First Experiences in Mumbai

I envisioned that my first day in India was supposed to be laid back in order to let my body adjust to the time difference, but we were able to pack in quite an active day. Shortly after breakfast (which I slept through), we jumped into two cabs to check out the city. The crew was Dag, Santi, Natausha, Ross, Brandon, Bisrat, Jose, and I. We started with a trip out to the hanging gardens. We didn’t see anything hanging, but I think the name actually came from a religious group in the area that used to hang their dead in order to give them back to nature or something like that. We also so a Hindu temple and got to walk through some of the back alleys to get a feel for the local culture. After that we had a great lunch at the Taj hotel, and then finished off the day with some sightseeing at the Gateway to India.

Driving through Mumbai was a very eye-opening experience. The traffic is pretty heinous, and the lines on the roads don’t seem to mean anything to anybody. Cars, trucks, motorcycles, people, and even animals are all quite skilled at getting where they need to go. However, there doesn’t seem to be any systematic set of rules. The surprising thing is that somehow it still works. Not very well as the travel times around Mumbai are multiple times that of what one can expect in a US city. It is common to take over an hour to get from one place to another.

The general living conditions seem to be polarized in an extreme nature. Well maintained high-rise apartment buildings are scarce, but the real-estate prices are comparable to New York or any other high dollar city. Middle-range housing seems to be non-existent, leaving most Mumbaikars in poverty conditions.
The extreme end of the poverty is the shanty-towns and sidewalk huts that appear to represent the majority of housing. It is common to see a sidewalk area simply “claimed” by a family that throws up some corrugated steel walls or tarp roof and calls it home. The overall housing conditions here are drastically more challenging than anywhere I have been in Mexico (my only frame of reference).

Despite the hardships, moral seems very good. People are happy to spend their time playing cricket in the streets or forging crafts to sell in the markets. Since it is Diwali (biggest Indian holiday of the year), we saw many families creating strings of fragrant flowers similar to a Hawaiian lei that were in turn sold by street vendors. Other forms of work include construction, but not under any conditions that would pass mustard with OSHA. We saw three workers several stories up on questionable scaffolding made of bamboo. Seemingly unconcerned, they were quick to smile and wave to us down on the street.

Pictures from my first sojourn into the city

Video Clips:
Driving in Mumbai
Gateway to India