From Hong Kong I took a flight aboard Kingfisher Airlines to a heretofore brand new country, India and it's economic capital, Mumbai, to see Komal. There's quite a bit of confusion over the name of the city, which is officially Mumbai now but used to be Bombay. The switch in its English name happened in 1995. While the different names have their own political implications which I know little about, Komal and her friends call it Bombay, and so I call it that too. Depending on your definition of a city, Bombay is as high as the 2nd most populous city in the world. Without going into semantics, Bombay seemed to me to be at the same level of immense urban sprawl and density as Beijing and Shanghai and a level above New York and Hong Kong. The city is very much a coastal city, shaped like a sharp peninsula extending into the Arabian Sea. Downtown Bombay is located towards the point of the peninsula and the suburbs are located more inland.
I had a little adventure getting my Indian Visa. I went to the Consulate in Beijing about a week and a half before I was to leave. After initially going to the Embassy by mistake, then waiting for half an hour in a small room and then dealing with Chinese paperwork with the Consulate workers (all Chinese), I was finally told that they'd process everything in 10 days. I did some quick math and realized that the 10 day mark would be the Friday before my Sunday flight. If they were even a day late, I would not have my Visa, or more importantly, the US Passport that would go with it. After the panic subsided, I found out the phone number for the Indian consulate in Hong Kong, where I would be spending 3 days, and called them to see how quickly they could process a visa. They said that if I had a HK ID, they could process it in a day or two. Luckily I did have the ID, whew! I was able to bolt from the Beijing consulate.
The Hong Kong consulate visit was very painless. The person before me was an Indian man who spoke fluent Cantonese, which is always cool. So before I knew it I was on a six hour plane ride to India. Though it might not be intuitive, Hong Kong to Mumbai is further away than New York to LA. This plane ride was my first indication that I was journeying to a strange new land. The full airliner had maybe 3 Chinese people, maybe 3 white people. The rest of the airplane was all Indian. We all had television monitors in front of us with a nice selection of Bollywood and Hollywood. The woman next to me seemed to be watching an awesome Bollywood film, but every single time I picked a Bollywood film, it sucked. I ended up watching Chariots of Fire, which also did not live up to the hype generated by its theme song. Walking to the bathroom, I noticed that nearly every single monitor was tuned into Bollywood - just one was bucking the trend, showing Friends.
I asked the woman next to me how she enjoyed Hong Kong. She told me that it was nice, but very dry. "I beg you pardon?" I couldn't believe her. Hong Kong was the most humid place I
have ever been - it makes DC seem drier than a medieval history lecture. Then I stepped out of the plane, got hit by a tidal wave of humidity, and I figured out what she meant. It's hard to put into words the intensity of Bombay's marshlike air. Come to think of it, I've never been in a marsh, but I imagine one feels a little like Bombay. It wasn't quite a sauna but you could definitely feel the air.
Then I got my bags and went through immigration and without a cell phone, walked out of the airport hoping there'd be someone waiting for me. Luckily Komal was, with a driver, and we left for her father's apartment in Malabar Hill. Now although I did not see an elephant during the weekend, I do realize that there is an elephant in the room. With full regard to that, I need to say that my relationship with Komal officially ended during that car ride from the airport, and yes it did suck. I had had the whole summer to deal with this so it wasn't as difficult, but it certainly led to one of the most unusual weekends I think I will ever experience. For the first time in a long time, I was legitimately scared. I was in a very large city in a very foreign land around which I did not know how to navigate. But the worst part was that the uncertainty in my physical environment was matched by the uncertainty in my personal life and I would not wish that combination upon anybody.
However I was in a cool foreign city with a good friend and it was a pretty special opportunity. Komal's apartment was incredible, honestly the most amazing apartment I had ever been in, and staffed with several residing workers who didn't speak any English. A full two stories of marble floor overlooking the beach, the apartment was fit for a real estate mogul. Early the next morning though, Komal had work and I was left alone in the most foreign of homes. Though I was very comfortable in this mini palace, armed with the Hindi words for food and water if I needed sustenance, I constantly felt uncomfortable. I felt that as I was in such a different place I should go out and explore, but my lack of phone, language skills and familiarity with the surroundings made this a bigger difficulty than ever before. It was one thing to lodge in a hostel and be given free reign but I was staying in an apartment with police officers continually camped outside and I couldn't exactly leave and come back whenever I wanted. So I took a quick walk along the beach, which was pleasant but extremely dirty, and waited until Komal's driver came. By now used to communicating without full verbal fluency, I got the point across that I wanted to see the
Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal, and so he dropped me o
ff there and presumably went to find parking nearby. Again for all I knew I could have been stranded there with only a faint idea of how to get back, but I proceeded to walk around and admire some of the finest sites that Bombay had to offer. The Gateway is a large stone arch structure built to welcome Queen Mary and King George's visit to the city. It does impressively stand out on the water and I'm sure the sight is rather spectacular coming at the end of a long sea storage. I managed to find some Taiwanese businessmen and asked them to take a picture of me in front of the arch.
I found the neighboring Taj Mahal Palace & Tower (hotel named after the more famous
mausoleum in Agra) even more impressive. The Taj was probably the most iconic building to get hit by the 2008 terrorist attacks, and the image of the structure burning is still engrained in my mind. I think the building is beautiful with Indian-style minarets and classical-looking stone structure. I'm no expert on Indian architecture but I just thought that that building fit in so well there as a symbol of Indian grandeur. The Palace didn't actually completely reopen until about two weeks after I visited.
I got beset by a beggar while staring at the Taj who asked me to buy milk for her starving baby. I had never quite seen this particular approach but she was so stubborn that I considered just doing it for her. Then she said come walk with me and started walking towards lesser crowded places. I have no idea what her true intentions were but red alerts blared in my head and I stood firm, tossed her 60 rupees and ran for my driver.
That night out one of Komal's friend's drivers was on duty so he was able to shuttle us around to different spots. I'm not sure how many peoples' nights outs revolve around personal drivers but it was very much the norm here. We first went to a country club where I sampled the
legendary Indian Chinese food. I had heard glowing reviews from Indian people about the Chinese cuisine brewed within their borders, but having just come from the Chinese capital and not seeing a single Chinese person I was skeptical. Nonetheless I was very much surprised - the dumplings there were particularly good. I also sampled an Indian Coca-Cola knockoff (later bought by the Coca-Cola company) called Thums Up. I noticed there was no B, which apparently was news to Komal and one of her friends. We then went to a slick new club which apparently had a cover charge of like 3000 Rupees which is an absurd $66. Maybe I have that number wrong but it was definitely the steepest cover I had ever seen outside of New Year's Eve. However, one of Komal's friends who knew the club owner was having her birthday there and thus we entered for free so yeah pretty sweet deal. Believe it or not, people dance in the clubs there like they do in Bollywood movies.
That may or may not be true but you should at least pass my little tidbit along to other people.
Okay so that was fun. Anyways just about nobody wears short sleeves in Bombay, ever, and certainly not at a nightclub. So despite the earth-shattering humidity, I manned up and wore a nice button-down long sleeve and the one pair of jeans that I had brought to China, though I'm the kind of guy who prefers comfort over style and always wore shorts into Vic's. I write this now with an awareness that this is much ado about nothing, but I think that in the American culture in which I was raised, we are taught to be afraid of the elements. We blast AC during the summer and heating during the winter, and complain loudly whenever we have to do without them. But of course large portions of the globe live their entire lives in weather either hotter or colder than we ever experience and consider it simply the norm. At the least, I didn't hear a whole lot of weather complaints from locals in Beijing or Bombay.
Over the rest of the weekend, I experienced a minor monsoon (felt like a Noreaster), saw a Bollywood film to get in the spirit, went shopping for some fine Indian cotton, entered Victoria Terminus aka Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, aka the train station at the end of Slumdog Millionaire where Jamal meets Latika. The train station was actually a tremendous experience besides for the cinematic experience (I wasn't even sure that it was the station from the film while I visited). First, its exterior, designed in Victorian Gothic style but with decidedly South Asian elements, was an amazing display of architecture. But the interior held more stories than the glorified facade. I had used the train stations in Beijing this summer and nothing stateside had prepared me for those crowds, but that paled in comparison to the bustle ongoing at VT on that rainy day. The outside was a zoo of stubby black cabs, and the inside was a jumble of sales transactions, hurrying passengers, departing trains, trilingual announcements and security, for this was the most deadly location for the 2008 attacks. Seeing the crush of humanity in person, it is actually painful to imagine the effects of a gunmen entering and opening fire. Mumbai apparently doesn't or didn't have a fully operational metro system, and intracity transit (as well as intercity) was mostly done with the suburban rail system. That was how Anish moved around from his spot up north in Santacruz near the airport into the downtown. I could wax on and on about my thoughts inside the station, and indeed I would need to spend more time in Bombay to fully understand them. But perhaps the most significant to me was that all the cars were gender segregated. Indian society is run with a moral mandate, and in addition to a strict no kissing in public, men and women are only allowed in separate cars. The station was also very filthy - the monsoons seemed to only spread the city's dirt around rather than the cleanse it.
What I heard from Anish's experience was also pretty incredible. A second generation English citizen of Gujarati descent, Anish was in suburban Mumbai for the year doing Teach for India, which is exactly like Teach for America except that while America has drastic educational deficiencies for a first world country, India has drastic educational deficiencies period. While many American high schools have awful dropout rates, more than 1 in 3 children in India drop out before the FIFTH GRADE. So yeah I think it's safe to say it's a completely different game. Plus though I think Anish teaches in English and doesn't speak much Hindi, all the kids are still learning the language. Oh and the pay is even worse. Suffice to say it was very interesting meeting up with him, particularly since I found his experience as a British-Indian, who spoke Gujarati and now learning Hindi, living and working in his ancestral homeland's largest city very analogous to my experience in China.
Indeed, as my experiences with large world cities in developing countries is very limited, I could not help but to conceptualize Bombay through my understanding of Beijing. Both gigantic Asian world cities of 18 million plus have migrants from all over the country and investment from all over the world. Each city has their impressive skyscrapers, each city has their difficult slum conditions and both definitely face overcrowding and urban sprawl dilemmas. Both countries have booming economies and over a billion people, and face similar social, energy and political issues accordingly. Also in both cities I had great meals. However, differences in foreign domination, internal political movements, religious movements and even climate have molded the two cities and countries into perhaps fundamentally different places. Even in three days, I experienced some of these differences. I would like to preface that I'm not sure how well Bombay can act as a microcosm for greater India, or even Beijing for China, but I do believe that both cities in some way contain a large portion of their nation's cultural heart.
Anyone who knows me well knows how much I like diversity. On this measure, I loved Bombay. Coming from Beijing, where my even slightly ambiguous racial features had occasionally drawn attention, I fully expected to stand out like a sore thumb among the considerably darker Bombay populace. Not even slightly true. There was not a single instance where I thought anybody gave me an unusual glance, questioning why I was in their land. You may think to yourself, "I'd hope not! I'd hope people don't act like that in a large cosmopolitan city." But still, people in Beijing who have surely seen members of every nation still occasionally gawk at the tall Westerner or ask the African-American to pose for a photograph. I bet every single white or black American who has ever spent a week in China has a story like this. However, I don't know whether they have those stories in India. What led to Bombay's more casual acceptance of foreigners in its midst? The answer is likely twofold. First, while China closed its doors to outsiders for so long, India has historically had more foreign contact including nearly continuous foreign influence from the Persians to the British. Second, the country itself is extremely diverse. Sure China has over 50 minority groups, but the country is still about 92% Han Chinese, and the great Eastern cities like Beijing and Shanghai even more Han. Meanwhile, India does not even classify its population among racial lines. South Asians seem to have a different conception of race. In the United States, would pan-ethnically self-identify as "brown" in a way that Koreans, Japanese and Chinese would never self-identify as "yellow." Even further, many Indians are decidedly "not brown." Many people were clear to point out to me that I could conceivably have been from the northeast of the country where the inhabitants have more East Asian features. Did you know that Burma was once a part of British India and could have been part of the modern state? This great diversity is very much manifested in modern day Bombay.
As a result, demographics in India are more commonly drawn by language, where there is clearly no majority. While Hindi is perhaps a lingua franca in Northern India and is spread greatly by its use in Bollywood films, the South largely speak completely unrelated Dravidian languages. Other related Indo-Aryan languages like Marathi and Gujarati are spoken by large chunks of people. I don't know too much about this language family, but I think perhaps that these languages are perhaps about as related as Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese and the Chinese dialects are. Though there is a lot of differences between these "dialects," it is taught in China that they are all part of the Chinese language. In India, there is no such conception of an "Indian" language. Even the language situation in Bombay confused me. Set in Maharashtra, the area traditionally spoke Marathi. However it seems that monolingual Marathi speakers are very much the exception now, "mostly fishermen," one of Komal's friends told me. Hindi seemed to be the language on the streets and in the media. However, certainly within Komal's circle of friends, English was far and away the most spoken language. In fact, one of her friends was an aspiring actor and taking "accent classes." When I asked him what was wrong with his accent, for his English seemed very good, he admitted that his Hindi was not where it should be and that he had a Hindi coach. Here I drew parallels to my knowledge of Hong Kong, where a similar colonial heritage has pushed English to its high status as the white collar and upper class language. However I don't think the situation is as similar as it would appear. In Hong Kong, many local kids who go to international school will speak English with an American or British accent and their international classmates will likely speak no Cantonese. Other locals may speak less fluent English and a large portion of the poor working class will speak little to no English. You either speak "mainstream" English, or you speak bad English. Hong Kong doesn't entirely have its own brand of English like Indian English. I believe the reason here is that in Hong Kong, English is used to communicate with the city's many Westerners, but communication with other Chinese will be done in Cantonese or Mandarin. In India, English is more than any other language the country's lingua franca, so there is plenty of communication with other Indians done in English. As a result, many street beggars came to me begging in English, which I hadn't heard in either Beijing or Hong Kong.
Decades of very different political rule has surely left other legacies upon China and India. I didn't see any of the slums in Bombay, but I still have the impression that the gap between the rich and poor is more pronounced in India than in China. I also definitely felt less safe in some parts of Bombay that I really ever have; for all its problems, Beijing is a surprisingly safe city.
Religious is perhaps the aspect of greatest divergence between China and India. It would be an oversimplification to say that organized religion had no effect on modern Chinese life, but compared to India that's almost a fair statement. The sheer number and visibility of religious groups in Bombay really struck me. When I was alone with Komal's driver, the few English words he knew were proper names common to Hindi and English. Thus he would point out temples to me: "Jain" as we drove past an unremarkable grey structure, "Farsi" as we glimpsed a somewhat hidden temple. Whether Sikh or Hindu or Muslim, citizens openly announced their religious beliefs with their clothing. Komal took me to a Hindu temple on my last day, possibly my strangest experience there. First she told me, "we'll have to take off our shoes, and they might get stolen." Luckily we found and paid someone to hold them for us. Then we walked up a densely populated hill, up curving stone steps that suddenly turned into old stone rooms filled with carved sculptures of different deities, ringing bells, chanting people in prayer, and flowers milk and dyes being poured on the sculptures in tribute. It was a lot to take in at one moment, and while I thought people would stare me out as a non-believer, nobody seemed to notice me. There was no exterior of the temple to speak of, for it seemed to have simply been built into the hill and the surrounding buildings. There were quiet pilgrims, loud adorers and some people in the corner who seemed to be studying texts. The scene was quite a lot to take in all at once.
Though it didn't seem like it at the time, I did and learned a lot in that short weekend. On Sunday I bought more souvenirs, including a keychain with my name in English and Devanagari, ate special Indian pizza with local spices (really delicious), natural ice cream, visited the Hindu temple and walked along the beach. It certainly was not nearly long enough to get any real grasp of what India was like and if I ever do return, I will make sure to stay at least a month. I think I could easily say that was the strangest or most interesting weekend of my life, but that didn't even begin to match the return trip...
