Mumbai Express X: Semester in India Wrap Up

Dear Everyone,

I hope you are enjoying the holidays. I’ve been busy for the past two months but in a week I go home. I’m really glad I came to India and am sad to be leaving.

My last note is a long one but my travel updates are done until July, when I’ll be in Japan for a month. With any luck, I may go to Southeast Asia next August but we will see how long the loans last.

Wishing you all the happiest of holidays,
Mike

—
Almost four months gone in the blink of an eye. Summarizing what it’s been like to live in India is difficult. It’s not like when you travel for two weeks and every day is an adventure offering a thousand flashbacks. Life settles down into a routine in which everything is the same and seemingly, hardly worth noticing. School has kept me so busy that I have hardly even scratched the surface of Mumbai.

Yesterday, I saw my first shoeshine boy since I arrived. At the train station there are men but never boys shining shoes. My classmates laughed at me that I was so happy to see a shoeshine boy, understanding only vaguely of my affection. All the kid had, was a brush and a little piece of wood for me to rest my shoe. No rag, no polish. I let him shine my shoes and gave him a few rupees even though he did a horrendous job. Then he followed me a block asking for money. It seems that the set up was barely more than an excuse for begging, or maybe he was just trying to get some money from the foreigner. I turn down way too many beggars, probably ten a day, feeling conflicted about giving money and about not giving money, about reinforcing the stereotypes that gringos—although they aren’t called that here—have money and about turning down so many people, most of whom must be really desperate for a meal or two.

During my stay in Mumbai, I have seen my Penn friend Shivani four times. She is trying to make it as writer and currently is directing and producing plays. Each of the three theatrical productions was marvelous, asking intellectually challenging questions about relationships, humanity’s idiosyncrasies and the crazy world in which we live. My favorite production was entitled Help Desk, in which God is a telephone operator who grants people all their absurd and terrible wishes, like the death of despised in-laws or a teenager’s desire to have a gun so he can go on a rampage. At the end of the play, the pregnant guy—yeah, that’s intentional irony—asks for a peaceful world for his daughter to grow up in and ends up getting clubbed to death by the other moronic characters. Being in India and seeing Iraq on TV 24-7, I certainly can relate to Shivani’s acerbic commentary. India has its share of intellectual artistic firepower.

Attending each of Shivani’s plays has also allowed me some insight into life among the upper crust of Mumbai society. At one place where one of her plays was put on, the Athena Night Club, there is a $20 cover charge on Friday and Saturday nights and the place was so exquisitely refined and upscale that it would put any club in Philly to shame. At another place, an Italian restaurant named Olive where we had red wine and Cuban cigars, I had a good meal. It was $30 all included. For me, I’d rarely spend that kind of money even in the States at a restaurant, but for a meal at a restaurant of the quality of Olive, it would easily cost $150 a pop. So I’ve been privileged to see how the good life is lived in Mumbai.

I have not written much on my trip to South India but the trip was spectacular. Recurring nightmares I’ve had during the past month about my computer going kaput and me losing hours worth of schoolwork on my computer prevent me from remember all the details about my trip but I shall try for some of the highlights.

Ben and I left on a Saturday morning for South India. We flew from Mumbai to Trivandrum on the South West Coast. Immediately walking out of the airport, the touts started in on “good price” rickshaw rides that of course cost 4 times what the locals pay. We avoided getting charged too much and managed to make it to the town bus station for a 3-hour ride to the southern tip of the country, Kanyikumari. The air in South India is completely different from Bombay, we could breathe and green palm trees and grass abounded on the muddy roadsides.

The bus station was an experience, even for a well-traveled person like me who doesn’t mind roughing it. By now, however, bone-rattling butt bruises lose their novelty after about an hour. Here, the bus station is an open-air market with about fifty large red buses in their slots. In India, many people speak English, but I believe I understood Portuguese better in Brazil than the heavily accented language we heard in South India. Finally after a lot of motioning, we settle for a bus to some town we’d never heard off somewhat more than half way to our destination.

I thought Ecuadorian buses were bad. Here, the buses are mostly government run twenty-year old red buses, with none of the subtle refinements in style found on your local Greyhound. No glass in the side windows, a very thin aisle with a 3-person bench on one side and a two person bench on the other. If it rains, you pull down the metal slats in the window so that the bus becomes a heat trap. I’m awfully glad it didn’t rain during our travels. As one bus was about to pull away, Ben and I hopped on. Like always, in this country that mints people like the US mints pennies, within a minute, every seat is filled with 1 and a half the people meant to sit there. The aisle is packed too. An hour into the ride, after some people get on and off, Ben and I are told that we are seated in the womens’ section of the bus. But since there are no other seats and since there aren’t any women who need our seats, we stayed where we were. The 3-hour journey half way to our destination cost 27 rupees each or about 50 cents.

Kanyikumari is not a place that I would ever recommend that you visit. It’s basically an old India fishing village that has gained popularity over the years as a pilgrimage site famous for its Buddhist, Muslim and Hindi shrines situated at the southern most tip of India and the confluence of three large bodies of water: the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Ben and I joined the masses of Indian tourists and a handful of westerners in the town. Thus far in my stay in India, garbage collection has not been one of the strong points of the subcontinent. It wasn’t in Kanyikumari either. The waters and beaches around the town were in serious need of a good community-cleaning day. We spend our most expensive night during the trip at a halfway decent hotel that charged 600 rupees or $13 for the 2 of us. Finding a good restaurant was just about impossible and we certainly didn’t. One of the reasons people go to Kanyikumari is too see the different colors of the three bodies of water coming together. For the record, it all looked kind of grayish blue to me.

The main reason people go to Kanyikumari, however, is to watch the sun rise. Therefore, Ben and I set our alarm for 5 in the morning. We woke up in the dark. Immediately upon exiting our hotel, we joined about 10,000 other people hurriedly walking to the beach. On the shoreline facing east, the day gradually brightened and it became clear that the horizon was cloudy. Still, Ben and I waited. We waited some more. We couldn’t even see the sun after half an hour, although the view was mystical as the dawn colors of pink, orange and yellow touched the cloud tops. An island with a giant Hindu statue sat half a mile offshore in shadows. An hour and fifteen minutes after sunrise people were still arriving at the beach, I couldn’t believe that people considered this a great sunrise and wondered why they continued to arrive but we stuck around. Suddenly, the sun burst through the clouds, in that bright orange color that is so strong it is impossible to look at directly. It was quite beautiful.

Other highlights of our week and a half sojourn included a riding an angry elephant, riding a ferry for an 8-hour cruise through the backwater swamplands of Kerala, seeing some magnificent Maharaja Palaces near Bangalore and attending a friend’s Indian wedding. The absolute highlight of our trip, however, was Vakala Beach in Kerala. Ben and I thought the place was paradise and we stayed for three days, not wanting to leave. It is the one place in India that for tourist purposes I would actually return to see again and if you are here in the next 2 to 3 years, before the town becomes too commercialized, you must visit. The tiny town is located on a cliff overlooking a beach that’s about 2 miles long with golden sand and palm trees. You can get a hostel for $2 bucks a person, eat at the bamboo restaurant huts on the sand and watch the local fisherman row out to sea in their palm tree canoes each morning. In three days, we saw three indescribably beautiful sunsets over the Arabia Sea. Each evening, we had fresh tandoori (barbecued) seafood that was out of this world.

I wanted to travel to the Taj Mahal in Delhi before coming home but it’s not going to happen. We end meetings with only four days until I pull out. I definitely shall have to return. I want to go to Rajasthan, in the north where camels room the desert and palaces abound. I want to go to Nepal and see the Himalayas. Apparently, you can see Mt. Everest on infrequent days when the clouds clear. Mumbai is certainly not India.

On one of our corporate visits, we learned about marketing in rural India where over 70% of the population lives on subsistence agriculture. Generally, the people are distrustful of outsiders and often worship hundreds of local deities. Men vastly outnumber women because families don’t want to have to provide dowries for girls when they get married so they practice selective infanticide. It used to be in India that if a women’s husband died, she was burned in his funeral pyre. Now, she is merely expected to live in mourning for the rest of her life, even if she is a teenager when the husband dies. Personally, I think Sarees are among the most oppressive forms of dress ever invented. Needless to say, life for women can be really tough.

I’ve not only learned about India culture but also about how it is modernizing. Today, barely over half of all Indians have access to television—and less own a television, although ownership is skyrocketing. Ads must be made with the fact in mind that many people will only see them Black and White. The country’s road system is primitive at best. It’s not uncommon to take 8 or 10 hours to what would be the equivalent distance from Philadelphia to New York. Literacy rates are fairly abysmal too, with about 65 percent of Indian men and less than half of women being able to read. Over 17 major languages are spoken throughout the country but less than 3% of individuals speak English. I could go on about trucks that travel cross country without radial tires, meaning they have treads that peel off easily and so much else that would appear so beyond antiquated to us. One of the problems with rural India is that agriculture can’t compete internationally with US prices since we provide $160,000 subsidies to each of our farmers. The subsidies distort economic advantages and increase poverty in India.

This rural scene is contrasted by the IIM’s and IIT’s, institutes of Management or Technology located throughout the country that offer a heavily subsidized education equal to that found anywhere in the world. Most of the graduates flee to the US as soon as they can. Something like 20% of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and 10% of the engineers at NASA are from India. Just about all of the students at Welingkar where I attend have family or friends in the US. The wealthy may compose less than half a percent of the population but they number about 25 million in total, enough for many a multinational to consider the market a worthwhile target.

Even though India is a democracy, so entrenched is corruption that political progress is considered the most romantic of notions. Most people get along fine but there is a large undercurrent of religious Hindi and Islamic fundamentalist ideology that divides the country and inhibits rational conversation let alone progress. Like we are finding out in Iraq, often times people really do see the world differently and gun aren’t going to change those convictions although in calmer times, it is possible to hope that words and economic incentives might.

Of all the things that I have learned in India, what is most apparent is that both India and the world are changing incredibly fast. Foreign investment is flowing into the country in record amounts. A recent Goldman Sachs report estimated that by the year 2050, China is going to have the world’s largest economy. The US will be second and India will be 3rd. That would be quite an amazing and interesting world certainly, with many more people than today having a higher standard of living, even if we’ll still have more than our share of environmental and other challenges.

I really can’t say that I’ve been impressed with the academics here. One of our guest lecturers, however, stated that what most employers really want isn’t someone who knows their finance backwards and forwards but someone who can carry on a conversation about art or culture or know what bottle of wine to order at a nice restaurant in Spain on the banks of the Mediterranean to finish off a business deal. With an intentional effort to look on the upside, I simply going to say I’ve got enough stories to keep the chatter going and I’m going to start reading up on my wine.

Mumbai Express IX: Letters from a Semester in India

Dear Immediate Family and Everyone,

Things in Mumbai are going well. I can’t believe that I have only three weeks left here.

This week, I went to the 3rd theater production of my Penn friend Shivani, since coming to Mumbai. Each and every play has been great. Yesterday, she and her family had me over for a home cooked meal and then she took me out for coffee. I guess that’ll have to suffice for my Thanksgiving dinner.

As always I have lots to share and little time to write. We actually have had some school work lately, and nonetheless life outside the classroom monopolizes all my thinking. Like no place I have ever been, Mumbai is a giant organic living being the second you walk outside. You know from my descriptions that it’s a crowded, dirty, traffic jammed and hot enough that you can barely stay awake sometimes. It’s also vibrant and real. Certainly, the people I have met (as is normally is the case) in my classes, at the college and other where have been the highlight of my trip.

On this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for many things. I suspect I will be especially so when I arrive home to clean air and quiet streets and everything else that we take for granted. Life everywhere seems to have its rewards though, and I’m glad I’ve gotten to experience more than my fair share.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!
Mike

Mumbai Express VIII: Letters from a Semester in India

Hey Everyone,

I haven’t had any time to write since returning from my trip. We’ve had a ton a work. Besides, sometimes my computer is on the brink and other times I have to lend my computer to classmates who don’t even have one.

Some of the highlights of my trip to Southern India included:

Seeing the sun rise with 10,000 people at the southern tip town of Kanyikumari over the India Ocean

Going to Vakala Beach and watching 3 sunsets in 3 days over the Arabian Sea. I also swam one day in the ocean for 3 hours. It was heaven at about 78 degrees. For dinner each evening, we had barbecued fresh sea food of which the highlight was a Tandoori Tuna cooked immediately after being caught at a beach hut restaurant.

Riding an Elephant for a half hour until he became unhappy. You really don’t want to be near an elephant if he’s not happy so we ended our ride early and gave him some bananas

Going to one of my classmate’s wedding in Bangalore, where all the women wore beautiful sarees and the music was incredible.

Visiting a palace in Mysore, near Bangalore, home to a family that has ruled that particular area for most of the past 700 years. The palace put the places I have seen in Spain and elsewhere to shame with the incredible artwork and furnishings.

Classes are going O.K. I’m pretty sick of restaurant food. All in all, however, things are great. I’ll be home in month.

Write soon,
Mike

Mumbai Express VII: Letters from a Semester in India

Mumbai Express 7

Dear Family,

Hope all is well. I’m finished the costal leg of my trip in South India and am in Bangalore. This morning we attended a wedding that was beautiful. I’m going back to Mumbai on Thursday and will write. I have stories, lots of stories to share.

Belated Happy Halloween.

Talk soon,
Mike

Mumbai Express VI: Letters from a Semester in India

Dear Everyone,

India is treating me well after six full weeks. We’ve got a week left to go before we get a week off to travel. We’ve had classes or corporate visits for the past 15 days I think. It seems that most of the time, the day is over before it has even begun. Getting into a studying rhythm is just about impossible.

Officially, English is a national language. Communicating with our professors, however, suggests that we think in completely different languages. Last week, for instance, one professor told us that we had an hour quiz. After it was over, he told us that it was worth fifty percent of our grade. Ouch. Indian English tends to be rather flowery. Instead of saying ‘Good Afternoon,’ addressing groups they will say ‘a warm welcome to you all.’ Instead of signing letters with ‘Sincerely,’ they write things like ‘Very Truly Yours’ for closings that we would consider less than personal. Just about everyday, idioms bowl me over. The other day, a group of students told me that they were putting on a presentation to ‘felicitate’ guests at the college. What they meant was they were honoring the guests. In some way the vernacular is to British English like Ecuadorian Spanish is to proper Spanish, degenerate in the sense that people got things wrong from the beginning and it became right by virtue of habit. In America, if you don’t answer a true or false question on a test, since it’s not right, it is wrong. In India, if you leave a true or false question blank on a test, since it’s not wrong—and they use negative marking like on the SATs where right answers minus a portion of wrong answers—it’s almost right! I wish I had known that before I took the ‘quiz.’ The language also has a touch of Victorian gauche that sometimes makes me want to say, colonialism ended fifty years ago and it is time to throw off the yolk! How American of me.

Actually, what really gets to us IMBA students is the lack of organization. We could care less if classes are at all hours of the day. What we’d really like is a syllabus with some suggestions of what we should be studying—but alas, I forget, this is India. Nothing is written. Everything is oral. Nothing is concrete. Everything is a hazy fog. Ask what will be on the test and you are told, read the book (never mention the fact that it’s 1200 pages long and the test is tomorrow). On a side note, we have all but given up on our Japanese class. Although the opportunity to begin learning the language was incredible, being in class we got a peek in the horse’s mouth and it wasn’t pretty. We didn’t have a book and teaching consisted of a lecture of random Japanese words for 3 hours with no conversation or context. Now, I understand why when we explain that we are studying in Mumbai, fellow conversationalist explain that people (and by the look on their face you can tell they mean rational ones) go to study in the States. So much for rationality… In all seriousness, we’ve got a few good professors but the chaotic schedule makes it difficult to study and get as much out of class as we should. Then again, since we eat out 3 times a day, we often spend 3 or 4 hours a day in restaurants. When you throw in a trip to the gym here or there, it is no wonder there is never any time to study. Well I could give up dinner at the restaurant and order a bland mystery meal of sorts to my room, but can you blame me if I’d rather not?

Last week, we went to visit Siemens for five days. I will spare you the business gob-a-junk and share the more interesting part of the visit with you. Besides getting an overview of how a large company functions, the visit to Siemens showed some of the ways in which doing business in India is starkly different from what occurs in the United States. Each morning, we were picked up for the hour-long ride to the factory by the company bus along with the majority of Siemens’ employees. Since the factory is so massive, relatively isolated and the 2000 employees do not have independent means of transportation, breakfast and lunch are provided in the cafeteria each day on site. Furthermore, the cafeteria was segregated with engineers and managers eating in a slightly nicer seating area than that where the shop floor workers ate. While I would not be surprised if upper management at a factory in the US eats apart from most employees, I suspect the division between employees and managers at lunch would be in different cafeterias altogether so that disparities in treatment are not so obvious.

The head of Siemens’ Personnel Department, the forth most important person in Siemens’ India, explained that the company faced a constant balancing act between allowing its workers to have a decent quality of life and being competitive globally. One example of this is found in the company’s support of a cooperative that Siemens’ helped formed for ex-employees who where brought out in the late 1990s. Most of the formers works were 40 or 50 often with 25 years experience. They would have been unemployed for the rest of their lives without the cooperative. Some of the company’s electrical component manufacturing is now outsourced to this cooperative. We had the opportunity to visit the cooperative and it was incredible. About 30 guys squeezed into a little garage-sized sweatshop putting bolts on screws with fans overhead for comfort. Apparently, most places where outsourcing is done don’t even have fans so cooperative members consider themselves lucky. The cooperative has a formal accountant and last year made a $1,400 profit after paying for labor. Labor amounted to $40 OR $5O a month for each of the 90 member workers and we are talking compensation for working 10 hour days, six days a week. $1,400 may not sound like much but considering it represents almost 3’x the annual average earnings for most Indians, it is quite a substantial sum. Since dividends are taxed, i.e. the $1,400 profit can’t be distributed without giving a bunch to the government, the members of the cooperative decide on something they all want like backpacks and the cooperative buys every worker a backpack representing their portion of the profits.

Siemens finds it difficult supporting ex-workers in the cooperative who are lower paid than they used to be but at least have jobs and satisfying the requirement of the union who represent current workers, especially since the union knows that layoffs will be the result of the next investment in automated mass production technology and continued outsourcing. Nonetheless, the company has made an effort to ensure that the cooperative members have steady work for the foreseeable future.

One of the highlights of visiting Siemens in India was the opportunity to work on the shop floor for a couple of hours. We assembled electrical relay switches along side the workers, putting in screws by hand and winding wire and snapping together plastic parts. The work was not hard although I would imagine that it would quickly become monotonous. Most of the gentlemen on the assembly line had 15 or more years of experience repeatedly performing the same task. The semi-skilled shop-floor workers in the assembly line were all amazingly open and generous with their time teaching us numbskulls how to do their work. Walking past the different tables or assembly lines, I got a sense of how all those little fixtures at Home Depot and probably of how most of America is made in some greasy third world warehouse.

Undoubtedly, the highlight of my visit to Siemens was a visit to the computer classrooms at three schools that were set up by the employee union in order to allow children in extremely poor schools to learn how to use computers. The classrooms each had six or seven computers and thirty children. Teachers are paid through funds that the union raises in an effort to improve the communities in which they live. While I’m not sure how effective the computer classes ultimately are, the children were simply beautiful and delightful. Having foreigners visit the schools was a big deal. I used my 10 lines in Hindi to communicate with them and they gave us flowers. Visiting the children reminded me of Ecuador so much that even thinking about it makes me all misty eyed.

Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Mike

Mumbai Express V: Letters from a Semester in India

Dear Family,

Excitement for the past few weeks has consisted largely of the innumerable pleasures and surprises inherent to life in Mumbai rather than any singular adventures that inspire me to write. Classes are going well by Indian standards. Somehow twelve hours a week in class, half of which is taught by professions who present material haphazardly at best is considered progress towards getting an MBA. Sometimes my classmates and I are bored out of our minds and other times we are trying to complete 3 projects in a day. As long as we work out in the gym and get our daily allotment of ice cream, I am not complaining.

When I lived in Ecuador, the volunteers used to feel that common sense was pretty much an oxymoron since no one ever had any. Well, it appears that there is little common sense in India either. I frequently wish that I could impose order on India society. Even if I suffer from a cultural relativism of sorts, not having to struggle to survive everyday of my life, rampant individualism in Indian daily life makes the US seem like downright placid. Here, crossing the street is like playing frogger, but you only get one life to do it right. In the US, even if you are jaywalking, cars are going to give way for pedestrians. That doesn’t happen in India, not even when you have the right of way, ever.

Then there are the habits of waiters in the respectable restaurants we four MBA hostel students frequent that serve good food for better prices. Labor is so cheap at 40 cents a day at most that there is no reason for owners to skimp on service. There is always a surplus of busboys and waiters. If it looks like you have less than an inch of soda in your bottle, it is quickly whisked off before you can grab that last sip to wash it all down. Heaven forbid that one of the other busboys get that bottle and prove he is doing his job better. I end up just ordering another soda for 20 cents so I can’t say I’m that much worse for wear but still you can never let your guard down. In the US, the customer is almost always right. In India on the other hand, the customer is always a sucker. Taxi drivers and barbers get what they can for today without regard for pissing you off so that you never patronize them again.

Thanks to the constant assault on your senses, Mumbai is a really tiring place to live. Traffic jams are horrendous meaning that going anywhere other than school located a mile away from the hostel is a real production. Taking the train offers some respite from sitting still in traffic if you enjoy being treated like cattle. We have only taken the train three times and thankfully only once at rush hour. Basically, in order to board or leave the train it is necessary to get down in a three-point stance like you are going to try and sack the quarterback in football. Then you push into the crowd and use your elbows ferociously. I’ve heard that Italian and Japanese subways are murder. Well, here, so many people board the trains that they don’t even shut the doors and sparely-placed small wire circle fans suffice for air conditioning.

Looking out the door of the train, trying to catch a breeze, you see and smell the real Mumbai: acres of decrepit tenements and shacks with piles of garbage along the rails. (As a side note, I would like to report that although it took 3 weeks, we found the business district and Mumbai does have skyscrapers.) The city rarely overwhelms me except when the stench of excrement becomes too much—and then the immensity of the poverty and struggles really get to me. I could run a marathon in the States and still be cleaner than I am after a ten minute walk or 15 seconds on train. On the bright side, at least riding the train gets my adrenaline pumping. I can totally understand why life expectancy in Mumbai at 56 is a full six years shorter than India as a whole.

This past week, I went to see one of my friends from Penn’s play that she directed in Mumbai which was excellent. Between visiting the nightclub and going to a jazz bar last night, I have been able to see some of Bombay’s upper class art scene. It surely offers anything as good as what we have in the US as long as you pay western prices. For what it’s worth, although I did not try it, the jazz bar had a Philly Cheese steak on the menu. In other news, M. Night Shamylan’s donation to renovate houses in South Philly made the society news page of the India Times. Mayor Street was quoted saying Night’s generosity was wonderful etc. Of course, EPOP wasn’t mentioned since it’s so far away but I hope EPOP is getting some press in Philly.

While I don’t have a lot of good things to say about the Indian system of education but yesterday, we had a lecture on the intricacies of exporting from India that was quite fascinating. Venky, the coordinator of our program is part time and he is a merchant exporter full time. In the course of his exporting, he needs to have various documents and he always needs to be present in person to load goods into shipping containers. Thus, each Tuesday, Venky goes to the port and waits for the government shipping inspector to show up to get a certificate that says he is really exporting what he says he is exporting. Each Tuesday, he is scheduled to meet the inspector at 8am. Each Tuesday, the inspector shows up at lunchtime with a grunt that he gets off the street. The grunt is given a clipboard and told to watch the shipping container while he and Venky go to lunch. Venky has to buy lunch and laugh at the idiot inspector’s jokes or he doesn’t get the certificate he needs. Apparently, from the sound of it, Venky has been meeting this same inspector for years every Tuesday and he has no way of conducting business unless he goes along with the demands of the inspector. Since the container of the day is never actually inspected, Venky could smuggle all sorts of stuff if he wanted to although he never has. There is no doubt, however, that lots of other people do smuggle stuff. If Venky were to put up a fuss or say that he doesn’t want to waste so much time going to lunch or doesn’t pay for the lunch, the inspector would take two days to do the inspection on some pretenses and Venky would not be able to load the ship and send his goods on time.

Without more to write, I’m signing off to go find some more reasons why I should be thankful I live in Philly.

Mike

Mumbai Express IV: Letters from a Semester in India

Hey Everyone,

I just wanted to say hi. Hopefully, I’ll send another express note next week. We are living like kings are twelve dollars a day. On the one hand, I’m exceeding my budget–well, it not worth following. On the other hand, I’ve never had so many consecutive meals without feeling hungry. Each meal is big enough to hold us over for a while and still we continue to eat. 80% of the food is simply great. My favorite dishes are vegetable purees of sorts that you dip roti (home made thin pita bread) or naan (triangle pita bread) into. The fruit milkshakes are great too. I know it doesn’t sound fattening by everything is cooked in oil.

Not too much is going on. Last night I went to a play produced by Shivani, a friend from Penn, with four of my current Temple classmates. Mom, Shivani says hi. She is doing well. The play was excellent and it was performed for a crowd of about 35 in a small very upscale bar. The play is touring India and it is being put on in theaters if they can find the space. As it turns out, Shivani’s own play is being produced on November 7th. We will definitely be attending.

Today, I brought tickets for Kerala where we will be going during our break at the end of October. Definitely on the agenda is a trip to the town on the southern tip of India where the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and Bay of Begal meet with their different color waters. Supposedly it is one or perhaps the only place in the world where you can watch a sunrise and a moonset at the same time. Unfortunately, we will miss the whole moon by a week but it should still be awesome.

Today, I also went to McDonald’s. India’s the only country in the world where the traditional beef hamburgers are not served. Choices include veggie burgers and chicken patties. I had a Maharaja Mac–two layered chicken patties. It was excellent. I think I’d actually go to McKee Dees more often in the states if they offered the menu they have here. Next week, we will be spending five days visiting Siemens, a technology company, I believe and perhaps their factory as well although we shall see.

Be in touch soon,
Mike

Mumbai Express III: Letters from a Semester in India

Hey Family,

Good morning. It’s 4pm for me. I wrote some of this message today, some two days ago and some two weeks ago, but at times the server was slow and I couldn’t send my update. Thanks to those of you who replied to my last message.

Monday morning, I survived my first yoga class. It was in a large room with about 75 other people. We had four instructors that took turns leading us. Some of the stuff they did with their bodies was just amazing. Maybe I shall be somewhat more flexible by the time I come home. You’d probably seen most of the exercises we’ve did at some point, lots of stretching. I couldn’t fold my feet inside cross-legged although maybe with time I will be able. Also, it was rather painful to sit on my ankles with my toes touching in a kneel of sorts. We only had a rug on top of a concrete floor. I look forward to continuing yoga on Friday. We listened to music, meditated a bit and even said “Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm” for 30 seconds at a time–well long enough that I was plain out of breathe.

Otherwise, things are as humdrum as they can be in Mumbai. We get our daily 4 packs of cigarettes just by living here. It really isn’t that much worse that Quito but that at least in Quito, if you were inside, you were pretty okay. My room has two French doors that open out on to a balcony. Nothing is very airtight. Our neighborhood crows visit everyday, sit on our air conditioner, which is above the French doors, and poop on the floor of the balcony. If we come out on the balcony, which is on the side of the building, besides delightfully standing in the bird crap, we overlook a small but festering garbage dump that would probably kick up a wonderful odor if it was distinguishable from the surrounding air which is dusty, humid and contains enough carbon monoxide for a lifetime.

I’ll digress for a page or two to let you know about Mumbai-ites fondness for scams. When I arrived in Mumbai on September 2nd at 1 am, I requested to be taken to a hotel in the neighborhood where I would be living so that I could explore in the morning. Instead, the prepaid taxi dispatcher from the airport instead sent me to a hotel in the opposite direction from the neighborhood where I wanted to go. After several experiences including a wild rickshaw ride (think motorcycle with a roof and two seats on the back) and a visit to the Gate of India, which I describe below, I can only conclude that being taken in the wrong direction is but the beginning of a typical Mumbai scam.

On Sunday, September 5th, Kevin, Ben and I had no classes and so we decided to explore some of Mumbai’s most notable attractions. We left the hostel around 10 in the morning and took a taxi to Colaba, the main touristy neighborhood in the south of the city. Its most famous attractions are the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Gate of India. The hotel is actually named after a beautiful palace outside of Delhi, India’s capital city. Supposedly, the hotel was built by a rich and smart India businessman who wanted his fellow citizens to have a place to stay since he had been prohibited from using British Hotels. We pulled up in front of the Taj Mahal and immediately walked inside to see what one of the most famous hotels in the world was like.

Maybe when I am rich I will return and spend a night in one of the rooms priced at $325 a night overlooking the harbor. The hotel front room had nice leather furniture and lots of oriental rugs. The main feature that stood out for me, however, was the underlining musty odor, a combination of old tobacco and mildew mixed together.

After purchasing a map in the Taj’s Bookstore and snapping a couple of pictures with the turbaned doorman, we exited the hotel and walked across the street to the Gate of India. Looking back, I got my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal hotel. The building is actually a tall thin building about 30 or 40 stories high, with a rather ugly-ish 1960s style concrete façade. Its two redeeming features are triangle style India awnings above each of the hundreds of windows and a top floor that is bigger than the rest of the building, a crown of sorts offering at least a modicum of dignity which possesses little of the magnificence of the original palace located outside of Delhi.

(Correction: Although I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote this message two weeks ago, above I actually describe the horrendously bad 1960s addition to the Taj Mahal Hotel. The original Taj is a block-long 4 story-building next door, truly a work of art, which I will have to return to visit another day. ha ha… Can you imagine? I was looking at two building and didn’t even know which was the original Taj Mahal hotel–but it’s not as if the place has a sign or anything. My gut feeling about the building was accurate at the very least. The addition is ugly!)

The Gate of India is a two or three story arch next to the waterfront. On the landside of the arch thru which you can see the ocean, there is a large semicircle patio. Boats, ferries in particular, are gathered along a dock area on the ocean side and for several hundred feet on either side. Immediately as we step into the vicinity of the arch we are surrounded by the leeches of the tourist trade, men selling post cards for 5 times what they’re worth and ferry rides. I was beseeched by a Hindu priest to let him pray over and paint me. Then there are little girls and young women handing out bracelets of flowers and begging for money. We ignore all of the commotion and take some pictures of the ferries while crowds of people wait in line to board or gaze at the ocean.

Eventually, we split up a bit. Kevin talks to a guy selling post cards. A Hindu priest walks up to me and starts tying a red and yellow bracelet around my risk and was on the verge of painting a dot on my forehead when another leech told him to get away from me since I was a nonbeliever. Ben gets a beautiful flower bracelet given to him by a young woman about 4 and half feet tall. We all eventually disengage ourselves and walk around the arch. The girl who gave Ben the flower bracelet walks up and starts engaging me in conversation with minimal English. She says, “No business today, no money” but says she doesn’t want any money for her flowers. I give her 3 rupees, about 6 cents, figuring she’s probably just not asking outright for money. Besides, she let me take her picture. Yet, she doesn’t leave, she says that she doesn’t want money; she only wants me to buy milk for her little sister at the store down the street. Well, I figure, I’d rather buy someone food or a drink than give them money and so I tell Kevin and Ben that I want to buy milk for the girl and we walk down the street.

Unfortunately, the store is closed. The girl, however, says that the street vendor has milk. We walk over to a stall of antiques and the vendor has a can of milk in a bag. It is apparently baby formula and costs 300 rupees. I’m aghast, that’s six dollars, nothing like I was planning on spending—it was a 3rd of my budget for the day. The vendor also offers a smaller can of baby formula for 200 rupees. Meanwhile, the girl who told me she was 20 although she looked like she was 10 years old, beseechers me to purchase the milk and give it to her for her baby sister. I dug out 200 rupees and Ben dug out 100 and we purchased the larger canister of baby formula. Laska, the girl thanked us sincerely and we continued on our way. Now, that I’m back at the hostel recalling my day, I can’t help but wondered if I was taken advantage of or not. I was simply stunned at the time at the elaborate length Laska want to put us in a position to purchase milk for her sister and could only think of the numerous horror stories I have heard of mothers who could not afford formula. Well, in retrospect what was a $4 dollar contribution for a little piece of mind, even if I was taken for a ride?

Soon after writing this particular anecdote, I talked to several people that ensured me my little donation was definitely a scam. To my knowledge, I’ve been scammed four times in all thus far for a total of $15. Well, I know my descriptions probably seem drastic but I’m really can’t say I am adversely affected.

I doubt I shall have anything as interesting as mass religious processions or scams to report in the near future as school consumes more and more time. Classes are scheduled in what can only be called a haphazard fashion, postponed and cancelled on a whim. I can’t complain, however, as it seems Welingkar, at Temple’s behest is doing its best to provide us with an overall quality opportunity. In what I can only say is a rather mind boggling move, introductory lessons in Japanese and Hindu have been added to our schedule this week. For those of you who don’t know, I’m going to Japan for a month next summer. I don’t expect to make much progress but I am sure both languages are fascinating.

Mom, you will be happy to know that there are 4 ice cream stores within a block of my school. I had ice cream 3 times the other day and think that I have had some just about everyday for the last five days. Their favorite flavor is butterscotch for which I have a newfound appreciation. While the servings are not American size, at prices ranging from 30 to 70 cents, l I don’t feel bad about splurging. Last night, we found a real America style coffee shop where I got a chocolate sundae with a fudge cake for $1. Besides eating ice cream, much of India food is fried–and I have tried a different dish at just about every meal. There is a slight chance that I will pass my all weight by the time I come home.

All for now,
Mike

Mumbai Express II: Letters from a Semester in India

Dear Family

Although almost every moment in India is spectacular because of how different it is from the West, during the past two days I have had two particularly experiences that I suspect are unforgettable.

On Sunday afternoon, Kevin, Ben and I went to see the Haji Ali Mosque located on a small rocky island off the cost of Bombay in the Arabian Sea. Walking out to the mosque is a rather remarkable experience since hundreds of Mumbai Muslims are walking to the mosque or returning along the pathway and you are shoulder to shoulder, twenty abreast in each direction as you traverse the walkway. A dozen vendors are set up hawking food and religious artifacts for the first hundred feet.

Beggars dot the rest of way. The mosque is small, white, about the size of one of our house’s floor plan and almost two hundred years old. Overall it’s in rather deplorable conditions, clearly ravaged by the sea air although its triangle turrets lend it a touch of elegance. The walkway out to the mosque is about half a mile long, twenty feet wide and is level concrete on top of huge rocks. At high tide, the path to the mosque is covered, which means that the water level must rise by a good ten to fifteen feet. As you walk out, if you look back you can see the curve of the Mumbai shoreline. Since we went at nightfall, we could see the lights of the city stretched in either direction, nothing like the skyline of a US city since there were no clusters of skyscrapers nearby but still beautiful.

Walking back to the shore was a sobering experience. Young and old, men and women, healthy and disabled and deformed beggars were seated about every five feet on our left. We passed at least 150 beggars. Many stacked their day’s collection nearly in coin piles. Some even seemed to have had astonishingly good days, receiving perhaps four to five hundred rupees, about 9 or 10 dollars. I doubt there are too many prime begging spots in the city that would top those situated by Muslims after they have prayed. One of the beliefs of Islam is that it is generally good to give to beggars although I do not know the specifics.

In truth, poverty permeates every area of Mumbai that I have visited. Around the corner from our hostel, each evening as we return from our excellent meal that cost 5 dollars, about twenty homeless people have bedded down in front of the corner store businesses after they have closed down for the night. Some have a blanket that they lay on. Others just sprawl, children huddled against their mothers on the dusty broken tiles that pass for pavement. I suspect that except in the very best of neighborhoods, it is impossible to walk a couple of blocks without encountering homeless individuals sleeping out in the open. Frequently during the day, you see individuals collapsed sleeping not in some nook but next to a street vendor or in the public right of way on the pavement. I suppose that is because they’d be chased off the pavement in front of individual properties. Despite the innumerable beggars, I am more surprised by how few people ask for anything. Each evening some of the homeless individuals who we pass, just open their eyes and stare up at us without saying anything.

We arrived in Mumbai in good time to observe the city’s most important holiday. For the past ten days, Mumbai Hindu population has celebrated what I can very inadequately describe as the return of Ganesh to the sea. Ganesh is a god of wisdom and good luck and is represented as a man with an Elephant’s head. The holiday is thousands of years old but its current incarnation is recent. In the 1940s, when India was fighting (nonviolently of course) to free itself from the British things were pretty touché after 20,000 Indians were massacred. The British prohibited social and political gatherings. Gandhi, or some other leader, decided that the India resistance would not become violent. Instead, they planned a religious gathering to show their force.

For each of the past ten days, groups of 20 to 100 people have appeared on the street re-enacting the original protest with a representation of Ganesh made of clay and painted beautifully that they have purchased on a cart or flatbed truck. The Ganesh statue is adorned with flowers and incense burns in front of the statue. The group, lead by a small troupe of impromptu musicians with pans and kettledrums walk singing and setting off small noisemaker firecrackers filled with red powder. Each evening, we can hear the drums beating as groups march to the sea to immerse Ganesh.

Yesterday was the culmination of the holiday, a reenactment of the process of expelling the British and claiming glory and self determination for a cause all Indians could agree was just. Hundreds of thousands or more probably, millions of Mumbai residents lined the streets to see the Ganesh groups march to the sea. By two o’clock, there was little traffic on the roads as pedestrians took over the city. The National Guard came out to ensure the procession stays organized. Kevin, Ben, Prashant and I joined the procession that was seemingly never ending. We were as much a part of the spectacle as any Ganesh group. People waived to us and asked Kevin to take their picture with his digital camera. They threw red and blue powder at us from the trucks, probably to hit the Americans, but at the very least they ensured that we had the same religious markings as everyone else on the route.

After walking for an hour, we came to Shivaji beach. We arrived at the early hour of about 7pm before it was completely dark to the smallest of Mumbai’s five beaches. The streets along the way were packed but the beach was literally a sea of humanity. It was fifty-feet wide and perhaps three miles long and contained nothing short of 100,000 people. And the other beaches have even more massive gatherings! You could see the litter and garbage from the city lining the tidal line in between the masses of legs. This was no sanitized beached. Heck, if you thought about it too much before eventually becoming numb, the stench of sewage from the sea was overpowering. On arrival many people walked straight into the sea. Those who were in groups took their Ganesh statues ranging in size from 1 to 10 feet and carried them on to the beach. They did some rituals and then walked out into the bay (even a hundred feet from shore the water was only five feet deep) carrying their Ganeshes before dropping them in the water. The larger Ganesh statutes, those over four feet tall, were walked out to wooden boats to be brought farther out to sea. We stuck around until a few were taken several hundred feet from shore and tilted into the sea. Returning on foot to the hostel, the flatbeds full of Ganesh trailed ahead of us for at least a couple miles. The noise and fireworks raged throughout the city until 3am. The whole experience was so beautiful and so democratic. No priest or holy men could be seen anywhere. People know the traditional songs by heart and they leave home with their Ganeshes whenever they feel like it. In the streets they are having fun and enjoying the festive atmosphere. I can imagine that kids wait all year to stay up late dancing their way to the beach to swim in the sea.

Despite what it may seem, life in Mumbai is pretty tranquil and we are feeling very much at home. Mom, if you could print a copy for Grandmom, that’d be great.

Until next time,
Mike

Mumbai Express I: Letters from a Semester in India

Dear Family,

Things happen much quicker than I can write which is way I am very behind in being the family scribe from afar. Bombay is so incredible and so indescribable that I don’t know where to begin.

Dad:

The Pontiac is better than any of the 20 taxies I have yet ridden. Christopher Hamilton (our backdoor neighbor to whom we gave the car) would be the king of the streets in Bombay. The taxies are numerous, constituting the better part of 50% of the vehicle fleet on the average street. They are licensed to fit five people and fit 2 Americans and I would say they are kind of like glorified go carts built out of tin cans (I exaggerate only slightly). From my investigations, it appears that an Indian manufacturer purchased the dies from Fiat—my best guess is that the model originally appeared in the 1950s. Some taxies, which look the same to my eyes, are Latas (the crappiest cars ever made) from Russia. The wheels are maybe a foot in diameter including everything. Driving here is like being a passenger at the Indy 500, only there are no rules, lanes are meaningless and horns are for use every 10 feet to tell the other people on the road to move out of the way quickly. Oh, taxies don’t have seatbelts or rearview mirrors either. The main private cars I have seen on the road are small Hyundai which dominate the market. I have yet to see an American car or anything resembling a SUV. Buses are common but not everywhere like in Quito. Getting from school to the hostel is a great adventure since there are no street names and every road has the same gray moldy concrete and stucco buildings that all look the same on each side. It’s ghetto Quito style but with a damp decaying smell of the once upon a time jungle and underlying garbage which is present everywhere.

Mom:

I’m taking all my medicine. I have never felt safer in any city I have traveled to. I walk around with my mini-disc recorder and don’t every feel like anyone is going to grab it out of my hand. I have been successfully hustled twice so far and will write more on that later but it seems that all people really do here is try to con you out of your money and they think if they’ve conned you out of five dollars they’ve ruined your day. Five dollars for a good story; I’d pay that any day! My hostel is very comfortable. Kevin Zvargulis from Jenkintown and I are sharing a room. We have an air conditioner, a 36-inch TV, a beer frig and will have an internet connection within the week. The hostel was actually used as the main university campus until last year. It is reminiscent of the language schools that dot South America where you can pay $5 for an hour of Spanish lessons. The neighborhood where the hostel is located is an average middle class Indian neighborhood, meaning it’s kind of scummy. Actually, I have yet to see a neighborhood that is not scummy. We have two kinds of eateries around our place. Two five star hotel sort of places where you can have 3 courses for about $5 or there is the take your pick of the barely-stuff-it-down variety watering holes for less than 50 cents a meal. We’ve been eating breakfast at the hole in the walls (omelet sandwiches hit the spot) and had mostly fine dining every evening around 8pm at the 5 spots.

Katherine:

The school’s new campus is very nice reflecting the recent investment of 5-7 million dollars. Little Sis, you will be happy to know that I now understand the agony of wearing a uniform. I hate it. We’ve have managed to weasel out of wearing a tie but must have a dress shirt and dress pants on everyday. Us Americans are planning to cause a scandal by wearing polo shirts on Monday, but I’m afraid that we might chicken out. Apparently, such rebellion would not go well with the fashion Nazi and they’ve don’t know what to make of us independent Americans. As students of the approximately 300-student university, we are also subject to mandatory yoga classes. Okay, I can handle that—but why do they have to be on Mondays and Fridays at 8:30 am in the morning and then I’m supposed to go straight to class. What about a shower? What if we have no classes otherwise on Friday? When we ask why, they tell us that in India people don’t ask way, they say why not? It gets worse. We have classes on weekends!!! Horrors of horrors, I’m beyond scarred by this treatment, surely worse than any American kid has ever received.

Everyone:

On a few other interesting notes, I can’t say that India is quite as cheap as I expected it to be. Well, it’s hard to resist when if you go wild on $15 a day, you get two five star meals of incredible Masala or Afghani Chicken, Uppata Tomato or Uldi. I can get a Polyester suit tailored to me for $40 and a nice suit for $100. A nice dress shirt is $10 and pants are $15. The three classes I have had thus far are excellent with good professors. I will have about 10-13 days off starting October 21st. One of my India classmates in getting married on November 2nd and we will probably go to his wedding in Bangalore. It does look like I will confine my travels to India during my stay here.

I will write soon,
Mike