2 Stories

A few weeks ago I was spending some time in South Mumbai, doing a little sightseeing. Toward the late afternoon, I had visited a well-known art gallery, and was sitting on the steps of this gallery looking through my guide book for a good place to eat. An Indian guy came up to me and started making some conversation. I should say that this guy looked really crazy. He had one crazy eye that didn't really look in your direction, long grey hair, a huge, thick grey soul patch, a very large mole on his cheek, and in general was small and wiry. First thing, he introduced himself as Terrence O’Daniel, which was quite unexpected for a middle-aged Indian dude. He asked me where I was from, and I said the United States. He pressed further, and I said Los Angeles. He asked what I was doing in Mumbai, where I was staying, etc… He told me about his brother who lived in Los Angeles, apparently working for the U.S. government as a software programmer who programmed drones for unmanned attacks. He also spent a while complaining that his brother doesn't send any money home. Whatever, it might be true, it might not.

            In all, we had a very pleasant, 20 minute conversation outside of this art gallery. After being initially suspicious, I thought this guy just wanted to talk and have ‘cross-cultural experience’. Then after about 20 minutes he came out with it: he said “I can give you a great tour of Mumbai”. I said no thank you, and that I was fine exploring on my own a bit. Then he got serious, and went into this whole thing about how other tour guides just view Americans as “bags of money”, and that they are just after our wallets. But he, Terrence O’Daniel, was different. Speaking very intensely, he said he didn't just view me as a “walking bag of dollars”, but that he wanted to show me the real Mumbai. He said that he didn’t even care about money, that his parents were very rich industrialists in Chennai. He then opened his backpack and pulled out a worn notebook. He said that other tourists had written testimonials about him and the tour he gave. I flipped through it, and there were maybe 6 entries, all written in the same handwriting. He said that he had 18 more of these notebooks, but had lost them all when he was drunk.

            I had trouble believing him. Besides which, I didn’t want to pay some dude to show me around. I don’t have the money for a tour guide, and I was fine looking around on my own. I said no thank you, but that I appreciate the offer and it was a pleasure talking to him, and stuck out my hand to shake is. He looked at my hand, and then me, and with an utterly disgusted expression on his face said “You know what I say to people who don’t take my tour? Fuck you! People who don’t take my tour end up being bastards, so go fuck yourself!” Jeez. I said okay, and left.

            I had met a couple cool Scottish guys at the hostel where I was staying, and we had made plans to meet up for dinner that night. So I met them, and told them this weird story of this crazy guy who tried to get me to take his tour, and cursed me out when I refused. The next day, I went to do my sightseeing they went to do theirs, and we had decided to meet up again for dinner drinks that night. When I met up with them, they said they had a story for me. They were at this same art gallery that I had visited, and this crazy looking guy came up to them asking if they wanted a tour. He asked where they were from, where they were staying, made them read the bullshit testimonials in the worn notebook, etc… They refused, and said they are going to meet a friend for dinner. He pressed them. “Friends, what friends?” he asked, “you’re tourists”. They said they had met an American guy at the hostel. Then crazy guy asked “Persian guy, bald with a mustache?” They said yes, and he says “I don’t think you should hang out with that guy. He’s a bastard, and I think he’s gay too”. After all that, this guy was so pissed off that I didn’t take his tour that he started spreading all kinds of rumors about me. Ridiculous.

***

Story number two is much briefer. It is just a great example of how pushy salesmen can be in Mumbai. Walking down the street, you can barely look at an item without the seller telling you how much it is, and asking if you want to buy it. If you look for too long, the sellers might even follow you down the street, telling you they’ll give you a great price. They’ll keep lowering the price in the hopes that you’ll buy it. I’ve had to reiterate so many times that I actually really didn’t want an item before the seller stopped hassling me about it. Or, for example, every day, I walk down the same street from my apartment to the train station in the morning, and take the same street back at night. And every day, twice a day, 6 days a week, this same guys asks me “Jeans? You want to buy Jeans”. In his accent it actually sounds more like “jins”. I used to say no, but now I just walk by without saying anything. But he still asks me every time as I pass by, “Jins? You want jins?”

            Anyway, one day a couple weeks ago, I was walking down the street in South Mumbai just minding my own business. All of a sudden, this guys that is walking the opposite direction says to me that I have something on my ear. I wipe my ear, and ask if I got it. He says no, so I wipe my ear again and ask if it’s gone. Keep in mind this guy is a complete stranger that I just happened to be passing by on the street. Out of nowhere, this guy says “I’ll get it for you”, and comes closer to me and grabs my ear. He then pulls out one of those thin metal rods that doctors use to get ear wax out from your ear canal, and shoves it in my ear canal. He takes out a bit of ear wax and says “I clean your ear for you, good price!” I’m shocked. I can hardly believe this guy just had the balls to do that. I say no, absolutely not. Fuck no. He says “don’t worry, I give you good price”. I get angry. I said hell no, I don’t want some stranger sticking a metal stick into my ear on the fucking street. He then says “Okay, you don’t have to pay if you don’t like”. And again, I had to get kind of angry to get this guy to leave me alone. After getting pissed off, this guy finally leaves. People sell their wares like theirs no tomorrow. As soon as they peg you as a foreigner, some folks will do almost anything to give you a tour, sell you a drum, or even clean your ear. I guess in a city of 20 million people, sometimes you have to be aggressive to make a living.

Mumbai

8/3/13

I arrived in Mumbai four days days ago, and it is every bit as nuts and intense as I thought it would be. Mumbai is a huge city, packed to the gills with about 20 million people. The City proper, with about 12 million people, is the fourth most populous in the world and it shows. The sidewalks (where there are sidewalks) are very crowded. People often walk in the street only because there are so many people already on the sidewalk. The trains, however, are the best place to get a glimpse of how crowded Mumbai really is.

The doors on the trains don’t close. They get so crowded that people hang out sides, out of the door. At rush hour, you are packed in like sardines. It takes a certain skill to ride the train here. The trains only stop at each station for about 20 to 30 seconds, so at every stop there is mad rush to board the train. People don’t wait for people to exit the train, they just get on, so unless there are many other people getting off at your stop you kind of have to push and shove your way off the train. Even if the train is not crowded or busy, people still rush and push to get on the train.  About two stops before you get off, you have to start to push and shove your way towards the door so you will be able to get off when the train is crowded. But this presents another problem. Sometimes, the platform is on the right, and at other times it is on the left. Experienced riders know which side their stop is on, but I don’t. I’ve already missed my stop a couple times because I didn’t know which side the platform was on. The trains have four different types of cars. The regular cars are “second class”. This is just normal service. Then there is “first class”, which costs more, has slightly more comfortable seats, and tends to be a little less crowded, which is why people pay more for it. Then, there is a car for disabled folks, and generally one or two whole cars just for women. There is real problem in Mumbai with ladies getting groped and harassed on trains. In addition, many women don’t want to be packed right up against some dudes body when the train is crowded.

Mumbai was once seven different island cities. During colonial rule, the British reclaimed vast amounts of land, making one continuous city. Mumbai is peninsular, and the central city (or South Mumbai, as it is called) is toward the tip of this peninsula. As the city grew, it grew northward. Mumbai is kind of oriented length-wise, with the Western line of the Mumbai metro serving as the backbone of urban growth. The train tracks create a kind of barrier, and the only way across them are purpose built elevated walkways and bridges for cars every few miles or so. Many parts of the city are split between east and west by the tracks, for example there is Bandra East and Bandra West, Andheri East and Andheri West, etc. In many parts of the city, which side of the tracks you are on makes a big difference. Bandra West is a very expensive and stylish part of town, while Bandra east, on the other side of the tracks, is industrial and impoverished. In one area called Mahim, on the west side of tracks is a normal neighborhood, while on the east side of the tracks is the huge Dharavi slum.

A couple of days ago, I took a tour of the Dharavi slum. A company called Reality Tours and Travel will, for a small fee, take tourists like myself on a guided tour of the slum (don’t worry, I understand the irony of paying money to gawk at people’s poverty). Reality tours is a fairly benevolent organization, giving 80% of their profits to social programs that support those living in the slum. The tour through the slum was perhaps the biggest reality check I’ve ever experienced. Once Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi is certainly one of the densest, and is most interesting because of the sheer amount of economic activity that goes on there. The slum is generally divided between a commercial and industrial area, and a residential area. The residential area is further split between a Hindu area and a Muslim area. All through the slum, as one might imagine, the streets are extremely narrow and unpaved. It was raining on the day of my tour, so we had to trek through tiny muddy streets. In the industrial area, there is all kinds of activity going on. By far the largest industry in Dharavi is plastic recycling. People from the slum go throughout the entire city and collect discarded plastic, from water bottles and yogurt containers to broken chairs. Back at the slum, they separate the plastic based on quality. The plastic is then sold to people who crush the plastic into tiny bits. The plastic is crushed using large metal crushing machines that are all made and assembled right in the slum. Walking through the narrow lanes, you can clearly smell the fumes of metal being melted and molded to make the crushers. The streets are so narrow that the smoke and the fumes have nowhere to escape, and it can often be suffocating. There is also a large leather industry in the slum, where they make purses, wallets, and other leather goods.

The residential area is even denser than the commercial area. Families generally have about 100 square feet of space to call their own, and it is often shared by 4 or more people. To walk through the streets, you have to crouch down a bit to avoid hitting the bare, open electricity wires above. Amazingly, most houses have access to electricity and water, but only for a few hours a day. Our guide warned us not to stop moving as we might stop the flow of movement in the narrow lanes, and to stay close, because the streets are so dense that if we get lost, it is very difficult to find your way out without knowing exactly where you are going. From the residential area, we walked out onto a large, baseball diamond sized heap of garbage. The vast area was muddy, smelly, and filled trash.

Next to the heap of trash, there were a group of children playing badminton and cricket and this was the part that struck me most. In the slum, everyone is doing something. People are relentlessly working, trying to make a living, children are playing, and mothers are cooking. Everyone there was making the best of what they had. The only open space the children had was next to this big pile of garbage, so that’s where they played. I’m not trying to say it’s okay or excusable, but I am saying that it put my privilege in perspective. I don’t think I will ever forget that.  

Overwhelming India

7/28/13

India is…overwhelming. I arrived in India about three days ago, and have been staying Delhi. Delhi is huge, hot, crowded, and at times smelly, and at other times fragrant. But pungent, all the time. I am staying with a friend with a neighborhood in South Delhi called Aleknanda. It is a normal, residential neighborhood with large apartment buildings, and small market areas. Aleknanda, like much of Delhi, has no sidewalks. People walk in the streets battling cars, auto rickshaws, motorcycles, and other pedestrians. There is lots of garbage lining the street. The part of the street where there is supposed to be a sidewalk is currently an open ditch where workers are building some kind of large pipe. I am told that the ditch has been there for several years. The ditch is also filled with garbage. The stench of garbage, still water, and cow shit emanates almost everywhere. It is quite overwhelming.

Delhi is a strange city. It is very large and very sprawling. It is made up of many small, dense, compact neighborhoods connected by large roads and highways. At the center is New Delhi, the planned city that the British built. New Delhi is ridiculous. Everything is enormous and of grand scale. It is obvious they built New Delhi to impress, not for people. Every road has four lanes in either direction, and no cross walks. Every official building is gigantic and surrounded by almost moat-like greenery separating it from the street. The main attraction of New Delhi is known as the Rajpath. Imagine the National Mall in Washington, D.C. with much less to see. The Rajpath goes from the presidential palace on one end to the India on the other. The India Gate is another gaudy arch in the style of the Arch de Triumph. The Rajpath consists of two one way roads that have 5 lanes each and two very large, very wide areas of greenery for pedestrians. However, oddly enough, the Rajpath has no walkway. Pedestrians must trample through the mud to talk its length.

            The rest of New Delhi is just as grand and large-scaled as the Rajpath. The streets are all wide, and are surrounded on each side by the large residences of members of Parliament, ambassadors, judges, and the wealthy. They live in large houses surrounded by 10 foot walls facing the street. So walking down the street in New Delhi means walking on the side of a wide street surrounded by walls. It can be quite unnerving.

            To north of New Delhi is Old Delhi, the older, denser, more chaotic an intense part of Delhi. That is the only way I can describe Old Delhi: intense. Today I went to Old Delhi to visit the bazaars and see the old city. As soon as you exit the train station, you are greeted by a wall of humidity, and giant crowds going every which way. To get to the street you walk down a long alley crowded with carts selling everything from brushes and umbrellas to shoes and stationary. Once you get to the street, it is equally as crowded and intense. Where there is a sidewalk, it is swallowed up by sellers hawking their wares, and the masses of other pedestrians. Many people choose to walk in the street and compete with cars and rickshaws rather than compete with other people.

Once you step into a side street from the main road, you are in the bazaars. The bazaars are a giant maze of tiny, winding roads intersecting with one another, with each road leading down to another part of the bazaar selling a different grouping of items. There is an area for jewelers, one for apparel, an area for book sellers, furniture, etc. The tiny streets are absolutely packed. People, cars, and bicycle rickshaws all crowd the small streets. Pedestrians push you to the side to get by, the cycle rickshaws yell and ring their bells, and the drivers honk relentlessly. That is actually a part of being on the road in India, constant honking. The whole time, you are breathing in the smell of urine, garbage, and a thousand different spices. For someone who has just arrived in India, it is a lot to deal with. Walking slow to look around slows the flow of pedestrian traffic, so people kind of push me to the side to get around. At the same time, you must be aware of the cars and motorcycles rushing by. It is loud, with sellers yelling about their wares, people negotiating prices, and cars honking. It is an environment that engages all five senses at once.

As I said, overwhelming.