It's 7.30 in the evening and I walk out of my office in the center of Bombay to search for a taxi. I am carrying my briefcase in one hand and a huge green and yellow ABN AMRO umbrella in the other, to protect against the pounding rain. I need protection from the rain but am petrified that the tip of the umbrella will as a conductor for the lightning that flashes across the dark monsoon sky.
Outside the office compound there are tens of people trying to hail a taxi, peering into the small decrepit Fiat taxis, worker bee hookers on a strip, hoping to attract the driver's favor and win a ride home. I finally start walking in the direction of South Bombay, prepared that I may have to walk the full ten kilometers until I reach the Taj Hotel, where my family is holed up. Finally, after walking for a kilometer, with cars whizzing past and horns blaring incessantly, I find a taxi willing to go South. I get in and sink back into the seats. Fumes, a blend of petrol, garbage and humidity, waft in, the noise is deafening. The ride to Colaba takes another hour. Nothing could be farther from the life we left behind in Chicago's Lincoln Park than this. This will be home for the next several years but it will take a long time for it to feel like it. I'm cycling along Marine Drive on a beautiful Sunday morning with Mira, our eldest daughter. It's 8.30 a.m., the air is still clean and we look out over the Arabian Sea on our right and the art deco buildings that line Marine Drive on our left. We're on the last stretch of our ride heading home in a city that has become home.
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Our Christmas tree, made from the finest polymers that China has to offer, stands tall and proud, never shedding a needle, never asking for a drop of water. Christmas was low key, in keeping with the spirit of sobriety, but intimate. We cherish our time together, knowing that less than a year from now Mira will be off to university.
Sitting at the Bombay Gym we are suddenly made aware that it's the season for foreign - returned twangs again, and they jar us more than before. We must have been like them, but we're local now. When the temperature drops to 20 degrees Celsius the girls say that "it's cold", memories of Chicago's winters gone. The people seated behind us are Indians living in America, better Indians, with perfectly aligned teeth and their own supply of water, which they carry around in their waater baatles. They speak loudly with a sense of entitlement, "We're leaving in faaive minutes okaay?", the sentence ending with that superfluous American question mark. “That storrrr is soooo soooo gooooood”, a reference to a store that we lesser Indians can’t possibly have heard of, with our kirana stores and Mafco. Our lives are slowly re-arranging themselves as we make way for boyfriends and late night parties. We stay sober so that others may party, truly sandwiched between generations. Bad hindi film music wafts up from the premises of the Workers’ Party of India compound below. Time to fry oliebollen tomorrow, honoring an age - old Dutch New Year’s tradition, more pleasant but no less effective than a direct shot of cholesterol to the heart. A member of the seniors' tennis club at the Bombay Gym called out to me loudly in the men’s dressing room this morning. “Join us sometime, we always need a fourth player, and it’s good to have a ’not so old’ member playing along.” A back handed compliment, his way of saying ‘you may think you’re sandwiched between generations but you’re closer to us than you think’. We close our eyes and think back for a moment, however briefly, to the way we were. Cherish your time together; rewind, unwind, be kind. Here’s wishing you a happy and healthy 2015. For someone whose blog is called “We Need To Stop Running” I’ve been doing a lot of running lately. I always have, at work or at play, running from one end of the city or the world to the other, from one self - invented crisis or activity to the other. Off late though it’s been the actual physical kind of running that’s got me leaving the house at an early hour.
Apparently the “We Need To Stop Running” doesn’t apply to the “I”. Running in Bombay is by and large a pastime for the well heeled, our feet cushioned by our Airs. We run up Marine Drive, past Chowpatty Beach, right onto Babulnath Temple Road and then left onto Hughes Road. The BMC’s city sweepers clear the debris of the night before, the last of the party goers heading home at 5.30 as the first runners hit the streets. As a city Bombay never sleeps. The homeless poor lie covered under thin sheets and blankets, sleeping on the dividers that separate Marine Drive from the sea. They’re in no rush to wake up, if anything keen to keep the day’s light out for as long as they can. On the turn back from Kemp’s Corner I pass an elderly chowkidar, a security guard, doing his surya namaskars in the 6m2 courtyard of his Master’s home. No fancy branded yoga mat or pants for him, just the hard tiles, his working pants and trousers and a basic human desire to be fit or to take care of himself. A wannabe prophet or Messiah crosses the road towards Chowpatty, dressed in a long white flowing gown, long black beard and a tall round cap on his head, a maniacal look trying to pass for a beatific smile on his face. He shouts out something, to no one in particular. The onlookers give him a tired “not now, not even in Bombay” look, it’s 7 am on a Sunday morning and Heaven and salvation will have to wait. As Marine Drive approaches again the sun is out and the crowds are thicker. Mothers and daughters walking and talking together, husbands and wives walking in silence and groups of men in their sixties ambling along, gossiping and back slapping each other, school boys at heart. A homeless youngster finally gets up, throws off his sheet, buttons his shirt and goes in search of a place to wash. I approach home and stop running. My parents, visiting from Bangalore, are up ahead, walking towards me, my father shuffling more than walking. He ran around this city once, in what he calls ‘his city’, as a young doctor. Those days of running are over now. We're in the middle of Bombay's second summer, with searing heat, and yet there's an image from the just concluded monsoon that won't leave my mind. I was standing outside a forgettable hotel in a forgettable grimy suburb of Mumbai during the lunch break, catching my breath and a bit of daylight after having delivered a training session in the basement of the hotel. The rain was coming down in buckets, filling the half completed concrete road dividers with water that then flowed over onto the street. Out of nowhere a family of four appeared, husband, wife, a three or four year old son and a baby tucked under the woman's left arm.
Three of them drank hungrily from the concrete divider, the adults reaching in with both hands and taking water to their mouth, the boy catching the overflow with his little hands. The woman dipped the edge of her sari into the divider and squeezed water into the baby's mouth. They drank with dedication, oblivious or not caring that they were being watched, their poverty absolute and somehow with their dignity and grace intact, less like humans in an imperfect city and more like animals at a reservoir. Our kids have occupied the various work spaces in the house. School projects and university applications are underway and we have a third teen in the house for a week, an exchange student from France. I am listening to the just downloaded J.J. Cale album and could go thirty years back in time, were it not for the fact that we're the parents now, ferrying our kids from school to party to project and that it's the kids that are throwing up and passing out. Not ours of course, but other parents'... Our omnipresent Prime Minister Modi has called it. We're a nation of filth, failing to provide proper toilets for sixty percent of the population, throwing the spoils of modernity, plastic wrapping and bottles, onto the street from our houses and our cars for others to sweep up after us. We're convinced that with material progress comes the right to have others clean up after us. The Prime Minister called it from the ramparts of Red Fort on Independence Day and has repeated the message over and over again in other speeches and via social media: if we are to progress we will have to learn to clean up after ourselves. He has linked it to Mahatma Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary in 2019 and named the project Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan. We're in the beautiful people phase of the project right now, with socialites, actors and business people trying to wield a broom for their photo op, helpfully moving leaves from one side of the street to another. School kids have been picking up the challenge, tackling parts of the city. Let's see whether the adults manage to develop their share of dignity and grace between now and 2019 and learn to clean up after themselves. I went to high school in Amsterdam 35 years ago, to an international school, The International School of Amsterdam. ISA, as it's called, celebrates its fiftieth anniversary a week from now.
We went to school in an era when the Cold War was still at its peak, when the Soviet Union had leaders whom you only saw in recorded TV images twice or thrice a year, waving from afar as they watched the presentation of fearful armaments meant for us. Iranian students occupied the American Embassy in Tehran and held Americans hostage for more than a year. Ronald Reagan took over from Jimmy Carter and embarked on trying to contain the Soviets, the 'enemy'. The Soviet Union positioned SS - 20 missiles in Eastern European countries, aimed at obliterating all of Western Europe at the push of a button. NATO retaliated by placing Pershing missiles. There were anti - war demonstrations across Europe. We listened to Duran Duran, Madonna, the Human League and Ultravox and pretended not to like them because the full potential of Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix and the Stones hadn't yet been exhausted, or so we thought. We were from the United States, Israel, Irak, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Eastern European countries, Australia, and Kenya, to name but some of the countries. For those of us who were politically engaged intense debates in between classes centered around the right and wrong of communism vs capitalism, of the Reagan and Thatcher led rearmament policy vs the perceived appeasement of the Soviets, of the right of Israel to secure borders vs the rights of Palestinians scattered across refugee camps in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan to their own homeland. The debates, though always intense, were never personal. The Indians and Pakistanis, the Israelis and Kuwaitis, the Japanese and Koreans were able to sit side by side minutes later in the classrooms. In the years that followed our departure from the ISA and from Amsterdam the school, its teachers and our classmates always held a special place in our hearts and minds. In spite of only being in direct contact with a few friends we stayed in the know of others via a relay system, via hear-say. The extended community felt like a tribe that was always connected in spite of being in limited contact with each other. The advent of social networking made that direct contact with each other possible for the first time in twenty five years. The initial thrill of Facebook was primarily to find and re - establish contact with friends across the world, to share again in their life stories. The tribe gained a virtual connection that had not previously existed. Next week hundreds of former students and teachers of the ISA will reconvene in Amsterdam, while the rest of us will join from afar. While we went to school with Yugoslavs and Soviets and Iraqis we will re-unite with Croats, Serbs, Slovenians, Kurds and Kazakhs. In many ways it seems as if the debates of thirty five years ago have returned unresolved. The Soviet Union may no longer exist, but Russia is one again a foreboding adversary, gifting us hitherto unknown wannabe republics. A war wages between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. Countries such as Iraq and Syria are disintegrating and re - assembling in ways that are unpredictable and frightening. This time round, our debates on the right and wrong of the war are waged on Facebook, with the same intensity as before, but still without getting personal. In thinking about the School's greatest gift to us I realized that it wasn't a particular curriculum or syllabus or qualification. The greatest gift was and is this ability to conduct debate without losing respect for the opposing party and it is for that gift that we owe immense gratitude to our teachers. In this era of increasing misunderstanding that capability is more valuable than ever before. Call it the Amsterdam School if you will. The reunion will take place. The tribe will come together in body and in mind and then disband once again, but remain forever connected with each other. A cockroach scampers up the backrest of the seat of the car as I open the door to put my briefcase and backpack away at the end of the day. Thwack! and it falls to the seat, antenna twitching but on its way to being dead, although you never know with cockroaches.
I drive out of the office compound following the latest exit route of our under-construction Urmi Estate. I reach the gate for the entry onto the main road, the day's biggest traffic challenge. The crowds aren't maddening yet, I'm leaving early, at 6:15 pm. Mothers pulling along children in school uniforms go from left to right, elderly people shopping for the evening's dinner, office workers heading in both directions, the men in simple shirts and trousers, the women in dresses or Maharashtrian saris, everyone wearing rubber shoes and slippers to brave the Mumbai monsoon. The rows crossing the nose of my car are only two to three people thick, not the four to five thick mass that will be passing here between 7 and 8 pm. As I inch forward bit by bit by bit, trying not to hit a mother pulling along a child in a school uniform or an elderly person shuffling forward to buy vegetables, the crowd keeps moving around the front of my car, swaying out into the street until suddenly, like a school of fish, they start moving across the back of my car as the distance has become shorter. I've made it, and I didn't even have to yell or slam my steering wheel and shout 'GVD!' in Dutch. I turn left onto the street, just behind a group of men carrying a body on a stretcher towards a cremation. The body is adult sized, covered in a cloth and flowers and tinsel streamers. The men are young, in their twenties and thirties, and walk ahead and behind the pall bearers. In the middle of the group of twenty or so men there's a lone immediate family member – a tall lanky boy, covered from head to toe in a white sheet with a bit of sheet wrapped round his head so as to cover his face entirely, himself a walking body. One of the other mourners, a youngish boy, has his hand around his shoulder, comforting him. The traffic policemen in their whites and khakhis let the procession cross under the flyover and continue walking towards Peninsula Business Park and Worli. For a brief moment even Mumbai's traffic slows down and obeys a higher law, letting the men pass. A second later and all of us – cars, motorcycles, buses and construction trucks – pass them, briefly glancing sideways and then on to where we need to be. Onwards over the monsoon's gift of potholes, left on Annie Besant Road, past Atria Mall, across Worli Sea Face. A white Audi Q7 that moments ago cut me off slows down for the driver to fling 100 rupees at a young man selling pink roses. The seller puts away the money with one hand and takes the next bunch from his helper with the other. Onwards past Haji Ali, past Mahalaxmi Temple and the Cadbury Corner, onto Peddar Road, look up Mukesh Ambani's house, all lit up in the dark, sharp right onto Babulnath, sharp left onto Marine Drive, past Chowpatty and then onto the home stretch, on to Nariman Point. Home. I have been to Japan several times before, the first time was in 1991. I was a young manager in the steel industry meeting the likes of Sumitomo and Nippon Steel, buying steel for our South East Asian operations. Subsequent visits for KLM Cargo in the early 2000s drove home the fact that Japan was slowing down rapidly, no longer as surefooted as it had seemed in the '90s, when all of South East Asia orbited around it. This trip with family is different though. A Japanese colleague from KLM urged us to try and 'feel' Japan, and that's what we have been trying to do, steering away from the bling bling of the large cities as much as possible. Our older eyes take in all the little small town politenesses, the punctuality of every single bus, the focus on personal safety, with guards blocking the exits of parking bays so that pedestrians can cross safely and the obsessive focus on the cleanliness of the individual, the streets, the cars, the edges of the elevators, well, of everything. Kumud is reading Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk. At some point he tries to explain to his lady that in the US buses are sometimes late, and she stares at him in bewilderment, and asks "but why"? How could you not be on time? Of course I have thought of the differences between India and Japan before, and many hilarious comparisons come to mind. The contained, dry, crumb-less meals served on Japanese trains (if they serve a meal) juxtaposed against the non stop barrage of food and drink being sold on Indian trains, from buckets, thalis and boxes. Daal sloshing over the edges of a thali and Chaai brimming over the rims of the tea glasses. A little of the Japanese way could have a huge effect on a country such as India, imagine what a lot of Japan infused in our DNA could do. Imagine more punctuality, systems and processes that connect, thought that is given to roads and intersections before they are built, the effect on time tables. Imagine the effect on healthcare if we too went around wearing face masks on days that we were ill, rather than coughing and spitting with abandon. Imagine the impact on personal safety and the reduction in accidents if safety was built into our way of working, and not imposed from above. We would 'rock'. Japan as an economy has been running on empty for some years now. The same system that could do so much for us and the rest of the world has also stifled growth in its own country, perfected it out of the system. Too much certainty, too much planning, too much insistence on predicting the future leads to a system that is in the words of Nicholas Taleb fragile. Japan could do with an infusion of Indian entrepreneurship, of not knowing what tomorrow will bring but of being confident that you will be able to handle it. Indian auto manufacturers are today beating their Japanese counterparts in the African market by providing motorcycles that are high quality and very low cost. India's Prime Minister and his counterpart Mr. Abe are due to meet in Japan in the next several months. We need many parts of them, but I think they could do with a slosh of us in the bargain. That would make for a very interesting cocktail, few parts Japan, one part India, sloshed, not stirred. Chai anyone? We have a new strongman as Prime Minister in India, one who speaks audibly and acts visibly and the Dutch exacted a punishing revenge on the Spaniards in the World Cup. Life as viewed from the two countries around which my life principally orbits, India and The Netherlands, makes sense, however briefly. The air all day has been unbearably heavy, humidity close to 90%. The monsoon is expected within 48 hours. As the evening wears on it hits with a few sharp jolts of heavy showers. The real deluge will hit within a few days, washing down our dirt if not our sins. The kids are off for the 'summer' aka monsoon and much relieved. Mira is resurfacing after months of exam preparation, Tarini is mentally digesting the last of the year's school girl tussles. We had breakfast at Mondi's today, our comfort zone, catching up on a Sunday morning. There is an unrealistic explosion of hope following the election of Narendra Modi, hope that is sure to be tempered if not dashed. Our streets will be clean and safe. Businesses will grow and flourish. Jobs will materialize for all of the 10 million youngsters unleashed onto the job market annually. Our borders will be safer. Neighbours and foreign powers will respect us. Decisions will be made and implemented. The news channels report of daily assaults on women in rural India, one more gruesome than the other. Border skirmishes continue between India and Pakistan. The Prime Minister warns of tough choices ahead in the months and years to come and it's clear that these won't just be financial or economic. Safety for the common woman and man is still far off. Last weekend I’m on board a Emirates flight from NYC to Dubai. A man standing at the bar in the Airbus 380 says loudly to a South Asian man next to him, “Mumbai is disgusting. I need to go to India for two weeks of work and I am NOT looking forward to it.” That’s my imperfect, vibrant, resilient, accommodating Mumbai he’s talking about. Want to bet on a city that will be around in full force 100 years from now? Bet on Bombay, amchi Mumbai. Bet on India. The right to Governance will win. The air is heavy with expectation. It's the final stretch of the greatest political show on earth. The Indian elections may not be as long as the US elections (NOTHING is as long as the US elections; two years of building up to primaries, primaries, conventions and then finally an election, all of it preceded by two years of posturing), but they're the most colorful, mind bending, noisy, boisterous and impressive elections known to mankind. Close to 800 million voters, I say close because somewhere in South Bombay a politically engaged person living in india as an adult for the first time during an election WASN'T ALLOWED TO VOTE! I digress. Close to 800 million voters, across 29 states spread over 1.3 million square miles. There's an Election Commission that actually regulates this circus and succeeds for the most part. Politicians of all ilk are hauled up if they are caught campaigning within a certain period or displaying their party's signs too close to a polling booth. It's the election where EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) meet vastu, India's version of Feng Shui, with politicians insisting that the EVM be re positioned in accordance with the rules of vastu. Talk shows don't happen on Sunday mornings, as they do in the US, they're on every evening across scores of channels. Each channel hosts anywhere from five to six speakers at a time, who all insist on speaking simultaneously, along with the host who yells over the din. The political class argues about the declining rules of civility, the argument being carried in this case by Dr. Karan Singh, one of India's foremost politicians and writers. That said, at least India has elections. Every five years the entire system heaves itself into action and gives the common man a right to vote. Voters consciously decide to give a particular party or candidate a chance to perform with the knowledge that they can oust him, her or them out in five years' time. Can't wait for May 12th, when the first exit polls will be out! All TV channels not dealing with the elections will be banned from then on, at least in one South Mumbai household.... In spite of being a little over thirty Kumud and I have never actually voted in a general election. We've never lived in India at the time of a general election or even cast our vote via postal ballot. It's a cruel irony, not having been able to vote, given how politically engaged and aware we both are, albeit with structurally divergent views (I usually support the right candidate and party, she the wrong one). We decide to get ourselves registered as voters, on the last day possible, the 9th of March, on which the Election Commission of India had organized a nation wide registration of voters. Finding where this registration was taking place poses challenge. Tarini and I go to the registered office of the Election Commission next to the Asiatic Society. It's a Sunday and the place is deserted. The guard tells us to go up to the third floor to find out where the registration might be taking place. We walk up three flights of dilapidated wooden stairs and find padlocked offices with wooden doors. A smell of stale urine wafts towards us, a construction worker shuffles past. We see a sign proclaiming this to be the second floor and so walk up a fourth flight of stairs to the third floor and finally find a sign announcing the existence of the Election Branch. The staff instruct us to go to "Elphinshtun Technical Kaalej" near St. Xavier's College and so we walk down the four flights of stairs again. As we leave the Magistrate's Office a family of three is asking the guard for instructions to the Electoral Office. The guard turns to us with a hopeful look, hoping that we have found the place. We share our information and the father of the family opens his mouth to thank us. He's wearing a red striped polo shirt and his teeth are broken and stained from a lifetime of eating supari (beatle nut). As Tarini and I drive off we see the family, father, mother and daughter, get into a taxi. After lunch Kumud and I decide to get into the car to try and find the 'Elphinshtun Technical Kaalej'. As we pull up alongside St. Xavier's college I spot a man in a red polo shirt getting into a taxi, holding a wad of papers in one hand. "I know that man!" I exclaim to Kumud, "Tarini and I saw him and his family outside the Magistrate's Building, he probably knows where the registration office is!" Just as we park the car ahead of a bus stop a taxi pulls up alongside and the man with the red polo shirt and supari stained teeth leans out and shouts "it's behind, there, behind the shtircush". "The what" I ask? Circus?" "Shtircush, shtircush!" the man says excitedly. "Staircase", Kumud mutters quietly. "Oh, ok" I say, but the man and his wife and his daughter in the black and yellow taxi have already pulled away. "You didn't want to exchange cards?", Kumud asks drily. As we walk up the stairs we enter a huge hall that has been lit up by four floodlights in four corners of the hall. The hall has a high wooden ceiling and must have been beautiful when well maintained. A plaque says that it was inaugurated in 1879 in honor of David Sassoon, one of Bombay's wealthiest benefactors, a Sephardic Jew who came to Bombay from Baghdad and who thrived on the opium trade with China under the British. Kumud proclaims it to be a 'Cambridge - worthy' hall, "if maintained". A man and woman are seated behind a desk with an upside down "help desk" sign stapled to their table. "No no no", they say when we try and ask them something, "we are not a help desk. Perhaps we should switch to the other side of the table" they say to each other, and get up. We see piles of registers on tables with numbers from 1 - 60, 61 - 120, etc. and when we leaf through them we see thousands of pictures, presumably of people who have successfully registered for the electoral rolls. A man guards a huge tin box that contains thousands of laminated cards, voter id cards. People yell names at him and then his hand dives pelican - like into the tin box to fish out cards containing a range of names within of which the yelled out name would fall. He does this with unerring accuracy, again and again. Finally we are told to fill in a Form 6 in order to get ourselves registered and after filling it in join the queue to submit it. Getting a form in an Indian Government Office goes something along the following lines. "Ek phaaram seeks dena!!" "Phaaram seeks?? Yeh?" "Haan haan, voh!! Then the form issuing Government servant fishes out a Form Six, looks at it one last time as if he personally gave birth to it, and then grudgingly hands it over. The recipient then takes the form and just stares at it, for minutes, not able to comprehend that he actually holds the "phaaram". After we submit our forms we stumble out, back on the staircase, drunk with the knowledge that each of us may independently alter the history of this country. "Well", Kumud says, "even if we're not ready for this election we will be for the next". All we'll need by then will be a Form Eight, for a change of address. |
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October 2022
Btw, the banner photo was taken from our holiday home outside of San Gimignano at 6.20 am. What light! It lasted all of five minutes.
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