Slumdog Millionaire

The trick (for me) in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was to spot the join in the fusion of author Vikas Swarup’s idea of India and director Danny Boyle’s idea of India. You’d think, wouldn’t you?, that the gap between the two would have been pretty wide. After all, how could Danny Boyle (a guy from Manchester) know India in the way that Swarup does?

Fact is, though, it’s amazing how Indian the film feels. It’s not just that the boys speak in Hindi (with sub-titles) in the movie, or that there is a funny, imaginary Bollywood-style dance sequence at the end (the first real reference to Bollywood), but that Danny Boyle seems to have picked up, somehow, an empathy for the country he is depicting.

Maybe I’m over-stating it, but think how Slumdog echoes the attitudes in films in the present Indian film industry. Plots in films like say, Chak De, or Black, are sophisticated without being deep, and also build through setbacks to the ultimate feel-good catharsis. So does Slumdog.

Also, Boyle doesn’t make the big mistake that most Westerners do, about Mumbai, and Dharavi especially, of seeing poverty as meaning degradation. Most Mumbaikers I know (outside those in Government service, who just seem depressed most of the time!) are too busy trying to come up with the next Great Idea To Make Money to be wallowing in despair.

And Boyle also gets beauty right; there is so much beauty in children, in women, and even in men. This is not being patronising – this is a fact of Mumbai. Yep, the place has decay in its bones, but life is vigorous.
The train sequences are genius too. Somehow Danny Boyle seems to have instinctively realised that trains are a centre-point of existence in Mumbai… he just gets it! They are a public arena, where everything human takes place; they are sort-of like mobile public squares into which we all wander, and sit, and chat, an d eat, and sleep.

So, is it a film I recommend? Yes, I do, wholeheartedly.
Okay, it’s not very profound, there are no life-changing moral insights, and there are some scenes which are lack truthfulness even for fiction (I just don’t believe any Americans are as stupid as the ones in the Taj Mahal sequences, which makes the scenes an easy pop at America – it’s just for very cheap laughs I think) – but… for the fact that it will make the real India accessible to western audiences, I applaud it.

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So, off-line, were there are any other aspects which just caught my eye?

Yes (bet you guessed there would be, huh?).

* Muslim Mumbai. What a lot of Western audiences won’t get is that Jamal and Salim, the two brothers, are Muslim in what is a predominantly Hindu city. Muslims make up a sizeable minority In Mumbai, and do well on many business and career levels, but, the bottom–line is that they are very often the poorest and most discriminated against in the city. In fact, one of the first scenes in the movie shows the tiny brothers’ parents being slaughtered in anti-Muslim riots – I would guess (I haven’t read Swarup’s book) that this is the pogrom of 1992, in which nearly a thousand Muslims died.
But this theme – a Muslim in Mumbai – fades away as the film progresses (though Salim’s last words are those a Muslim should say - ‘God is great’). I guess Boyle/Swarup does that deliberately… but I did wonder why it became under-played.

* The Taj Mahal. The two tiny brothers wander India on trains before ending up at the end of the tourist trail in Agra.
I just want to say as the two beggar boys cry out in wonder on seeing the TM for the first time there in front of them – is this Heaven?!! – that I identified with them completely at that moment. The Taj is a staggering, staggering place; and I feel sorry for Indians who get so used to it.
As a foreigner I have never become used to it. It is … Heaven.

* The actors. Well Dev Patel is fine, but I kinda forgot how good Anil Kapoor is. I have gotten used to seeing him in rather B-grade stuff, but as the quiz-show host he is great, and even outshines the always exemplary Irfan Khan.
Indians can never quite believe me when I tell them that the Indian film industry is almost totally ignored by Westerners – you’re more likely to see a Mexican or Japanese film at your local cinema/film-theatre in the US or France than an Indian one.

Now, I know a lot of this is to do with the length. A Western audience is not going to sit through three hours; they just won’t. But it’s a source of great frustration to me. How can I explain the fact that a fine and moving film like, say, Maqbool/Macbeth, is just not going to get exposure, even in an arthouse theatre, in the UK?
Trouble is, the English non-Asian audience still thinks Bollywood is wet saris in Switzerland, and won't take it seriously.
Slumdog is the nearest they are going to get to an 'Indian' movie – which is both heartening and depressing at the same time.

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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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Bombay Railway

I’ve been living here over a year now, but sometimes it takes another person’s view to make you see properly what’s been in front of your own eyes all this time.

By a weirdly long route, a DVD recording of Gerry Troyna’s recent BBC TV documentary about the railways in Bombay, called, er, “Bombay Railway” fell into my hands, and I just had to watch it – mostly cos I get a kick of watching something related to a city I know and then saying – “yes, I’ve been there!”
(I don’t know why I like doing this. This habit sounds a bit childish as I write it down… But if you live in Mumbai as I do, it happens a lot when you watch Bollywood. I spent most of the movie “Lage Raho Munnabhai” just identifying the backgrounds. Very irritating for the person watching it with me as it turned out later).


Information, Education, Entertainment

Anyway, the documentary, which is in two halves, Part One being called “Pressure” and Part Two being called "Dreams", is really a revelation, even for a resident like me. I should have known it would be because the film’s maker, Gerry Troyna, has been coming to the city on and off for twenty years, so he knows much about what the city is.

Actually, It’s a kind of old fashioned documentary in that it simply follows the lives of a dozen or so ordinary people whose livelihood is somehow entwined with the railways – from the train driver near retirement to a hawker who works the women’s carriages.
It’s also “old-fashioned” in that there is no hidden agenda or thesis to push, there is no interrogating of the participants, and, on the positive side, there is also a desire to capture just how happy ordinary people can be as well as how crushed they can get.
And all the time, there is a gentle drip-feed of facts and figures about the enormous industry that is the railways of Bombay (Did you know: that six million passengers daily use the city’s system, over just 300km of track? Stunning).
The documentary ends up giving you that famous combination of Information, Education and Entertainment. Which is just what I appreciate.


Railway essential

For Mumbaikers, the railway system is just plain essential. The shape of the city is like a long water-drop, and this makes the roads hugely congested. To drive from one end of the city to the other (which is about 30 kilometers) will easily take two hours. On a train it takes twenty minutes.
And in a city where fifty per cent of the inhabitants are so poor they live in slum conditions, it has the added advantage of being incredibly cheap.

The system is also just part of the landscape. Unlike London, where the railways are often hidden behind embankments or high concrete fences, these rail lines often run quite visibly alongside the main highways in the city. You can often be walking along, looking at the pavement (if there is one!) and look up, and there’s a train running parallel to you. Because the carriages are basically glorified cattle-transporters, without doors as such, many of the passengers will also be leaning out into the slipstream enjoying the cooling breeze. It looks a crazy thing to do, and, actually, there are lots of accidents.

(Somehow people don’t seem to get too worked up about the rate of accidents, strangely. Over three thousand people are knocked over and killed or fall off trains every year in Bombay, a statistic that would close down the national network in Britain, but there seems to be a belief here that it’s usually the victims’ own fault anyway. And that could be true. Because railway land is so open, and because Mumbaikers love a bit of risk, you’ll see people wandering all over the lines at all times of day, with some families even bedding down in small shelters by the lines. It’s a Health & Safety Inspector’s nightmare!)

In fact, the driver, whose story we follow in the film, admits, almost in passing and without self-pity, that he has driven his train into nearly seventy people during his career (many accidents are at night, in poor light). It is also his gruesome and statutory job to ensure that the body is removed form the line before the train can continue. But he shrugs his shoulders, albeit a little quietly, at the fact.
This rather blasé attitude can work to the city’ s advantage though, because it means it would take something huge to close down the network. Even the terrible floods of 26/7/2005, in which 500 people died, only saw the schedules suspended for … twenty-four hours!

If you do get a chance, this film has got to be worth seeing - whether you’re interested in railways, urban infrastructure, or simply how Mumbai keeps going.
The end of the documentary is brilliantly conceived as a Bollywood–style fantasy song and dance sequence on a fictional Bombay station, as dreamed up by the railway officer who is another of the figures in the film. Somehow the whole concept just gets the spirit of the Mumbai ‘thing’, whatever that is, and gets it just right.

Finally, the other great thing about this film is that it’s about the range of unnoticed people, whose efforts keep the railways so vital. There’s such a temptation in Bombay to concentrate on the pretty people, or the billionaires, or the politicians, but Gerry Troyna has just quietly selected the right people in his profile.
There’s the magistrate who holds his court for railway offenders on a station platform; there’s the guy who just wants to create a successful business selling food on the trains; there’s the street-kid who sleeps by the tracks – and more.
It’s his genius I think to have spotted these people, to have helped them relax enough to be filmed acting so naturally, and then woven them into being integral features of the bigger story – that of the railway system itself.

I know your chances of getting to see it are slim now (though it might turn up on Discovery – who knows), but honestly I should try to get to see it.
If anyone hears of where and when it’s playing in Mumbai, just let me know, or stick what you know in Comments.

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Links: BBC's webpage about 'Bombay Railway', and The film's Bollywood sequence "Chali Chali" -on YouTube

Fading Glory of the Parsis

Though Bombay is a city that is all-inclusive, that does not mean that there are not quite firm divisions between communities. These different communities may meet and barter on the street without differences, but back inside their homes they will pursue markedly distinct ways of life.

One of the most intriguing communities (to me) is the Parsi one. Parsis, aka Zoroastrians, are a religious group, originally from the area covered by the ancient Persian Empire, who started coming to India around 900 CE. In the nineteenth century their fortunes, in Bombay in particular, seemed to have taken a huge lift-off, and some of their members became very powerful.
The fact is that South Mumbai (the old part) is absolutely riddled with statues, and most of them seem to be of the great Parsi merchants and entrepreneurs who, alongside the British, virtually ran the city in the 1800s and early 1900s. Frozen in their monuments, they sit on stone thrones, and stare out at the city that seems to have been moulded by them.

However, what’s odd is that the Parsis’ status, influence, and even numbers, seem to have dwindled at an amazing speed over the last half-century. Their population in Bombay has almost halved since the Second World War. Certain individuals shine out, but mostly the Parsi tone in Bombay now appears to be one of faded glories.

The previous paragraph is of course a generalisation, but, if you want to see just how faded the glories can become, check out Mumbai’s painfully wilting Parsi History museum….


Museum unregarded
The Time Out Guide to Mumbai doesn’t even mention the FD Alpaiwalla Museum (though, oddly, it does mention the Khareghat housing estate, aka “colony”, in which the museum is located).
At first this would seem a strange omission – after all, the museum has some ancient artefacts, which it claims are nearly 4000 years old, and a beautiful sixteenth century carved gate from Gujarat, which alone would give it high prestige. And then there are also antiques from the Persia area, including stone tablets with cuneiform writing inscribed on them, which are fascinating. (Well, they are to me).
Despite its small size, just that of four large rooms, the museum has got some nice pieces.

But, the full story is that… it’s dingy, dilapidated and under-serviced.
The visitor’s book, speckled with age, told its own story – twenty entries in the last six months. And, certainly, I never saw another soul in the hour was there.

You begin to wonder who’s running it – and why they do so little to promote it…
It’s almost as though the committee/trustees/whatever prefer it that no one comes there!

For example –
There are no directions to the place inside or outside the housing colony.
There’s no sign on the front that outlines opening times, admission details, or contact information.
No photos are allowed (not even for a fee, as at most Indian museums).
There were no souvenirs on sale, nor information leaflets to be had.
There is no website (This really gets my goat. C’mon guys, this is the 21st century, and a webpage can cost you nothing. Just do it!)

The sweet lady who occupies the office next door reinforced that no photos were possible. Why?, I asked. Because the committee does not allow it. Why does the committee not allow it? She then completely confused me by saying that the exhibits were rotated from the main collection, as if that explained the policy somehow.
However, I was now intrigued and asked – so, what other exhibits are there that you have that I might want to see next time, and when does the next rotation cycle kick in?
She seemed nonplussed, as though the idea of my wanting to return was completely crazy, and then she said – ah, sorry, I don’t know, and there is no catalogue of artefacts anyway…
I was stunned.
She said apologetically: “There is no money. The government does not give grants”.
I thought: I’m not surprised – you do your very best neither to attract visitors nor to entertain them…

Whoever is on the committee should be awoken from their coma and get responsible. Now!


It actually could be rather good…

Because, the fact of the matter is that this could be a decent small museum with a unique selling point in that it is dedicated to a surprisingly influential but tiny community. And it has some interesting (ok, ok, they are a bit dry – but I liked them) displays.
One top attraction is the Mother goddess terracotta figurine dating back to 1800BCE – who has one hand cupped around one of her breasts in an oddly modern pose – and which is from Iran itself.

The great Parsi businessmen whose photos are on the wall – such as Nariman, Mehta (whom Zubin Mehta is a descendant of), Jamshedjee Jejeebhoy, Dadabhai Naoroji (who was elected as a British MP in 1892, believe it or not), Godrej, Tata, Modi, and Petit – must surely be staring down in huge disapproval. The priceless collection of porcelain, the furniture and the antiques are all just gathering dust, as far as I can see, and all those Parsi business instincts are being turned on their head.

(Just a side-note here. Parsis aren’t universally liked in Bombay even if they are respected. They got very pally with the British during the Raj, and became almost more British in their mannerisms and outlook than the British themselves. The well-off Parsi homes that I’ve seen do look as though they could be in Surrey! As a result, some Mumbaikers look askance at them, feeling they made a devil’s pact with the “oppressors” during the 1800s.)

There is also a practical need for this museum to be successful.
Parsis won’t need reminding that the Battle of Nehavand in 641 was nearly fatal for their religion and culture. The Muslim Arabs were in the ascendancy at that time and their blitzkrieg across the Middle East meant that it took just thirty years for them to overrun the old Assyrian Empire. Zoroastrianism has survived in that part of the world of course, but only in tiny clumps and under duress, and of the 120,000 Parsi/Zoroastrians left in the world, just under half are in Bombay, having originally come there as part of the Parsi diaspora. (A lot of them also went to China, which I only learnt thanks to the museum).

And now there is a similar crisis. As I said, their numbers are in big decline. You see, you can’t convert into the faith, and if a Parsi’s child is born of a mixed religion marriage then they are not allowed to be of the faith either. In a mobile and free-choice world, such rules spell possible disaster for the community. (There is dispute about who can become a Parsi - check the link below to the Wikipedia page).

See – another reason to get this museum up and properly running.


Donate the lot

Poor old Alpaiwalla. He put most of this collection together and then died in 1952 just before the museum opened, and now look at what’s happening.
Somehow, I think he’d be just as happy if the whole collection were handed over to Bombay’s main museum, the CSMS, which is doing a fine job under difficult circumstances. Surely, the trustees there would make a decent job of looking after it.
It just needs some courage from the apparently sleeping committee to go ahead and donate the lot asap.

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Links
'Yahoo Travel' entry on the Alpaiwalla Museum
Wikpedia's Section on Parsis
UNESCO Project to preserve Parsi Heritage

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(Addendum -- Bet you never thought an Englishman could write a piece about Parsis without mentioning vultures, or the rite of The Tower of Silence, or Freddie Mercury…! )

Sex on The Beach

I had only been in the city a short time, when I went to the far north end of Mumbai, to a slightly touristy seaside resort called Uttan. After a late afternoon shack-meal, I went to rest on the beach where lots of local people were also milling about, enjoying the waves, at the end of their working day.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I realised that there was something unusual (unusual for me, anyway) going on. And then I realised – although lots of women were in the water, none over the age of ten was wearing a swimsuit or bikini. Nearly all of them were “swimming” in their ordinary clothes. This was new to me.

Later a European girl came to the beach, pulled off her sarong (revealing a bikini) and plunged into the sea. This sight so pleased a group of men that they stood in a clump near her clothes waiting for her to come out again: a diverting way to pass the time for them, with a sort of show to come, I suppose. Sadly for them, she must have been a fitness freak, for she hadn’t come out after fifteen minutes, at which point they got bored and wandered away.

So… I first came to learn – bikinis and swimsuits are not a common sight even in hip Mumbai. Modern and modernising it may be, a huge tourist destination too, but the city has not yet embraced the female swimsuit.

But questions remained.
I suppose the thinking is that bikinis invite unwanted male attention/lust, so are women on the beach, in fact, much less lusted after if they wear clothes? (It’s not such a daft question – see further down).
What happens at public swimming pools? What do women wear? The same thing?
And, where are Indian women at in the evolution of swimming-as-fun? In many countries, sea-swimming is just seen as plain stupid (what, they ask, is the point of it anyway?), while in the Far East, a woman, fully clothed or not, who went swimming would be very badly regarded. Mumbai is very feminist compared to many places – so how do women here feel about swimming?

(Of course, this is not to forget the Big Question – are swimsuits so great anyway? Looked at objectively after all, they are mostly designed purely for the Male Gaze, and not much else. Having said that, all the girlfriends I’ve ever had say they like the sense of freedom and the tan possibilities that bikinis provide.

But it’s also as well to remember that it’s not just Europeans that have revealing clothes. Women’s ordinary clothes in India can be provocative to a European, even if Indians are not aware of it. A woman in a sari or chaniya choli – a combination of a skirt and a very tight breast & shoulder-hugging blouse, that leaves much of the trunk naked – may not be aware of it, but to a Western man her body can be eye-poppingly sexy, even when she is thinking she is being modest. It’s all about what you are … not ... used to! Ironic, isn’t it?
Women from minority religions like Christianity or Islam are much less likely to wear stomach-revealing clothes of course.)

Onwards!

Now, the swimming pool test is fairly easy to answer, as there are two huge water-parks in Mumbai – Water Kingdom in Gorai and Suraj Water Park in Thane. At these both, the rule is simple – “Woman Must Wear Swimwear….”
In other words, whereas in England you would have a rule against wearing swimsuits that are too skimpy, here women have to be ordered out of day-clothes and into swimwear! For an Englishman like me, this was a surprising and curious reversal of the usual instruction.
This rule however can still cause confusion and embarrassment, so the parks go even further – and say the “swimwear” must be composed of nylon or lycra fabric. This has now stopped all the women who wanted to turn up in cut-off jeans.

So, what (say all the non-Indians) are women wearing then?
The answer is that they wear a compromise - an outfit of sleeved T-shirt and cycling shorts (or what look like cycling shorts), which in essence efficiently covers up much of the body.
Both the main water parks do quite nicely out of this confusion, as they sell a “designer” version of this combination for a nice price to anyone who turns up with the incorrect apparel. If you are keen on buying a similar outfit yourself, they have hit the high street, and you can buy them on Mumbai's so-called “Fashion Street” (near Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus).
Now, I never quite got the bottom of this (ho ho), but it’s unclear if bikinis are frowned upon or not. What is clear is that all the women I spoke to would never wear one anyway in a such a “public” place as a water park – first and foremost because of the unwanted leers of the young men, who, they say, would gather round them in numbers and maybe start to display that kind of behaviour known here as "Eve teasing".
However, in hotel pools – both luxury and family ones – I have seen bikinis. I presume that this is because there are less likely to be leers, and a greater sense of “protection”, in hotels.

Which leaves us… where….?

Well, the T-shirt & lycra shorts combination is: clearly the most efficient swimming gear (a similar outfit is worn by professional swimmers after all); is obviously better protection against the sun; and serves quite well to ward off too much staring. Some women I spoke to have also remarked that in bikinis, they feel they are being “marked down” if they have less than perfectly fashionable bodies, so they opt for the shirt&shorts as a way to escape all that nonsense.
In other words, the combo makes sense. It makes special sense in India, even if it has not got to the beach yet.

The bikini, on the other hand, is not meant to be sensible anyway. It is really a kind of personal statement, and, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, has – in an obscure way – become tied in with women’s equality, in that woman can now feel they can wear what they want, be as sexual as they want and behave as they want. The bikini says “I can be as sexual as a man”. However, it is an odd way to have to say it. The bikini is at the end of an odd and slightly random evolutionary strain in the women’s personal freedom movement in the West. It may or may not ever be “needed” in that way in Mumbai.


What do you think?

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Just a Final Thought…
One of the main reasons for all this discussion is the presence of testosterone-driven young men who can make life so difficult for the women who are the objects of their desire.
But, sadly, you can’t seem to stop testosterone.
It almost doesn’t matter what women wear or don’t wear, because the beach or waterside is a fun place, and young men’s lust-levels will always soar in such a place.
Bikinis, head-to-toe one-pieces, burkhas – they only makes degrees of difference in warding off the male gaze.

A friend of mine wrote the piece below after going to Goa – where he too observed young women bathing in full clothes in the sea. As you’ll see though, it did not stop him “appreciating” what he saw.

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The Beach
The older sisters, dressed in full shalwar kameez, stand out in the ocean – up to their thighs – stiffly monitoring their excitable young siblings, who rush near them and
back to them in the playing waves. To my foreign eyes, it’s a surprise: only those who wish to secretly commit suicide, or those who are absent-minded to the point of eccentricity, would want to walk into the sea fully clothed.
Even from this distance, their clothes shine electric blue and dazzling red against the grey-ish water.

Sometimes though, the yank of the sea’s undertow pulls these dignified young ladies with it, and these women feel their knees being twisted by the force and their bodies sucked sideways, and, resist the water as they will, they are still toppled down into the spume, are lost to sight a moment, and then re-appear - shock and embarrassment and pleasure alike on their dripping, emerging faces, not sure if their position has been offended or just joked with.

But they have undergone a sea change. Their hair, previously in dry, untidy strands, is transformed - now sleek and sable-shiny-black and pasted to their glistening, salty skin. Their blouses, before shapeless and billowing, now stick to them like seaweed to a nude rock; and their white teeth shine from damp, excited smiles as their little brothers and sisters tease them.

But do these decorous young women know how each curve and run of their nubile bodies is now revealed by the clinging wet-tight material they wear?
What was a concealing cover, hiding what should be hidden (bare shoulders and the shapes of breasts and the firmness of her belly), now seems suddenly over-stretched, straining to hold in the breathing bodily forms beneath. Her new appearance belies her.It says: this is no shy modest young woman, but one abandoned to pleasure.
The sticky wisps of hair that fall coquettishly in her confusion further betray her.

This is also the Bollywood transformation... from virgin to seductress, instantly, in a shower of rain, yet not requiring an inch of nakedness.
______________________

Links: Suraj Water Park


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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.

**
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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Sex on The Streets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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


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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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Bottoms at The Sea

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

It is also reflecting off about fifty bare bottoms.

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

I suppose I too should be outraged.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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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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