toilet facing the waves. After ten minutes (sometimes more) of meditative motions, they wash in one of the rock-pools, and head off to work. It’s a good way to start the day.
There’s no embarrassment, though each man will give his neighbour a correct space. A few will be more modest than the others by hunkering down near the swampy bushes, but many are as exposed as they can be as they squat down right out at the point where the waves are coming in.
The people who live in my block are, of course, furious. Some, from the safety of our compound, even hurl small pebbles at the men to discourage them – but the men take little notice.

I suppose I too should be outraged.

However, to tell the truth, I don’t much care. When I asked one of the men why he did it, he told me that the complex’s “toilets stink” (which is true) and that, anyway, he liked to come out here in the morning air.
To be honest, I also couldn’t see much harm in it. The water of the bay ebbs and flows, and around noon, all the men’s droppings are submerged – and then carried away as the waters ebb in the afternoon.
As for the offence to my sensibilities… I’ve seen worse things at sea, as the saying goes. I must admit I’d read VS Naipaul’s ‘Area of Darkness’ in which he claims to be disgusted by men defecating by the side of the road, but then I must say I think Naipaul is sometimes a bit pompous.

But then, one day, I got roundly ticked off.

Apparently “open defecation” (the most widely-used term for this in India) is a Bad Thing. At a party (where else would one talk loudly about faeces?) I was told by a rather upset woman that open defecation in fields in rural India polluted water-courses and caused a terrible toll in cases of diarrhoea and children’s diseases.
I had not known this.

But I did wonder – what is the difference between human excreta and animal excreta? Is human excrement in fields so much worse than animal? I did not like to ask her.
This issue is relevant, as the government – according to the newspapers – intends to make India “open-defecation free” by 2012. They will be providing literally millions of domestic toilets. The sanitary-ware industry in this country must be jumping for joy.

Now, I hope I’m not quite stupid. In areas where human beings live densely together, good sanitation is of course absolutely essential for community health. And, if villagers excrete into a pool, then I can see that will pollute water.
But if a farmer and his family excrete using a field latrine-area and then dig soil over the results, what is the issue? And if a few men take their morning toilet on the sea-line, will that really foul up an (already filthy!) bay of Bombay?

Really, I would like to know the answer. I searched on the internet for quite a long-time, wading through reports knee-deep in… well… facts, but not for the first time, the internet could not find me an exact answer. Can someone explain why ALL open defecation is bad?


And for my next blog topic: ...urination!


(You can comment by clicking on 'comments'. Commenting is open on this site. You do not need to register, and you can leave an anonymous post if you wish.)

You Staring at Me?

One should never be confused by Mumbai’s international status into thinking that it is an international city where international behaviour applies.
For instance – in Mumbai, staring at people is not only OK, it is part of the scenery.

Imagine me, fresh off the plane. A security guard at the airport is staring at me, but with no expression (friendly or otherwise) on his face.
Now, a stare in England is an invitation to an interchange of some sort, or, if prolonged a few seconds, a sign of aggression.
I lock stares with him, but he doesn’t look away or change his expression. This is now becoming (for me) a serious standoff. Angered (I’d had a long flight…) I challenge him: “Do you have a problem of some sort with me?” Only then does he look away, saying nothing. Moment over.

Now I look back, I realise that the poor security guard must have thought I was crazy, or had taken an extra dose of testosterone that morning. Because his blank staring – which in a British pub might have led to a fight – is just something people in Bombay do. They stare quite openly at one, as a matter of course.
I suppose they might stare longer at someone who is foreign, or a woman who has bare shoulders, for curiosity value, but they just like to stare at people. And that’s it.

This cultural misunderstanding can lead to almost comic moments.
In one supermarket, I caught a man staring at me. As we were both stuck in checkouts, there was nothing else to do, and I stared back at him. His face was unflinching, and I thought I could detect a whiff of hostility, so I changed from stare to glare. By now ten seconds had passed. He didn’t alter his face.
I was getting annoyed, but in a spirit of Gandhigiri, decided to smile. Then to cock my head in puzzlement. Then to raise my eyebrows. Not one reaction from him as he simply continued to bore his gaze into my face; and now we were (I thought) into a game of chicken – who will drop the stare first?
After thirty seconds, he slowly looked to one side.
Had I won? To be honest, I think not. He’d obviously grown bored of my features, and, unembarassedly, moved on. It had all been a storm in my own teacup.
Yet, in England or America, this would have been a match of aggression, two stags locking horns.

An American woman I know now has her own technique. If she can be bothered (it would be too exhausting to do it on all occasions), she smiles – and smiles – and smiles – until her interchange is met also with a smile.
Because Indians stare in such an unconcerned way, she says when the eventual smile comes back, it is almost a smile of surprise, as though to say: “me? You’re smiling at me? Well I do like that!”
Needless to say, she restricts herself in this performance to children, the old and to women…

So, how does a reserved Englishman cope with being stared at? What I would have called the obvious response, which is to nod in recognition of someone’s interest or to say, American-style, “Hiya! How are you this good morning?” and walk on, is simply inappropriate. No one is trying to engage with you, so to respond as though they were is seen as odd.

No, what I do now is largely try to ignore it in the nicest possible way. Walking the pavements, passing through the tunnels of stares, is at first difficult – it doesn’t come naturally to me. Yet one does it, albeit with one’s English mind still ticking over and thinking “gosh, I hope I’m not offending anyone by not returning his or her looks…”

++

Just one postscript to this.
When I discussed this issue with a young woman I know, she bowed forward and covered her head in her hands. Then she looked up and said patiently, “You simply don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, do you? In any culture, we have to deal with this sort of thing every minute of every day.”
Ah, I said.

(Comment by clicking on 'comments'. Commenting is open on this site; you do not have to register, or leave posts with your real name on them).

How To Spoil a Great Museum

On arriving in Mumbai’s arts quarter, one of the most powerful prods to the imagination of the visitor is the sight of a beautiful domed building hidden away in its grounds, behind high railings and a veil of trees. In its reserved position and with its strange, evocative mix of architectural styles, ‘Saracenic’ and British-Gothic, it is suggestive of a concealed palace of secret treasures.
And in fact the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya (aka the Prince of Wales Museum), for that is what it is, is just that. But, oh, how one wishes it were more than… just that!

Let me, first of all, explain that the CS Museum is a marvel.
Whatever one’s reservations, to approach up the drive to that lovely dome in the sunlight is a joy.
To enter the marbled lobby and look upwards one hundred feet through another two floors and into the bowl of the dome is to savour a fine architect’s vision.
The study of the exquisite miniature-paintings exhibited here would make a very long journey totally worthwhile for any art-lover.
To wander at liberty and be so close to centuries-old statues of serene stone gods and bodhisattvas (found the length of the sub-continent from Tamil Nadu to the Himalayas) turns dull history into an hypnotic experience.
To be so close to the incredibly intricate jewellery pieces and ornate weaponry is to make one wonder deeply at the care in workmanship.
So, yes, I would advise that you go.

Most of the time, you’ll have the place much to yourself too. Dirt-cheap prices for Indians mean that (whenever I go anyway) there will be always some local teenagers or bored tourists from Delhi hanging about, but the 300 rupees ($6) price for non-Indians seems to put off quite a few foreigners, which is a shame.
The audio guide too is rather well-scripted and voiced, with just enough background facts to keep the informed expert listening, but enough colourful description to keep the casual visitor interested too.

But the fact is that a lot of people I’ve spoken to simply don’t rate the museum’s collection.
Certainly it’s undervalued, I think, by the leading guidebooks, which damn it with faint praise. Fodor’s India virtually dismisses it, with just two lines on the collection, while even ‘Time Out Mumbai’ can only squeeze out two sentences (in fact, it has more to say about the displays at the tiny Money Museum in Fort…!)

If the museum’s collection is so good, why is it so, well, unappreciated? Why such disaffection? Well, there’s a can of worms… I think I can point up some problems.

Let me give you an example of why visitors are turned off. As I said, the delicate miniature paintings of India are to die for. Some of these pictures (many of which are here) easily stand comparison, in my humble opinion, with the output of the pre-Raphael Italian schools. You could easily spend a couple of hours at CS enjoying these depictions of life, so delicately and so finely and so gorgeously observed they are.
Well, you could. But you won’t.
Sadly, in the miniatures gallery the lighting (which amounts to a few yellowing fluorescent tubes) is so understated, i.e. dim!, that one’s eyes are tired after just thirty minutes with all one’s peering and squinting. What’s more, thick yellow drapes on the windows prevent any natural light entering.
Now of course, even I realise that harsh direct lighting would damage these fragile things (though, annoyingly, there is no apologetic sign to explain that); but modern techniques of lighting do also mean that, with a little will, it is possible to help the art-lover actually see the details of what s/he is looking at - without damaging the works.
So - the CS Museum is either incredibly poorly funded, or there is a lack of modern thinking among the trustees.

The maddening thing is that, in an extension to this very same building, the Khandalavala Wing (endowed by a former chairman of the museum) shows just how modern approaches to museums can make the difficult look easy. Intelligent settings and appropriate lighting there make that section, small as it is, incredibly welcoming.
Even in the marginalised Pre-History gallery the cleverly planned lighting of the Assyrian reliefs shows thoughtfulness.
And the visiting exhibitions in the Premchand Roychand Gallery on the far side of the East Wing are often innovative.
But where is the inspiration for the way in which the bulk of the main collection is presented?

And don’t talk to me about the Ratan Tata European Paintings Gallery. The shabby frames, the peeling paintings, the huge ugly fans and the cracking walls in this gallery – which includes some Constables believe it or not – would disgrace a provincial gallery in Pune, let alone here in the foremost museum one of the greatest cities on earth. Frankly, I think that that gallery should be put out of its misery, like an animal in pain – if no one is prepared to rescue it, its paintings should be donated elsewhere and the room simply closed.

But also what came across to me as a foreigner, and marks the major disparity between how this gallery presented itself and what I am used to back home in Europe, is that the possibilities of attracting, exciting and gripping the visitor seem to be ignored!

For example… The labelling of the works is often not only uninformative, except perhaps to an art-historian, but even missing. Unless you’re an expert, you often have to guess what it is that you are looking at.

For example… The splendid gardens, which contain colourful beds of flowers and a number of (apparently) fine oriental statues, are roped off. No one was able to explain why, or how long this situation would continue.

For example… Certain sections of the gallery seem to be closed for renovation at any one time. But do you think the unsuspecting visitor would be told this before paying over any money? Nope.

For example... The totally out of date website, which seems to have been last refreshed ten years ago, and has virtually NO information on it. Please, folks! This is the twenty-first century - when a child can make a website at virtually no cost. Can't you?

For example… The gift shop. Now, don’t get me wrong. I too despise galleries where there is more attention and space given over to Money than to Art, but there has to be a balance. The visitor seeks, when going to the gift shop, a memory of a wonderful day. In the CS Museum gift shop, which is isn’t large enough to hold a dozen people, there are a few untidily arranged and expensive-looking art-books for sale - and a mere thirty cards! (Incidentally, some of these cards show works from other museums, annoyingly). Is it really so impossible to get in a professional photographer and create a wider selection of cards?
And if you seek refreshment in the midst of your hours here? At many major galleries – even the nearby Jehangir – you might find a small café, or at least a vending machine. Not here. You’d better have brought a bottle of water, cos there’s nothing.

What is one to make of all this? Do the managers of the museum not care to exploit the cash-resource of their visitors, which is at their very fingertips, or do they really not think about visitors’ needs, or, as I suspect, is there so little creative thinking that customer service is seen as an expensive luxury?
I suspect that the reason the place is not teeming with visitors, as it should be given the treasures on show, is because of this attitude toward the visitor.

The museum is a fabulous effort of conservation. But gone are the days when museums could just be the preserve of the curators. Nowadays, they belong to the public too.
And if money is the root of the problem, then a major appeal (of which there was no sign) is in order.

There will be, I hope, many people who wish to tell me how wrong I am in my assessment. And, at the risk of contradicting myself, I hope they do.

The point I am hoping to make is that there are some wonderful pieces here, including the very building itself. A visitor to Mumbai would be foolish not to put aside an afternoon, and even a day, to go around.
But the flaws niggle at the visitor like annoying mosquitoes, in the end making the experience much, much less than it could be.

**

A final note.
On one of my visits, time passed by almost without me noticing so engrossed I was, and the attendants were turning off the lights and ushering people out before I even realised the bell had gone. As I left the huge white staircase to cross the lobby and leave, the sun was just starting to go down, and, to my left, its last orange rays were entering through the windows of the Statuary Hall, where the lights were already off. In the half-light, the statues had mutated into unfamiliar shapes.
There is something oddly affecting about empty rooms in a museum, and in this instance it was even more so. The statues, some more than a millennium old, standing mute, being forsaken for the night, were twisting and turning (or appearing to) as the dying sunlight moved over or by them, changing.
What a spell was being weaved there!

And it’s epiphanies like that which remind you that… niggling as their flaws may be, the great museums with their great collections do have a power in them – and it’s a crying shame to see such wonders neglected.

Links: Museum Website, and Excellent Intro to the Museum Collection even though it lacks some details (on The Bharat website)

++
Please make a comment. Commenting is open on this site, so you do not have to register, and you can even leave anonymous messages if you wish.