While in England shop assistants may ignore you, and in Spain they may snarl at you (just for asking a question!), and in France they may just look down on you and in America they may pounce on you, in India… they just follow you. And often, not just one, but two or three of them.
It can only be, I suppose, because labour is cheap here. Stores seem to be as stocked as much with assistants as with products.
And I suppose assistants are told they must be at their customers’ beck and call. Often, when the shops I have been in are not that busy, I get an assistant, or two, all to myself.
I walk in, I smile. They smile. I give a little look that says in the universal-shrug-speak, “Just looking!”. I think the exchange of shopper and shop assistant is over, so I start to wander around and gaze. But someone is on my tail. I turn right. They turn right. I stop to look at a shelf of goods. They stop. A shadow of a shop assistant. Or two. Never quite in my personal space, they remain five or six feet away. I verbalize again to them: “Just looking”. But they continue to lurk.
Oddly, sometimes, they refuse look at me, even as they dog my footsteps, which gives one the strange sensation that this is all just a science-fiction. Perhaps I am invisible, but they can sense and follow my presence.
It is even odder, when, as I am looking at, say, shelves of CDs, they continue to stand next to me - right in the way of the next shelf - so that I must go round them in order to see the next row of discs.
I used to wonder if they thought I was a potential shoplifter, whom they must keep a deliberate eye on. Maybe tourists, I thought, are known for being untrustworthy. It’s possible…
In fact, entertaining this thought that I was under suspicion once got me so annoyed that in one shop I walked quicker and quicker and quicker, and then stopped abruptly. The poor assistant, rushing to keep up, couldn’t help but whiz straight on past me.
I’m ashamed to admit that when she regained her position – five feet behind me – I continued my tease by spuriously turning left and then right to see her keep up with me before finally turning 180-degrees to face her directly. However, I’m glad I didn’t confront her at this point, because, yes, after all, she was just doing her job. Does her boss tell her to be on hand for customers at all times? And if she had simply, albeit efficiently, stood in a corner and followed me only with her eyes, her boss probably would have scolded her. Right?
But who needs such close attention? Well, some people obviously. The old and the infirm do.
But does the haughty lady, who does not lift a finger for herself, but who forces the shop assistant to lift the tiniest things off the shelf for her perusal? I doubt she needs the attention; it might in fact do her some good to do something for herself.
Of course, it is, if that is its intention, a successful way of combating shoplifting. It is even more useful as a form of job-creation. Perhaps it is not as daft as it seems.
It was the same when I went to a nursery to buy some plants for one of the many people who let me stay at their home while I was looking for an apartment.
First there was one guy, then two, then as I wandered around the rows of ivy a manager was called over, and finally a fourth man appeared. I was the only customer in this little field off the edge of a city park where they sold plants. But still, four guys were on hand to help me shop. Indians’ natural curiosity, plus the propensity to assist - and the fact that there was nothing, at that moment, better for these guys to do - meant that I couldn’t fail to be helped.
But in this instance, it did turn out that there were four functions to be performed. When I asked one of them, “Do you have jasmine here? You know, the white flower with the strong, sweet smell?” (I didn’t even think then that it is one of the most prolific flowers of the country, the smell of which probably kick-started the Indian aromatherapy industry), it took all four to produce the necessary reactions. One of them sniggered outright; another smiled slowly and said something in Marathi to the old one (who then went to get me the plant); and the fourth said to me politely, “Sir. This is India. You ask me if I know jasmine...?”
(With thanks to LLP for nearly all the input).
**
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Monday, 30 April 2007
Friday, 27 April 2007
Reverse Racism - & Contempt for Servants
One thing the European visitor notices almost immediately is that his skin-colour will mark him out for special treatment. You might say that that would be blindingly obvious, but the fact is that India is one of the world's leading nations (in the top twelve states in terms of GDP, believe it or not) - so it has no reason to be over-respectful to the outsider. So, I was surprised.
But, frankly what is more interesting, is that, while it might also be said that class-distinctions among Europeans are gradually disappearing (though Europe has much to learn in this respect from the Australians and Americans), a person’s class seems to me a disproportionately major factor among Mumbaikers.
And in one of the world’s most established democracies, that observation struck me as being very curious. More later...
Back to colour. Here in Mumbai, there are both advantages and disadvantages to being a white foreigner.
As an Indian friend coyly said, after I was charged ‘foreigner price’ for mangoes: “You are, I’m afraid, a victim of your colour.” Very amusing.
But one can forgive it I suppose. It’s true that prices are regularly a third of what I would pay back home, so I can afford ‘foreigner price’. In fact it becomes a sort of tax for living in a country I love living in… and taxes are inevitable.
What is less easy to take is the reverse – what might be deemed by some as an ‘advantage’ but in fact is something that just feels rather creepy: it’s the obsequious behaviour of flunkies in opulent hotels and expensive shops.
Examples: the fawning displayed by shop assistants in rich people’s department stores; the self-debasing eagerness of some lift attendants in well-off apartment blocks; the humble, self-effacing way subordinates just accept the open contempt of their employers.
Now, it’s not just the foreigners who get all this bowing and scraping stuff. Peons will debase themselves as much before members of the Indian professional classes.
To a Westerner, who will often be a firm political egalitarian, this obsequiousness just appears like a lack of self-respect from these employees, or, worse, an unmanly fear of the 'boss'; in fact, this kind of behaviour appears to be simply demeaning to the person exhibiting it, and, well, just plain sad.
(Yes, yes, I know, some visitors, like me, are quite flattered by this excessively boot-licking attention at first. Believe me, it just gets tiring to have to deal with it after a while though).
So... why do (some) Mumbaiker working-class people do it?
After all, they are a minority. Out on the streets, at roadside vendors’ stalls, in small cafes, in independent shops, in government offices even (!), there is no such behaviour. Mumbaikers here can be as rude and as peremptory as any other folk on Earth!
No, the toadying that I refer to most often occurs in places that the well-off and/or the professional classes inhabit. Why?
Are the assistants told to behave like this by their managers? But then... are the managers stuck in some ancient past where “kow-towing to a master” was demanded? And do they think most modern foreigners find it pleasant?
It struck me (though I know very little about how caste actually works), that these assistants might just be observing the rules of caste, they being lower-caste, those they serve being upper-caste. But then why bother scraping to a tourist like me? Tourists are not from a higher caste (are they?). Tourists are from no caste at all – surely.
I guess that’s where one’s white-skin might play a role; and if colour does play a part, then such behaviour really is truly unpleasant – it’s a sort of reverse racism that does neither party (those who behave obsequiously, and indeed those who accept it) any credit.
However. Some people I have spoken to say that it’s more than just obsequiousness before Foreign Riches, but also has undertones of the colonial past – and that some Indians find it difficult to shake off memories of the days of the sahibs. Could that be possible? If so, I find it truly odd – as it is now some sixty long years after the bitter Independence strggle.
But… and here I might be getting into really hot water… let me point the finger elsewhere to explain at least part of this behaviour.
From what I see on the streets of Mumbai or in the more expensive homes and restaurants of the city, there are members of the Indian professional classes who seem to have little ability to communicate with members of the lower classes.
I have been shocked by the rudeness and arrogance shown by otherwise extraordinarily cultivated people toward their own servants or to shop assistants or waiters. In the US, in ninety per cent of cases, those people would have not been allowed to get away with it, as the abusers would quickly have been equal measure back.
Don’t forget, when I say ‘professional classes’ I mean people like dentists, or small-businessmen, or teachers – that is to say, relatively ordinary folk. Yet, sometimes, I have been so embarrassed that I have had to look away when they are so curt and harsh and rude to their ‘inferiors’ – which, to the shame of all, seems somehow acceptable.
And, do you know what I think is at the root of this bad behaviour? (Oh dear, here I get into more trouble). My answer: widespread use of domestic servants.
I can think of very few other democracies where the ordinary middle-classes have full-time domestic help (usually ‘maids’) as a matter of course.
Sure, in Britain, a middle-class home might have a cleaner who comes in part-time, but even in America, it is only the upper middle-class that will have live-in servants. But here in Mumbai these maids or ‘boys’ are common to many households, even quite ordinary ones. They are often brought in from rural India, or the city’s slums, and are on long hours and very meagre wages (which is why they can be afforded in the first place of course).
The trouble is that because these servants are often so badly trained, poorly-paid and so lowly, the people in the household, including older children, often feel they can be openly contemptuous of them. (Though, there are exceptions to this rule, where some servants are treated like members of the family; that is true too, I admit).
These servants, who have few options open to them, are often cowed by their employers’ arrogance and abuse.
This kind of relationship seems to me an unhealthy one all round, and yet it seems to be a defining characteristic for how certain other exchanges take place outside the home and in Indian society at large.
For example, as this particular wheel turns, you can see how it manifests itself in industrial companies, where I have seen managers rant and rave at unhappy and powerless employees for hours – all the while accusing their employees of not showing initiative (as if they dared!).
I leave it to sociologists to suggest how much such powerlessness affects a man’s or a woman’s attitudes. But it must have some effect.
So… here is a final (I hope interesting) thought – wouldn’t it be better, in the drive toward a truly equal and classless society in Mumbai, if the middle classes learnt to stop looking down on someone simply because he or she is employed by them, and started to wash their own socks?
**
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But, frankly what is more interesting, is that, while it might also be said that class-distinctions among Europeans are gradually disappearing (though Europe has much to learn in this respect from the Australians and Americans), a person’s class seems to me a disproportionately major factor among Mumbaikers.
And in one of the world’s most established democracies, that observation struck me as being very curious. More later...
Back to colour. Here in Mumbai, there are both advantages and disadvantages to being a white foreigner.
As an Indian friend coyly said, after I was charged ‘foreigner price’ for mangoes: “You are, I’m afraid, a victim of your colour.” Very amusing.
But one can forgive it I suppose. It’s true that prices are regularly a third of what I would pay back home, so I can afford ‘foreigner price’. In fact it becomes a sort of tax for living in a country I love living in… and taxes are inevitable.
What is less easy to take is the reverse – what might be deemed by some as an ‘advantage’ but in fact is something that just feels rather creepy: it’s the obsequious behaviour of flunkies in opulent hotels and expensive shops.
Examples: the fawning displayed by shop assistants in rich people’s department stores; the self-debasing eagerness of some lift attendants in well-off apartment blocks; the humble, self-effacing way subordinates just accept the open contempt of their employers.
Now, it’s not just the foreigners who get all this bowing and scraping stuff. Peons will debase themselves as much before members of the Indian professional classes.
To a Westerner, who will often be a firm political egalitarian, this obsequiousness just appears like a lack of self-respect from these employees, or, worse, an unmanly fear of the 'boss'; in fact, this kind of behaviour appears to be simply demeaning to the person exhibiting it, and, well, just plain sad.
(Yes, yes, I know, some visitors, like me, are quite flattered by this excessively boot-licking attention at first. Believe me, it just gets tiring to have to deal with it after a while though).
So... why do (some) Mumbaiker working-class people do it?
After all, they are a minority. Out on the streets, at roadside vendors’ stalls, in small cafes, in independent shops, in government offices even (!), there is no such behaviour. Mumbaikers here can be as rude and as peremptory as any other folk on Earth!
No, the toadying that I refer to most often occurs in places that the well-off and/or the professional classes inhabit. Why?
Are the assistants told to behave like this by their managers? But then... are the managers stuck in some ancient past where “kow-towing to a master” was demanded? And do they think most modern foreigners find it pleasant?
It struck me (though I know very little about how caste actually works), that these assistants might just be observing the rules of caste, they being lower-caste, those they serve being upper-caste. But then why bother scraping to a tourist like me? Tourists are not from a higher caste (are they?). Tourists are from no caste at all – surely.
I guess that’s where one’s white-skin might play a role; and if colour does play a part, then such behaviour really is truly unpleasant – it’s a sort of reverse racism that does neither party (those who behave obsequiously, and indeed those who accept it) any credit.
However. Some people I have spoken to say that it’s more than just obsequiousness before Foreign Riches, but also has undertones of the colonial past – and that some Indians find it difficult to shake off memories of the days of the sahibs. Could that be possible? If so, I find it truly odd – as it is now some sixty long years after the bitter Independence strggle.
But… and here I might be getting into really hot water… let me point the finger elsewhere to explain at least part of this behaviour.
From what I see on the streets of Mumbai or in the more expensive homes and restaurants of the city, there are members of the Indian professional classes who seem to have little ability to communicate with members of the lower classes.
I have been shocked by the rudeness and arrogance shown by otherwise extraordinarily cultivated people toward their own servants or to shop assistants or waiters. In the US, in ninety per cent of cases, those people would have not been allowed to get away with it, as the abusers would quickly have been equal measure back.
Don’t forget, when I say ‘professional classes’ I mean people like dentists, or small-businessmen, or teachers – that is to say, relatively ordinary folk. Yet, sometimes, I have been so embarrassed that I have had to look away when they are so curt and harsh and rude to their ‘inferiors’ – which, to the shame of all, seems somehow acceptable.
And, do you know what I think is at the root of this bad behaviour? (Oh dear, here I get into more trouble). My answer: widespread use of domestic servants.
I can think of very few other democracies where the ordinary middle-classes have full-time domestic help (usually ‘maids’) as a matter of course.
Sure, in Britain, a middle-class home might have a cleaner who comes in part-time, but even in America, it is only the upper middle-class that will have live-in servants. But here in Mumbai these maids or ‘boys’ are common to many households, even quite ordinary ones. They are often brought in from rural India, or the city’s slums, and are on long hours and very meagre wages (which is why they can be afforded in the first place of course).
The trouble is that because these servants are often so badly trained, poorly-paid and so lowly, the people in the household, including older children, often feel they can be openly contemptuous of them. (Though, there are exceptions to this rule, where some servants are treated like members of the family; that is true too, I admit).
These servants, who have few options open to them, are often cowed by their employers’ arrogance and abuse.
This kind of relationship seems to me an unhealthy one all round, and yet it seems to be a defining characteristic for how certain other exchanges take place outside the home and in Indian society at large.
For example, as this particular wheel turns, you can see how it manifests itself in industrial companies, where I have seen managers rant and rave at unhappy and powerless employees for hours – all the while accusing their employees of not showing initiative (as if they dared!).
I leave it to sociologists to suggest how much such powerlessness affects a man’s or a woman’s attitudes. But it must have some effect.
So… here is a final (I hope interesting) thought – wouldn’t it be better, in the drive toward a truly equal and classless society in Mumbai, if the middle classes learnt to stop looking down on someone simply because he or she is employed by them, and started to wash their own socks?
**
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Wednesday, 25 April 2007
Mumbai’s rubbish
I seem to remember that security businesses regularly warn people in England that they should be aware what they throw into their rubbish – because someone somewhere is probably sifting through it, looking for ‘sensitive’ information.
But here in Mumbai, that warning is superfluous. It is a simple fact of life that, every day, someone is searching, by hand, through my rubbish - I can see him or her doing it from my window. And so it is with the waste of every resident of the city.
Mumbai is a city of recycling. As soon as I throw a plastic carrier bag, some spoiled tin-foil, or an old newspaper, or even a used battery into the kitchen bin, the housekeeper will retrieve it. Usually, she tuts at me, annoyed that valuable material is being wantonly discarded, and asks me not to repeat my thoughtlessness.
Early on in our relationship, the housekeeper also made it clear that one of the perks of her job was that she got first dibs on other discarded things – from old combs to greying shirts. So now, she keeps various plastic bags in her cupboard; and into each she sieves the various unwanted items until there is enough in one to make it worth her taking to one of the various dealers.
This is the first level of domestic recycling.
The second level consists of a man who walks up and down outside our building each morning, crying, in a sing-song way, something that sounds like “o my cheeky boy” (sooner or later, I will ask for a translation, but, right now, I’m enjoying the incongruity of this odd call…). He gives immediate cash for newspaper, tin, cardboard, bottles, wood, etc on the spot.
However, the housekeeper will not use him, saying darkly that his prices are cheating prices; but he is the easy option if you want a quick return.
The third level belongs to the women who collect all our rubbish and sweep the stairwells.
Once they have amassed the apartment block’s rubbish and it is deposited in the rubbish cabin (which stands next to one of the block’s perimeter walls), they then have liberty to sort through it.
From my high-rise flat, I look down and watch their work. What can be left, I wonder, after the housekeeper’s previous sift? You’d be amazed. Bits of fabric, paper-clips, empty biro pens, rubber door-stops, old but whole vegetables, used yoghurt pots – all are grist to this mill.
The cleaning women are on to a good thing too – the professional classes who inhabit these flats have lots to throw away.
(They have their angry moments though. I witnessed a stand-up argument in which a sweeper was criticising one housekeeper who was failing to sort her flat’s rubbish into wet/organic matter and dry matter. As the sweeper said, it wasn’t very nice for her to have to pick through old bones as well as everything else. I took her point).
The casual visitor to Bombay can also witness this kind of recycling in action. The visitor will often see children or poor women carrying huge, white plastic-fabric sacks, sometimes as big as themselves, along the streets. Well, these bags are either full of accumulated rubbish (from businesses or homes), and are being carried to a central point for a thorough picking, or are full of already picked material (e.g. rags) being taken to a dealer.
It is one of the hardest sights for a foreigner to face – on a roadside, an arthritic, filthy & silent old woman, surrounded by half a dozen or so of those large packages of smelling waste, is slowly gouging and poking into the mess in order to find tiny re-sellables.
**
And what happens to this stuff then? Has the city such a well heeled, or responsibly civic side, that it can afford huge plants to recycle these materials?
Er, no. It tries – but it could never cope with all.
Interested in where the recycled rubbish goes?
One of the most illuminating trips a visitor to the city can take is one to the slum-district of Dharavi. A tour company called Reality Tours will undertake to show you, for a few hundred rupees, the multiplicity of cottage industries in this deprived part of town. As you wander through alley after alley (though – be warned - an alley will often serve double as a sewer-ditch here), it is fascinating to see how this so-called slum acts as the digestive system of the city.
It is like being in the depths of Dickens’ Victorian London. As you peer into what appears to be dark and broken workshops, you see thick and sooty faces, sweating at their tasks: renovating old paint tins and oil-drums, which are being scrubbed clean (one shudders at the amount of lead these labourers must be taking in); dead computer-drives and used hypodermic syringes (yuk) are being hammered into fragments, for later shredding into tiny plastic chips; domestic batteries are being snapped in two, the metals sorted; shoe-soles remoulded – and so all this detritus becomes ready for re-use.
In an almost casual aside, your guide will tell you that so efficient (and cheap, and uninterested in expensive health & safety rules, no doubt) is Dharavi that much of Europe’s used plastic goods are shipped here, broken up, and exported back to the West as raw material.
It’s a sort of recycling Heaven… well, you couldn’t call it Heaven… a recycling Hell.
If I recommend one thing that all visitors to Bombay should do, this tour is it.
**
The funny thing is that there is a sly, self-deprecating joke that Mumbaikers make about the millions of voracious rats and the crows here. It is also a comment on the city’s overwhelmed refuse service. “Without the rats and crows” they smile “who would clean up the city?”
And now you know the answer. The rag pickers… and the labourers of Dharavi. What I am wondering is: what is the human cost of all this messing about in filth?
Links: Reality Tours of Dharavi and BBC report on Dharavi
__
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But here in Mumbai, that warning is superfluous. It is a simple fact of life that, every day, someone is searching, by hand, through my rubbish - I can see him or her doing it from my window. And so it is with the waste of every resident of the city.
Mumbai is a city of recycling. As soon as I throw a plastic carrier bag, some spoiled tin-foil, or an old newspaper, or even a used battery into the kitchen bin, the housekeeper will retrieve it. Usually, she tuts at me, annoyed that valuable material is being wantonly discarded, and asks me not to repeat my thoughtlessness.
Early on in our relationship, the housekeeper also made it clear that one of the perks of her job was that she got first dibs on other discarded things – from old combs to greying shirts. So now, she keeps various plastic bags in her cupboard; and into each she sieves the various unwanted items until there is enough in one to make it worth her taking to one of the various dealers.
This is the first level of domestic recycling.
The second level consists of a man who walks up and down outside our building each morning, crying, in a sing-song way, something that sounds like “o my cheeky boy” (sooner or later, I will ask for a translation, but, right now, I’m enjoying the incongruity of this odd call…). He gives immediate cash for newspaper, tin, cardboard, bottles, wood, etc on the spot.
However, the housekeeper will not use him, saying darkly that his prices are cheating prices; but he is the easy option if you want a quick return.
The third level belongs to the women who collect all our rubbish and sweep the stairwells.
Once they have amassed the apartment block’s rubbish and it is deposited in the rubbish cabin (which stands next to one of the block’s perimeter walls), they then have liberty to sort through it.
From my high-rise flat, I look down and watch their work. What can be left, I wonder, after the housekeeper’s previous sift? You’d be amazed. Bits of fabric, paper-clips, empty biro pens, rubber door-stops, old but whole vegetables, used yoghurt pots – all are grist to this mill.
The cleaning women are on to a good thing too – the professional classes who inhabit these flats have lots to throw away.
(They have their angry moments though. I witnessed a stand-up argument in which a sweeper was criticising one housekeeper who was failing to sort her flat’s rubbish into wet/organic matter and dry matter. As the sweeper said, it wasn’t very nice for her to have to pick through old bones as well as everything else. I took her point).
The casual visitor to Bombay can also witness this kind of recycling in action. The visitor will often see children or poor women carrying huge, white plastic-fabric sacks, sometimes as big as themselves, along the streets. Well, these bags are either full of accumulated rubbish (from businesses or homes), and are being carried to a central point for a thorough picking, or are full of already picked material (e.g. rags) being taken to a dealer.
It is one of the hardest sights for a foreigner to face – on a roadside, an arthritic, filthy & silent old woman, surrounded by half a dozen or so of those large packages of smelling waste, is slowly gouging and poking into the mess in order to find tiny re-sellables.
**
And what happens to this stuff then? Has the city such a well heeled, or responsibly civic side, that it can afford huge plants to recycle these materials?
Er, no. It tries – but it could never cope with all.
Interested in where the recycled rubbish goes?One of the most illuminating trips a visitor to the city can take is one to the slum-district of Dharavi. A tour company called Reality Tours will undertake to show you, for a few hundred rupees, the multiplicity of cottage industries in this deprived part of town. As you wander through alley after alley (though – be warned - an alley will often serve double as a sewer-ditch here), it is fascinating to see how this so-called slum acts as the digestive system of the city.
It is like being in the depths of Dickens’ Victorian London. As you peer into what appears to be dark and broken workshops, you see thick and sooty faces, sweating at their tasks: renovating old paint tins and oil-drums, which are being scrubbed clean (one shudders at the amount of lead these labourers must be taking in); dead computer-drives and used hypodermic syringes (yuk) are being hammered into fragments, for later shredding into tiny plastic chips; domestic batteries are being snapped in two, the metals sorted; shoe-soles remoulded – and so all this detritus becomes ready for re-use.
In an almost casual aside, your guide will tell you that so efficient (and cheap, and uninterested in expensive health & safety rules, no doubt) is Dharavi that much of Europe’s used plastic goods are shipped here, broken up, and exported back to the West as raw material.
It’s a sort of recycling Heaven… well, you couldn’t call it Heaven… a recycling Hell.
If I recommend one thing that all visitors to Bombay should do, this tour is it.
**
The funny thing is that there is a sly, self-deprecating joke that Mumbaikers make about the millions of voracious rats and the crows here. It is also a comment on the city’s overwhelmed refuse service. “Without the rats and crows” they smile “who would clean up the city?”
And now you know the answer. The rag pickers… and the labourers of Dharavi. What I am wondering is: what is the human cost of all this messing about in filth?
Links: Reality Tours of Dharavi and BBC report on Dharavi
__
You can leave a comment by clicking on 'comments' below. Commenting on this site is open. You do not need to register or even leave your name.
Tuesday, 24 April 2007
The Locked Gardens of Mumbai
I am determined, in these entries, not to believe the popular myths about Mumbai or India unless I find evidence proving them true.
One profile of India says that it is a Land of Inflexible Rules laid down by invisible bureaucrats, seemingly incomprehensible diktats, whose rhyme and reason has long disappeared into history – but which nobody can be bothered to update or challenge. And so the Rules live on.
Take the case of public gardens.
In this hot crowded city, where green space is at a premium, cultivated gardens and parks are… amazingly… shut during the hottest hours of the day, just when they are most needed. No one seems to know why.
Mumbai is studded with gardens and small parks. Some are fairly sorry affairs, but some are really very inviting. The one on Bhulabhai Desai Road is a long cool stretch of green running alongside the sea line at Breach Candy; the ‘Residents Garden’ on Cuffe Parade has some luxurious plants and sleepy places to laze; the one by Charni Road has a delightful play area; the one at CST railway station has an extraordinary statue; BPT Gardens have an amazing collection of plants; Priyadarshini park (by the sea, again) by Malabar Hill has a jogging track; and so on and so on.
But in fact, all the gardens mentioned, and nine out of ten of Mumbai’s other numerous gardens that I’ve been able to check out, are closed for over four hours in the middle of the day. From 11am to 3.30pm, locks guard their precious trees and shrubs from visitors. Why? What on earth is it all about?
(And don’t talk to me about the lovely flowerbed gardens at the Prince of Wales Museum. They are shut – completely. Irritating little ribbons mark off the gardens from any visitor, who is only ever allowed to observe from a distance. Maddening.)
One honourable exception is the Horniman Circle Garden, which remains open through the lunch hour. And so it should. The office-weary heroes of this area, the financial district, are surely desperate for somewhere to shake the a/c out of their clothes, and just relax away from the computer.
And not just them. Tourists, footsore after trekking around the streets of Fort, take a break and eat some chaat here under the shade of the tall trees. In the heat of the day (and don’t forget… it’s hot all year round here), to have somewhere to stop and cool off is worth its weight in gold.
If The Horniman Garden authorities can allow it, why not others?
At first, I thought this closed-when-most-needed idea must be just a ploy by lazy park officials. At Priyadarshini Park, where parkies sat around in chairs chatting inside as I banged on the gate outside, I was ready for an argument. Even more so, when some lycra-clad lovelies could be seen in the distance on the joggers’ track. “And why are they here, and not the rest of us?” - “They are in an official club” was the smug answer. (Do you remember me saying there’s a usually a rule but it’s hard to know it? Also, the reasoning behind that rule escapes me).
So what’s it all about? No official has yet explained to me the reason. Theories from acquaintances spring up, and then die – for want of sustenance.
Could it be to stop pavement-dwellers sneaking in and building tarpaulin tents for themselves? (But then what’s to stop them doing that at 4pm?)
Perhaps many of the gardens are privately owned, and don’t want the public in? (But why then let the public in at all?)
Is it that the cost of paying for the places to be manned by guards at that time is too high? (Nope – one of the most infuriating things is to see the clumps of men in brown overalls lounging about inside doing very little).
It’s an exasperating mystery – and I would welcome any answers from those who know. It’s one thing that puzzles visitors immensely.
Perhaps a campaign could be started – Free the Mumbai Gardens!
**
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Links: Mumbai Municipal Parks & Gardens Department
One profile of India says that it is a Land of Inflexible Rules laid down by invisible bureaucrats, seemingly incomprehensible diktats, whose rhyme and reason has long disappeared into history – but which nobody can be bothered to update or challenge. And so the Rules live on.
Take the case of public gardens.
In this hot crowded city, where green space is at a premium, cultivated gardens and parks are… amazingly… shut during the hottest hours of the day, just when they are most needed. No one seems to know why.
Mumbai is studded with gardens and small parks. Some are fairly sorry affairs, but some are really very inviting. The one on Bhulabhai Desai Road is a long cool stretch of green running alongside the sea line at Breach Candy; the ‘Residents Garden’ on Cuffe Parade has some luxurious plants and sleepy places to laze; the one by Charni Road has a delightful play area; the one at CST railway station has an extraordinary statue; BPT Gardens have an amazing collection of plants; Priyadarshini park (by the sea, again) by Malabar Hill has a jogging track; and so on and so on.
But in fact, all the gardens mentioned, and nine out of ten of Mumbai’s other numerous gardens that I’ve been able to check out, are closed for over four hours in the middle of the day. From 11am to 3.30pm, locks guard their precious trees and shrubs from visitors. Why? What on earth is it all about?
(And don’t talk to me about the lovely flowerbed gardens at the Prince of Wales Museum. They are shut – completely. Irritating little ribbons mark off the gardens from any visitor, who is only ever allowed to observe from a distance. Maddening.)
One honourable exception is the Horniman Circle Garden, which remains open through the lunch hour. And so it should. The office-weary heroes of this area, the financial district, are surely desperate for somewhere to shake the a/c out of their clothes, and just relax away from the computer.
And not just them. Tourists, footsore after trekking around the streets of Fort, take a break and eat some chaat here under the shade of the tall trees. In the heat of the day (and don’t forget… it’s hot all year round here), to have somewhere to stop and cool off is worth its weight in gold.
If The Horniman Garden authorities can allow it, why not others?
At first, I thought this closed-when-most-needed idea must be just a ploy by lazy park officials. At Priyadarshini Park, where parkies sat around in chairs chatting inside as I banged on the gate outside, I was ready for an argument. Even more so, when some lycra-clad lovelies could be seen in the distance on the joggers’ track. “And why are they here, and not the rest of us?” - “They are in an official club” was the smug answer. (Do you remember me saying there’s a usually a rule but it’s hard to know it? Also, the reasoning behind that rule escapes me).
So what’s it all about? No official has yet explained to me the reason. Theories from acquaintances spring up, and then die – for want of sustenance.
Could it be to stop pavement-dwellers sneaking in and building tarpaulin tents for themselves? (But then what’s to stop them doing that at 4pm?)
Perhaps many of the gardens are privately owned, and don’t want the public in? (But why then let the public in at all?)
Is it that the cost of paying for the places to be manned by guards at that time is too high? (Nope – one of the most infuriating things is to see the clumps of men in brown overalls lounging about inside doing very little).
It’s an exasperating mystery – and I would welcome any answers from those who know. It’s one thing that puzzles visitors immensely.
Perhaps a campaign could be started – Free the Mumbai Gardens!
**
To leave a comment, just click on “comments”, below.
Commenting on this site is open; so you do not need to register, and can even leave an anonymous comment if you wish.
Links: Mumbai Municipal Parks & Gardens Department
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