It has been exactly a fortnight since I arrived in the city of bollywood and the finance capital of India from the city of gardens. I felt that I should have changed the title of my blog to everything under cloud.The first feeling that we get after seeing the city is a feeling of overwhelming inadequacy, the city will overwhelm with its sheer size and population...can we cope with the city that is so huge and brimming with people.
The city is very huge and it is bustling with people and what more it feels like that you have arrived in a different timezone as it is the western most part of India and the Sun never sets down until 7:30 in the evening. Normally I used to sleep by 10 in the night, but in Mumbai my sleeping habits have taken a beating. I could not get up b'fore 7 in the morning and cannot sleep before 11 in the night.
The wonderful thing that I have observed is that the city has a vibrant night life unlike Bangalore which closes shop by 10 PM, here the life starts at 10 PM. On the first day I arrived at airport near by 11:30 PM, even then there is huge traffic on road and there are usual traffic jams....Oh! GOD take a break it is 12 at night.
The people are friendly especially when you want to travel on locals and you knew nothing about where to get in or where to get out. The locals are the lifeline of Mumbai and there is an interesting statistic about Mumbai locals... every day 70 lakh Mumbaikars travel in the loacals which is exactly half the total passenger capacity of Indian Railways in a day. One more sad fact is that on an average 10 people are killed everyday due to these locals...which is more than any kind of deaths due to terrorist activities if taken cumulatively.
Media says that it is that never say die Mumbai spirit that drives people to get back to normal even after deadly terrorist attacks. The people are not brave or courageous, they are afraid about where they would get money to lead their lives. This fear is driving them on.But the fact is that the people have to get on with their life even if there is rain or terrorists. If they do not go to work then they will have to starve to death in this giant metropolis. The vagaries of life makes a mumbaikar gets going, if given a choice he/she would have abstained from travelling but sadly there is no choice in the life here.
Since June 11 it has been raining heavily in Mumbai, for a guy like me it is a living hell..wading through water that is knee high and even then peole brave these and get to work. The rain was so incessant that I wondered whether this rain will ever ever stop. This heavy population and rain has got several self made systems in place.
People carry an umbrella daily, even if it is raining they will wait in a queue for the bus/auto. These are the systems which prevent life in Mumbai from descending into chaos which it easily could. The taxi and auto drivers make an honest living and they take the fare by meter which is seldom the case in Bangalore/Hyderabad.
Mumbai is the costliest city that I have been in ....I thought Bangalore as being costly..by coming to Mumbai, one should up their benchmark of what costly is....It is the city where we see only sedans and luxury cars on roads but we also see lot of poverty where 20% of the population sleep on footpath.
This is a city of contradictions..will throw more light on the contradictions in Mumbai in the next post.. :)
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