Bombay Sweat

It’s said that the Eskimos of the Arctic regions live and work so much with snow that they have over fifty-two words with which to describe it.
If this is true, then visitors to Mumbai, especially now in the summer months, must have a similar amount of words to describe the various types of sweat that this city grants to us.

Coming from England, where even on the hottest days, you might want to carry a jacket with you, and sweating is something you do only in a sauna, I have been amazed by how many ways a man can perspire.

Examples

There is the little tickly drop that starts at your neck, and slowly passes down the back of your spine, before dripping tantalizingly off the very end of your backbone. When it disappears, a new one starts again…
The frizzy ends of hair on the back of one’s head are usually the starting point for this little journey, so you can attempt to beat it by toweling the back of your head. And then you realise your neck is sweating too.

There is the middle-of-the-day sweat when the sun thumps down on your head while you are out walking. As it does so, your hair seems to thicken, and then it seems suddenly as if a thousand small moist creatures are conspiring to oil each strand, separate them out, and make them stand on end.
Funnily enough, this is not an unpleasant feeling, as you feel like a cake bubbling in an oven. It’s a sort of prickling sensation. I am sure that to feel like a cake cannot be a bad thing.

Then there is the embarrassing line or series of small dots that appears on your tee-shirt front (even though you have only walked a few yards from your taxi). This often occurs when you are about to bump into a smart friend (who travels everywhere by a/c of course).
It is pretty tiresome for men because the line forms just below one’s breasts, and seems to insinuate (to someone who might not know) the beginning of a sex-change process. I guess though it must be worse for women.
You can try to fold your arms and hide it – but everyone seems to know it’s there.
A variation on this is to get into a taxi for a long ride, and then realise that the seat covers have that familiar smooth consistency of arctic-flock material, and are double packed with nylon foam (why such unsuitable material?... I really don't know). This would be fine in Norway; but in Mumbai, it is a trap. Lean back on this seat for long, and the back of your shirt will have to wrung out and hung out to dry after twenty minutes; but, even if you sit forward, away from the back-rest, (but sit in that one position for too long), well, take it from me, the backside of your trousers will be soggy. Ugghh.

Nights can be bad. We all can guess how sticky it can be at 3am in Bombay in May, but imagine being English too – the sensation of being glued to one’s sheets by one’s own sweat is a new experience.

But the worst is the slow burn. In a non-AC restaurant, or a room without a fan, one’s forehead takes on a second, clammy layer, one’s face begins to turn scarlet, one’s eyelids even get heavy with damp…. until, finally, when the sides of one’s ears have become tiny rivulets of moisture, one has to run outside and seek the breezes of the Arabian Sea.


Prevention and Cure

There are many more variations.
But it is axiomatic that if I walk this city now – day or night – sooner or later the little pricks of liquid heat will come.

I bet you’re wondering about underarm sweat patches.
It’s an interesting question, because, for some reason – perhaps it’s the quality of the anti-perspirant sold here (is it super-strong to match local requirements?) – I don’t know anyone affected too much by them, which is odd isn’t it? Maybe it is also the type of humidity in Mumbai? Perhaps. I should research it.

Some of my Northern friends are clever enough now to make sure they prepare themselves for the Possibility of Sweat. They do this by reducing effort almost to nothing.
If they are going somewhere, they get ready slowly and easily, and never rush. They travel by a/c car; they do not walk even 200 yards. They arrive early at the smart hotel, just in case they need to cool off in the (usually freezing) bar. They never walk up the stairs.

But I must admit that, generally, this is not a solution for me. I refuse to allow the heat to curtail my desire to wander. This city is wonderful to meander around, and so much would be lost if strolling were denied to its visitors.

So I wear thin tee-shirts, I wear cotton shorts, I wear chappals, and I wear a Vietnamese jungle hat. I ignore the stares when I cool off at smart coffee shops. I look like someone from Lost (except for the muscles): it’s not pretty. But it makes me free.

Anyway, isn’t there something ridiculous about being in a tropical city and yet retreating constantly into the kind of temperature-controlled rooms that take igloos as standard for imitation?
Excessive AC is normal in posh environments here- but it’s just plain unnatural, surely?

So, as I’m in Mumbai, I have determined not to run away from Sweat – but to learn to embrace it. (Er, metaphorically).
Yes – and crazy as it sounds, it works. In England, the way to defeat the Cold of Winter is to see it as a companion, a stern and distant one, yes, but a companion. If you fear Cold, it will get into your bones and eat you.
Same with Sweat. If you can interpret the invasive discomfort as a welcome gesture from the city (no, I am not crazy!), actually, you can get along fine.


And – one advantage.

This morning I played tennis with Deepak. After half an hour, my T-shirt was drenched and I could barely see through the cascade of sweat-drops descending from my brow.
(He, on the other hand, was still tucked up in his tracksuit, and almost looking as though he could do with an extra warm-up. Amazing.)

But I felt great. I wasn’t just pretending to have a sweaty workout, this WAS a sweaty work out. The more the sweat flooded my brow, the more I felt virtuous. I must be doing something right, I thought.
And I didn’t have to go on no treadmill to do it with some personal trainer yelling at me.

However, the downside to extreme running about in the Bombay summer is the shower afterwards. The combination of exercise and highly humid heat has driven up one’s body temperature by a few degrees, at least temporarily… and no matter if you have a cold shower, you’ll still be sweating ten minutes later. In fact the very stupidity of putting on (warming) clothes immediately after your shower will make you torridly sweaty and hot all over again, thus negating the shower completely.
You have no choice but to sit in the dressing room, and wait for the body’s own cooling controls gradually to sort out the issue.

The trouble is that Deepak just thinks it’s all pretty funny. He’s already in the bar with a cold beer (which he doesn’t need).
And, because he is always unflappable, and never overheated, I guess my situation does look pretty funny to him at that.

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Eating with Fingers

If there’s one thing I have not got used to while living here it’s eating with my fingers. None of my Indian friends makes a big deal of my choice, and I think they even prefer I stick to cutlery, as then I don’t look so awkward or inept, which is just embarrassing for everyone.

(I should say that in Mumbai, among the professional and middle classes, nobody seems to care much anyway. If you go to someone’s house to eat dinner, half the folks will eat with their fingers, half will not, and nobody cares either way. Mumbai is a city that grants some freedom of action to its citizens.
If anything, in Mumbai, the overt prejudice can be against those who eat with their fingers. At four and five star restaurants or a very sophisticated dinner party, it would have to be a very confident person who would follow his or her inclination and eat with fingers).

Some ex-pat friends that I have, particularly those with NGOs, tell me however how liberating it is, how it brings us closer to the food that we eat, how sensual it is, and indeed how environmentally conscious it is – no nasty washing up liquid to have to use to wash cutlery (and if you use banana leaves instead of plates you get double green points!).
I do wonder however how they square up their washing of pots and pans – do they scour them with sand as some roadside food stalls do? Perhaps. I must ask them.

Anyway, I’ve tried it, but I don’t like it.
The biggest issue for me is probably the most trivial for others – and that is the thought of all that food getting squeezed up under my fingernails. Sad? Hmm, I guess you may be right, but we all have our issues.
The second thing is that, in most ordinary Mumbai restaurants, the water for washing one’s hands in is usually cold. Now, actually, the germ removal from a thorough scrubbing in cold water and soap is said to be around 90% - which is not bad. …What worries me is the other ten per cent of germs.
And after the meal, I can’t hack the greasy residue left on one’s fingers. Again, cold water and soap can eliminate most of that – but not all of it, and all I want to do is to find a hot water source and clean my hand thoroughly.
Are my feelings part of the slightly crazy Western obsession with hygiene? Or a perfectly permissible personal choice? I’m still considering.

It is one of those peculiar cultural impasses.

Indian friends say that it just seems prissy and affected to use cutlery – it just makes them uncomfortable.

I like to point out to them that cutlery washed in boiling hot water and detergent has a much higher rate of cleanliness than fingers ever can attain (apparently, it’s not just down to the temperature that things are washed in, but it's also due to the fact that steel cutlery is totally smooth, unlike human skin which has minute crevices) – but even those “facts” don’t convince them to change their minds at all.
Indeed, I suppose the upside of living here, vis a vis eating habits, is that it reinforces the need to wash one’s hands each and every time before eating, whether you’re having a quick bite or a meal. Since I started doing that, I’ve rarely been sick.

Of course at this point, someone wisely points out that Westerners in fact do often eat with their fingers – when they eat biscuits or pastries or sandwiches or potato chips.
Does it make sense if I say that such items, which are by nature non-sticky (well, mostly) do not fall into the same gluey category as say, a biryani? (The one exception to this rule that I can think of is those Americans who eat cheesy pizza slices with their fingers. I don’t understand that at all).
But, as the same person, again wisely, points out – you still have to deal with issue of unclean fingers touching the food you eat…
Er…yes. He’s quite right. Caught up in the web of my own logic there!

I think I should halt my ramblings at this point, while I consider the fact that there is nothing like seeing another culture to make you realise how weird and inconsistent your own is…

**

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Monsoon Myths

Living as a foreigner, in any society I suppose and not just Mumbai, means that life is just one long series of startling revelations.
Because you are learning from scratch, you are constantly running up against a theory or sight previously unknown to you. What’s more, if you have a curious mind and want to ask “er, why is this so?”, somebody is usually there to give one (or more) explanations to you of what’s going on.
But – and it’s a Big But - the advantage of being an outsider is that you do not have the same in-built belief system as everyone around you. You have the advantage of being able to be sceptical of these so-called explanations.
And, having tested them, then you might rightly wonder if people’s explanations sometimes might contain no truth at all.

This is most evident in the case of The Monsoon, which comes here in the months June to August. You wouldn’t believe how many old wives’ tales there are, and how contradictory the pieces of advice can be…


Myth 1 - Swimming Is Bad for You in the Monsoon

The seas around Mumbai are probably not very healthy, so it’s advisable to bathe in swimming pools - at all times of the year. And because it’s also very hot in the monsoon (despite the grey skies and rain), I head out to the sports-club even more regularly at this time of year. It has an outdoor pool that is huge, so it’s very relaxing, and - for some reason - very empty during the monsoon months. My presumption was that people were worried about lightning striking, even though lightning is rare.

But when one day I told the man in the flat downstairs that I was going swimming, he got very agitated: “Don’t!” he said. “Think of all that pollution coming down from the skies!”
Now, he’s an intelligent man (though not, admittedly, a meteorologist) but I couldn’t help but wonder - what pollution? After all, the rain comes in from the southwest, from the lovely Arabian Sea. But then, he has the local knowledge….

After that, I spoke to a friend who has young children and she also said she avoided the pools. Why?, I asked. Because the high monsoon winds bring in spray from the sea and that gets in the pools, she said, and I cannot let the children risk catching what comes with it. But – what’s in the spray, exactly?

But, I suppose these fears, irrational or not, explained the lack of swimmers in the pool.

So I thought I should reproach the swimming-pool manager for his lack of care for his clients, and explained to him what had been said, and advised him that, if this were all true, he should shut the pool for the monsoon months.
He thanked me for my concern, but gently pointed out that the pool water – drenched as it was in cleaning chemicals and filters – was probably healthier than the air we breathe in this city.

So I asked him how he explained the paucity of swimmers. He
shrugged his shoulders: “Who knows why they think what they think,” he said.


Myth 2 Eating Fish (Not)

When we met a group of friends at a restaurant in early July, they immediately told us not to eat the fish.

Now one thing that is always enjoyable to me is to find a group of people who all adhere to a long-held and passionate - but quite irrational – belief; and then watch them as each try to explain the reasons for it to each other.
For example - people who believe passionately that wearing glasses weakens one’s eyesight even more (it doesn’t) come up with all kinds of amazing rationalisations for their belief and even start arguing with each other about their incorrect theories. It’s slightly crazy.
The fact is that often when people hold a belief that has been with them, probably since childhood, they never ask themselves – do I have real evidence for believing the thing that I believe?

Something similar happened at this table. Everyone had an opinion why not to eat fish in the monsoon. Here are a few of the opinions uttered….
*The fish is inedible because it is not fresh; and that is because it is not locally-caught in the monsoon, but in fact is shipped in, some said. (What’s wrong with that?, I wondered). They explained that the fish is not fresh because the local fishermen (the Kolis) are afraid of the fierce monsoon storms, so they stay in port.
(I thought I would check on this and later went to the Sassoon fish dock, and yes, it seemed to be true that there were no fishing boats around in July… yet a week later, on August 1st, suddenly all the boats were in the bay again. Admittedly, this was strange, and I haven’t worked out why yet. Anybody know?)
It still didn’t explain why eating fish at this time of year is bad. Unless you don’t like imported, frozen fish…

*No, said others, there are in fact fishermen out at sea, but they often net dead fish, which have been shaken upwards from the sea-bottom as the raging monsoon storms stir the seas, and then are taken in the catches. Restaurants, they said, use these old fish as much as the fresh fish.
(Personally, I thought this was ludicrous, but I’m no marine biologist.)

*Ah, said someone else, it’s not dead fish that are shaken up, but the very silt of the sea-bed (by the turbulent stormy seas). The seabed is massively polluted, they said, therefore the fish – which consume the stirred-up pollution – are poisonous. (Blimey!)

It was all very confusing, and yet sounded all very unlikely, despite the firm opinions.
The next day I checked the local fish-market, and the women were screaming their wares as usual (it gets to be quite a din in those market-halls) – so it looked like someone at least was going out to catch fish. No great dearth of locally-caught fish there, apparently.
I bought some, cooked it and tasted it. Seemed okay to me; but then maybe it will take a week or two before any effect takes place?

Nevertheless, at lunch today, at the sports-club, the café manager shook his head: “No sir, no fish on the menu for the next two months. It’s because of the monsoon, you see.”
Funnily enough, however, he couldn’t explain exactly why.


Myth 3 The Monsoon is a Good, er Bad Thing

Depending on whom you talk to, and the day you talk to them on, the monsoon is Good – or Bad. Strangely, people rarely consider it simply a bit of both, as you might think.

Of course in Mumbai, the monsoon can cause great damage to both life and property; the floods that resulted from the incessant rain in July 2005 led to the deaths of over 500 people in the city.
The danger from water-borne diseases also rises of course in flooded areas, and the incidence of malaria increases too because there are so many pools of standing water - which encourages mosquitoes to breed faster. Thus monsoon can be BAD.

But the same conditions on rainless days can also turn Mumbai into a sort of balmy English summer – fluffy, grey, and cooler than the usual Mumbai heat – a relief from the baking and sweaty sauna-like state of affairs that is the month of May. The rains also bring green back to the recreation grounds (the “maidans”) allowing the cricket pitches to re-grow. GOOD.

What is hard in this debate is to accept is the fearful state of the pavement-dwellers and in the slums.
Everywhere suddenly, in June, great swathes of blue stiff plastic are attached to the makeshift roofs, but it doesn’t provide anywhere near complete protection from the rain, and inside these tiny shelters/homes, the new insulation simply produces an intense breathlessness – forcing many to choose to sleep outside on the paths until the rains come to wake them, and then they crawl back inside their dwellings. What’s worse is that the really heavy rains will just flood and even sweep away homes. BAD.

But hardened Mumbaikers will also tell you that this is the great time for cheap holidays just a few miles outside the city. The rains make hiking in the hills possible, the rains make the landscape intense and green, the rains make river rafting possible on the main tributaries. If you don’t earn a lot – and the vast majority here do not – and you have time to take a holiday – and the vast majority here do not – the monsoon can give you a good reason for a weekend away. These holiday-starved city-dwellers yearn for monsoon. To them it is GOOD.

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I guess we all have opinions and preferences. What’s odd, and you really do observe this when you are an outsider, is just how fierce and aggressive people can get in defending what are really quite weak positions. It makes you think about those "beliefs" you have back home too…


Addendum
One nicely weird fact is the contrast of the days pre-monsoon with the fortnight post-monsoon.
Before monsoon, some people are almost giddy with excitement, looking at the skies for rain-clouds (just as the English stop and smell the winter air for hints of coming snow). When the first drops plash down, they squeal: “I love the train; I love the rain!!”
But, two weeks later, the same people are miserable with the grey cloudy sameness of it all: “Monsoon. I hate Monsoon!” they whisper.

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Independence Day

I must admit it was the oddest thing – while the world celebrated a very significant Indian Independence Day (“Sixty Years of Freedom!”), Mumbai remained, er, silent.
And, what’s more, it seemed that a lot of India did.

In fact, almost all the photos of Independence events that we saw in the newspapers here all seemed to come from other countries. There was the photo of the Nasdaq building in New York, bannered in the colours of the Indian flag - green white and orange. There was the India exhibition in London where NRIs and Indophiles were going mad. And even the French celebrated it through their India themed festival in Lille.
But very little here in India – BBC (India) only found two celebrations of note to report on! (See link at the end of this entry)

Of course, one of them was the Big Event in New Delhi, but in the rest of the country, including here in Mumbai, it seems it was muted. All I saw in my quick runs around the city was a small drill of the local police in cocked headwear, but it wasn’t going anywhere.
The biggest noise came from commercial interests, which saw an angle through which to sell their wares – Airtel commissioned a chauvinist song which accompanied their adverts, Baskin Robbins put together a patriotically coloured ice-cream, and the TV channels ran loads of relevant historical movies all themed around India’s struggle, with swirling flags in their promos to show just how heartfelt their commitment to the nation was. Etc etc.
But – on the street – zilch! (Though I forget – there were the boys at the traffic signals desperately trying to sell their reproduction flags, and obviously trade was not brisk, as I was eventually offered a flag at the rock-bottom price of one rupee).

The point is that, unlike South India (which dislikes the government’s apparent support for Hindi-language domination… because the South doesn’t speak Hindi much) or the northern border areas where there can be various sorts of unhappiness with the rule of New Delhi, Mumbai is quite patriotic. People stand for the national anthem in cinemas here quite enthusiastically. And of course, the Quit India movement started here. And on Republic Day, which was held in January, there was even a military fly-past at the city’s Chowpatty beach.

So what happened?
No one seems to know. The local newspapers were silent on the matter, and the local people I spoke to just shrugged their shoulders.

I can only guess.
Security must have been an issue - being the 60th Anniversary I suppose it was one terrorists must have thought about. In fact, for a week before, I found myself ducking round police barriers every time I went near the World Trade Centre in Colaba.
What’s more, there appears to be an undercurrent of bitterness in the city over how justice is served here. While the trial of the Muslim bombers behind the 1993 blasts here in Mumbai has recently come to an end (with a number of them receiving death sentences), there have been next to no convictions of the Hindu militants responsible for the many deaths of Muslims in what was essentially a pogrom during the ’93 Riots. As a consequence, there has been considerable growling by each side in recent days. So – that uneasiness in the city could have been a reason for a no-show of any official events.

But, apart from one minor piece of enthusiastic shouting at a college festival, which happened to be on the same day as Independence Day, there were no spontaneous shows of celebration on the street either… Very odd.

The rest of the world seemed more gung-ho about India’s Independence than did Mumbai. I’d be interested to know why.

Links: BBC Online report on Independence Day events

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Bollywood vs... Hollywood?

It’s hard to explain this, but sometimes one gets tricked by Mumbai’s own description of itself.
Mumbaikers, rich or poor, are so, well, self-conscious of their place on the globe, and so aware of the fact that their city has such an international profile, that you get slowly into thinking – yes, this is indeed an International City.
After all, the English-language papers more often that not feature world news on the front page, the big poster hoardings are more often than not featuring global brands such as Levis etc, and the huge new skyscrapers make the place resemble Chicago (on a hot day!).

And then suddenly, something happens to bring you up short and make you reconsider that view… And then you realise that Mumbai is not just like other places. In Mumbai they do their things their own way (sometimes). It is unique.

The incident that made me think this is quite trivial really – but telling.
The Hindustan Times was carrying a piece on racism against black people in the city, and quoted theatre director Alyque Padamsee as saying “I blame Hollywood films – they portray black men as uncultured cannibals living in trees.” This was such a bizarrely wrong-headed statement that I thought I had misread it. While Hollywood definitely has issues, this was the statement of a man who surely has not seen a Hollywood film in fifty years! What recent film do you know that portrays black people that way?

Now, how could this be? Padamsee is not only a cultured man, he is also media-savvy too, with a background in advertising. How could he have come up with such a skewed idea of American films? I now prefer to think he must have been quoted “out of context”; but then arises the thought – how could the paper have allowed such a muddle-headed remark to be printed anyway?

We talked about this in a bar, and, after much talk, we think we may have solved the conundrum.
And here’s our answer: Indians, generally, and unlike the rest of the world, don’t really count Hollywood large on their horizons. So their image of its films might well indeed be vague.

After all, it is interesting to reflect that India might well be the only country left in the world where Hollywood does not rule in local cinema halls. Across the country, Hollywood plays a poor second to India’s own film industry, aka Bollywood.
(Of course, Hollywood is making certain inroads, particularly here in Mumbai where multiplexes are springing up; American blockbusters are beautifully suited to the multiplex environment with its sensurround experience. However Bollywood too is now turning out some beautifully crafted and tense films that can beat Hollywood in that multiplex strategy.)

You see, what I thought was that, because Mumbai has the reputation of being an international city, that then you’d get to see here all the world films that you’d get in say Manchester, or Berlin or Tokyo. But I’ve often been astonished at how hard it is to see a “decent” or important international film here. For example, even “Borat”, which I was much looking forward to, has not got a release here, while the chances of seeing a foreign-language film are virtually nil.
In fact, Bollywood rules, because the cinema mangers know that that is what audiences want to see.
And, in this area, film going, Mumbaikers rarely look very much outside their own indigenous movies.

Please don’t think that I am making a value judgement. In fact, I think it is rather pleasing that Mumbai’s filmgoers are bucking the globalisation trend. They prefer homegrown movies, and that’s fine (if unexpected).

So, to go back to the point.
How could a reputable commentator like Padamsee be so wrong about Hollywood?

"Well, because in this city" – said my friends in the bar – "Hollywood is the outsider. Bollywood is what matters! Hollywood is an interesting diversion, but it's not the main interest for Mumbai film-goers, not by a long shot."

And that - probably - explains it.

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Links: Hollywood and Bollywood Compared (Blog)


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Spooked by the Suburbs

Mumbai – whatever you think of it – can never be described as sterile. Most of it has all the life and hustle of a city bursting at the edges, and is almost overwhelming.
But then one visits the district of 'Hiranandani Gardens'. By contrast, it can seem spooky… and a little discomfiting.

It was when I went to Powai, one of the Mumbai’s northernmost suburbs that I came across the elite district of Hiranandani Gardens, which lies off the main highway there.
At first, it was hard to believe my eyes. Hiranandani Gardens is about a mile square: a square mile of pristine urban development. It looked like a huge wedding cake made of marzipan straight out of the shop; or like a combination of ancient Rome and a modern shopping mall.

There were huge, pastel-coloured buildings adorned with neo-classical pillars or Grecian pediments. There were wide, clean uncluttered roads (with no potholes!). There were luxury shops. There were road signs requesting that motorists desist from using their car-horns (and people were obeying…). There were landscaped, tidy public gardens. There were street-names like “Central Avenue” and “High Street”, and, behind imperial gates, there were dazzlingly bright apartment blocks called “Olympia” and “Tivoli”.
I have seen something like this before. But it was in the gated communities of super-rich America.

Though HGs is in Greater Mumbai, it does not seem like Mumbai. There were no rubbish piles. There were no pavement dwellers. There was no one sleeping on a wall. There were no street-side vegetable vendors. The roadside drains (four feet deep!) were unblocked and empty of debris. I didn’t see a rickshaw, or a rat.
At night, the happy inhabitants can sally out to spend their money in the numerous international shops and restaurants, and at the well-heeled entertainment centre.

Where on Earth was I? This was surely not Mumbai.
Mumbai, love it or loathe it, is filthy, squashed, vibrant, decaying, noisy, diverse and, above all, chaotic.
You can guess at my amazement.

The internet tells me that this district was created by the Hiranandani brothers, who are both very rich indeed. They flattened the hills that dot this area, and then built this impressive small-town to cater to their fellow rich.
I learned, not to my surprise, that they are also involved in building in the huge 23-Marina building in Dubai.

It was also they who brought in India’s hardest-working architect, Hafeez Contractor, who brought with him his trademark faux-Italian arches, cornices and domes. (Poor Hafeez is in that strange position of being incredibly popular with his clients, but despised by some of his more sniffy peers, who compare him to the deadhead populist architects in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.)
But even if you think Hafeez is the best thing ever, you do have to ask the questions - why do the buildings have almost no relation to the shape of the lands around them? And why are they so un-Indian?

A man who was walking round with me hissed his displeasure. “Look at this! The people who live here are lots of NRIs and Americans who don’t want to know they are in India… They want to pretend they are in London or Milan!”

And then, even more bitterly, he said: “Why are the street-names in English? Where are the Hindi or Marathi street-names?”
He carried on: “And Where are the mosques, the temples, the roadside shrines… the cinemas?!!”
I suddenly realized he was right. No matter how much I looked, I couldn’t find any religious institutions or film-houses. In a country where religion and Bollywood are second nature to the vast majority, it was spooky to observe a complete absence of them.

But the poor are still there. My companion took me to the edge of the district, where suddenly, round a corner, you hit a jhopadpatti. The black liquid of untreated sewage spreads along its alleyways, and the ragged children play in the dust.
Now, it’s not unusual in Bombay to find this contrast of rich and poor – in fact it is common – but having seen what I had already seen I had assumed the poor here had been “moved on”, as they often are in this city.
I was told that a legal battle to resist eviction by the slum-dwellers had turned into a political contest, so – for now – they were staying. But its clear the facilities of the town do not extend to them.

What is one to make of all this? I wandered some more.

I went into the public garden (called “Nirvana Park”), which is a copy of a Japanese-style space with pools full of carp, little half-moon bridges across the water feature and ultra-tidy lawns. The young courting-couples were obviously at home; they seemed happy. And yet, as I looked around, I saw nothing Indian at all in the features of the place, not even the face of a Ganesh or a swastik.

A hundred yards away, there is a tall black obelisk - in HGs’ “Central Square”. Now I must admit I didn’t quite understand all the images at its base, which are not explained, but I could make out the gist of one. It shows a contented paterfamilias who sits and reads the paper as his children play ball behind him. I guess it was trying to sum up the area: reinforcing the idea that this is a Happy Community.

**

That night I watched that spooky movie ‘Stepford Wives’ on the TV – that’s the one where the “perfect” community is created by the men there, who also turn their beautiful wives into absolutely submissive robots.
And it rang a bell for me. The fake classical architecture of Stepford, the “happy community”, its disturbingly spotless streets – all reminded me of… Hiranandani Gardens.
But – that’s a film.

Maybe the Hiranandanis are right?
After all, what’s wrong with cleanliness and order? On their website, the brothers even list one of their achievements as being the first builders to bring copper plumbing to India. You feel that they are trying to clean up India, which is worthy enough.
And, you know, Mumbai has had enough of inter-communal tension and strife – maybe their brand of money-led secularism is the way forward instead? Will their new-rich make India Shining?
And, following that line of thought - why shouldn’t therefore their new India look more international than Hindustani?

I’m still thinking about this.


**
Links: Hiranandani Gardens, and Hafeez Contractor’s website, plus Stepford Wives


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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.”


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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??!!


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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.

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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)

++
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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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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.

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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.

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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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Mumbai’s Thing about Hitler

One of the biggest slaps in the face that a European visitor to India experiences is the all-pervading presence of the swastik – what we foreigners perceive as the Nazis’ swastika. The first few times I came across it, on the gates of a college, on the back of a truck, and in a prominent place in a shop, it chilled my blood. Of course it was obvious quite quickly, even to me, that the symbol was not being used here in the same way as in Europe, but, still, my upbringing means I and many others in the West have a visceral and intense reaction as soon as it is seen, and it didn’t feel good in my first days to see it around the place so much.


What’s more…. perhaps the confusion between the European and the Indian significance of the swastik (which actually originated in India, is a long-established religious emblem of good fortune, and which Hitler stole, for his own movement’s use) might contribute to why, strangely to me, there seems to be an inordinate amount of interest here in Hitler’s philosophy …

I’m not talking about the crass right-wing politicians in India who say rather silly approving things about Hitler – after all, that happens in Europe too, sadly.
No, it's more than just the statements of rather ignorant politicians. For example, in Gujarat, the neighbouring state to this one, the school textbooks referred to Hitler the Hero. (However, as you can imagine, there was eventually some objection to that).

Indeed, even on the shelves of the trendy modern bookshops in this city you can see displayed prominently ‘Mein Kampf’ (Hitler’s autobiography, written by him when he was a young revolutionary, and in which he first outlined his views). To my surprise, I learnt that it is on quite a few local bookshops’ ‘constantly-selling’ list.
In fact, quite a few Indian publishing houses (of which two, Jaico Books – which specialises in New Age works surprisingly! - and Embassy Books, are based in Mumbai) compete to produce in-print versions of Mein Kampf. Interestingly, all the versions I saw use the 1939 edition (Patrick Murphy’s translation) – without any modern preface to give it a post-1945 historical context!
Then there was the bizarre incident of the restaurant that opened here in Greater Mumbai in the summer of 2006 – as “a tribute to General Hitler” (see Hindustan Times, August 21, ‘06). The owner of ‘Hitler’s Cross’, as it was called, was quoted as saying “we named it after the general Hitler, and we hope our customers gobble up our food just as he gobbled up countries”. Eh?? As you can imagine, I was incredulous, and wondered what naivety/ignorance could be behind this ‘reasoning’. (As it was, the big newspapers had a field day going after this man, and he later had to change the name.)

Soon after this incident, the Times of India (Oct 29 2006, pg 4) quoted a charity worker who was mentioning, approvingly, one of Hitler’s maxims about being independent. The man, who was being feted as a community hero by the paper, went on to say that Mein Kampf was his “favourite book” which he read in Marathi translation. The report added (without any other comment!), “...like Hitler, he too is a vegetarian teetotaller”.

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What on earth does it all add up to? Well, as usual, I’d love any reader’s thoughts on why they think this happens, but I’m beginning to think it’s an interesting example of just how wide the gap between India and Europe really is.

Here are a few guesses on why some ordinary Indians have a soft spot for Hitler.

*First, and obviously, the swastik. Hitler’s German race theories postulated an Aryan root for Germans. The modern peoples of north India are (believe it or not) descended from the same Aryan stock, because the Aryans migrated into the Indian sub-continent… which is why in fact Hitler adopted the swastik – an authentic Aryan symbol. Indian people love the swastik, and so did Hitler, so, maybe some ignorant people think this is a reason to admire Adolf? Maybe.
Incidentally, a recent move by German politicians to try to have the swastika outlawed in the European Union countries was greeted with outrage by … guess who… European Hindus!
The fact that Hitler was a vegetarian, like so many Hindus, only adds to this sense of approval.

*Secondly, though Indians did fight in the Second World War on the side of the Allies (and lost a helluva lot of soldiers incidentally), they were reluctant allies. Indians were part of the British Empire at the time and had to follow Britain into the war, at a time when many Indians actually desperately wanted independence from what they saw as the equally tyrannical regime of the Brits. Perhaps, perhaps, Indians who opposed Britain saw a ‘friend’ in Hitler, who also was fighting the British?
Certainly, he is admired by those same silly Indian politicians I referred to earlier as a Man Who Achieved Things.

*Thirdly, many of the Mumbaikers that I have come across have a fierce sense of Individualism, which is, I suppose, why they make great entrepreneurs.
So, despite the fact that government here is largely paternalistic, many men (and more and more women) sincerely believe they can find success through their own individual strength of will. That attitude is of course echoed in the language of right-wing zealots… such as Hitler.
For example, another hugely popular right-wing book here is Ayn Rand’s 'The Fountainhead', which can be found in every bookshop. Her book (published in 1943) is also a hymn to the power of the Individual who cares nothing for Society as a whole. It’d be interesting to see statistics, but Rand is seen as pretty old-fashioned in Europe, while here, yup, her books are still being bought in numbers, presumably as life-guides.

*Lastly – and I don’t know how many Indians will agree with this – maybe Hitler is a bit of a remote figure to them.
Most Europeans nowadays don’t feel threatened by the figures of Attila The Hun, or indeed Napoleon, even though in their own centuries, they were regarded with horror by anyone who wasn’t on their side. Well, maybe distance, as well as time, softens images. Perhaps Hitler (“general Hitler”) whose appalling activities were carried out largely in Europe is not someone who registers too largely with ordinary Indians?
Indeed, while news of Hitler’s atrocities were trickling out of post-war Europe in 1945-7, India had its own terrible history – when hundreds of thousands were dying and being slaughtered in the mess of Independence and Partition. So maybe Indians had other things to worry about then than Hitler.
And of course, there are also very few Jews today in Bombay to remind Mumbaikers of Hitler’s genocidal actions. Despite the fact that this is a city that has huge public endowments from the Jewish Sassoon family, many of the Jewish inhabitants have left – including the Sassoons themselves – and the two main synagogues have comparatively small congregations.
(As a sidebar on this point, one of the objectors who was quoted as opposing the Hitler’s Cross restaurant said – “even restaurants in Germany do not have such a name” as though it seriously might be possible! It just shows how out of touch with European feelings the man was).

Finally - here’s a question for you…. I don’t feel afraid of any book, nor would I ban one; but what would you think of a Bombay book-club that put ‘Mein Kampf’ on its reading list?
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Links: Jaico Books and Reuters News Video report – Hitler’s Cross