Mumbai-2

Victoria Station

Senior Garden

57-Story Vacant Home

Dhobi Ghat School Boys

Jan. 21, 2013-Innovation

We re-read my old email from when we were here in 2002. It's interesting in that there were no cows then either & it was cleaner than the rest of India. I ended saying India is difficult & fascinating. I thought we may have to come back. And here we are.

I took another look & whiff of the lobby of our hotel. The waterfall flows over stone tiles, not marble, the women are amazing in their luxurious saris & jewels, & the place is so redolent with the cloying smell of lilies & scented candles I can taste it.

The luxury permeates to table service even in the coffee shop. As before it's the only restaurant where our attire is acceptable but the service is still impeccable. When I got up from the table to go to the buffet, I put my napkin on the table. When I returned the waiter had folded it & draped it over the arm of my chair. Pretty fancy for breakfast.

Our guide today is Tomji. He's from a Mongolian family who came here 800 years ago. He has a degree in economics & political science & is an non-observant Hindu. I asked him if there was really Mongolian Bar-b-que in Mongolia.  He laughed when I described what we have in the U.S. He said the Mongols were too busy to stop for a bar-b-que when they were riding their horses. They put raw meat on the horse's back in lieu of a saddle. As they rode, the friction of their bottoms & the horses back tenderized the meat. They reached under their tush, grab a chunk of meat on the fly, & chowed down. Now that's fast food.

 We have a nice bus which always takes the edge off. We did a brief driving tour of the city as we headed for Marine Drive, also called the Queen's necklace. We stopped at the Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill & found out why they're called hanging. There used to be a lake in that location, but it was close to the Parsi Tower of Silence. Parsi's were originally Persian. They immigrated to India starting in 1668  to escape invading Muslims. When the British took over & realized they were a wealthy community they invited them to settle in Mumbai. They practice the  Zoroastrian religion & don't bury their dead. The bodies were left in the Tower where vultures eat the flesh & the bones are disposed of in a pit. There were three problems. Vultures dropped decaying flesh in the lake where it caused the water to be polluted; the bones washed into the water also causing a problem; & the vultures died out from eating the bodies of modern Parsis who'd taken medication poisonous to the birds. Nowadays they use solar panels to mummify the bodies which are then put into a charcoal pit & covered with lime. Because the bodies are filtered through charcoal on their way through the pit it doesn't harm the water.

Back to the garden. The British suspended the garden over the lake so vultures couldn't drop anything into it thus creating an underground reservoir. And so the hanging part. Parsis are dying out because they forbid intermarriage & conversion. Genetic problems are becoming an issue. Adjacent to the Hanging Gardens is one of several  for use only by senior citizens. The Grandparent's Garden is where they have Laughing Clubs. Signs are clearly posted with hours for seniors only.

Checkered Past

We stopped for photos outside Victoria Terminal now called the Chhatrapati Shiva Terminal. In 1853 the first railroad tracks were laid in Mumbai. The terminal was named after Queen Victoria on her Golden Jubilee. It's an elaborate palatial building in the Victorian Gothic style with Islamic influences. It's an outstanding edifice reminiscent of fairy tale castles but not the only stand-out in Mumbai. Miami & Mumbai are similar in that they both have a large number of Art Deco buildings. Several of the old movie theaters are in deco style. In 1896 the Lumiere brothers shot the first Bollywood movie here. Technically Bollywood movies are only made in Mumbai although the Indian movie industry is huge. In Delhi it's called Dollywood & in Kerala it's Kollywood.

Four years ago when terrorists invaded from  Pakistan they floated across the Arabian Sea, landed in a slum where poor fishermen live & went to Victoria Station. They shot several people there, crossed the pedestrian bridge to the hospital & moved on to hotels & the Chabad Jewish Center killing as they went. Our hotel was involved in that tragedy. It was built by the Tata family, now one of the richest in the world, in reaction to Indians being barred from admittance to British hotels. The family donates 60% of their earnings to charity. In contrast, the family who built the fifty-seven story unused residence own Reliance Industries & aren't generous at all.

On our previous visit to Mumbai we'd seen the museum of the house where Gandhi stayed when he was in town. But now in addition to photos of when M.L. King visited, they had notes from  Pres. Obama & Michelle to show us. They had two days notice for Obama's visit so only had time to paint the facade but did inspect & batten down the sewer hatches. They also removed the breadfruit from overhanging trees lest they fall & injure him.  As when we were here before, I noticed that Ben Kingsley was a dead ringer for Gandhi. Hollywood got it right.

Tomji wanted to take us to a food market but we rebelled. Enough was enough. He asked if we wanted to go on a slum walk & we jumped at the chance. Of the twenty million people in Mumbai  eight million live in slums. We saw that at the dhobi ghat where the workers live in deplorable conditions. The facility is a laundry on the river where one man can wash 400 pieces of clothing in a fourteen hour day. Today the children are going to school & don't want to do laundry anymore but the demand is greater. They've resorted to using machines.

My day was a short one. I wasn't feeling energetic. Only three of our group wanted to walk through the fishing village slum but we begged off to rest.

Tomorrow we'll tour the city some more & get a chance to see a business unique to Mumbai. It's their version of meals on wheels. Lunch pails are distributed to homes of workers who want lunch delivery. The lunch is prepared by someone in the household, it's picked up & taken to a central distribution center. Each lunch box is coded kind of like FedEx. It's re-directed to someone who will then deliver it to the person who ordered it. The empty container is picked up in an hour, taken to the central point where it's cleaned & readied for the next day.

I'm not looking forward to the long flight tomorrow. It starts at 9:30pm. It's over fifteen hours going home. Tomji thinks Air India is so bad because it's a government owned airline & people only do the minimum. Maybe at least the toilets will work this time.

I don't know if I'll get an email out tomorrow since we're touring before we fly out. If not then, this is good-bye.

Toby