After twelve years we're leaving Mumbai, the original casino city, not that impostor in the desert of Nevada. Without even an actual casino in site this is the real capital of gambling, where thousands of people disgorge every day to not just gamble a bit of spare cash but their entire lives to try and make it in acting, music, business, serving, building, hustling, crime, life or even just staying alive; where for centuries Maharashtrians, Gujaratis, North Indians, Parsis, Jews, Armenians, Portuguese and the British jostled for their place in the sun and all helped to create a thriving ecosystem.

Everything that seemed alien and jarring twelve years ago when we got off the flight from Chicago via Amsterdam and stepped out into the pouring monsoon rain now isn't just familiar but comforting, at least most of the time. What seemed like chaos in those first days, and outwardly still is, hides or disguises a professional ethos that would put many cities around India, let alone the world, to shame.
It takes a while to realise that in spite of the glam of Bollywood and the top business houses this is fundamentally a working class city, and proud of it too. There is no poetry in the spoken word, people swallowing syllables as quickly as they do their vada pav,  their Hindi a guttural mixture of southern, western and northern Indian languages. There is no time for small politenesses, people brushing and shoving past each other to catch a train, bus or plane, always worried that they might be slower or later than the next guy and thus lose out on something worth having. There is hardly any place or space for organised retail as it's known elsewhere in the world, few sprawling malls, with most retail being conducted from small neighbourhood kirana stores. People live stacked on top of each other in a mixture of old dilapidated chawls and modern gleaming high-rises. 

And yet the city has a soul, a kindness that only slowly reveals itself, almost inversely proportional to the frenzied speed with which business is conducted. That guttural language is peppered with lines such as 'koi tension nahin lene ka hai', or 'koi lafra nahin', i.e. 'don't worry and don't get worked up, it'll be o.k.' or 'there is no issue', phrases that are applied as a verbal balm onto any tense situation requiring immediate relief.
That person who brushed past you a few minutes ago will turn around and double back when he realises you're lost and need to be pointed in the right direction. Honking and perpetually impatient taxi drivers will detour to return a lost iPad, phone or jewellery. The corner shop guy will send his delivery men come rain or shine to drop off groceries that were ordered on the phone minutes ago.
There is a trust in doing business with a business person's word still carrying weight.

We're heading to Bangalore, the southern Indian city that represents the wannabe new India of technology and startups and a new cosmopolitan mix of people from across India, perhaps a new Mumbai in the making, one fit for the 21st century.

Before we leave though we need to pay tribute to what we're leaving behind. So here's goodbye to:

• the delivery men who carry four bags of shopping on their bicycles through sun, rain and wind
• the careless Mumbaikars who stand out in the rain during the monsoon, talking and laughing with abandon, because it's raining and that's what you do
• the guards, postmen, newspaper delivery men, dhobis and doodh wallas who once a year miraculously discover religion while standing outside your door and say 'haan sar, Diwali'
• the faux glam SoBo women who answer their phone with an indignant flick of the hair and a 'WHEREAREYOU??', worried that their friend may be somewhere more fun, someplace better that they have missed out on
• the hordes of young boys who on a Sunday board a train for the Oval at South Bombay to play hundreds of overlapping games of cricket till it's too dark to see, who shout 'ball ball ball' to get passersby to throw their cricket ball back to them 
• the uncles and aunties on Marine Drive and Worli Sea Face who think that two squats and a single swing of the leg constitutes exercise and is a good build up to a well-deserved Indian breakfast
• the uncles and aunties on Marine Drive and Worli Sea Face who hire a trainer to put them through their paces, without any shame and under the watchful gaze of their fellow citizens
• the hut dwellers who have no business being happy but who sit on road dividers at midnight, talking and laughing with abandon, because tomorrow is another day, another chance to gamble 
• the city officials who can't build roads worth their name but who flawlessly organise twelve days of Ganpathi celebrations each year 
• the city that keeps its cool, in spite of being called 'Maximum City' by people who don't actually live here

Damn you Mumbai for making it so hard to say goodbye.

As they scroll through Photos in search of some image or the other the girls often berate me for the number of photos that I appear to have taken of Marine Drive, because it's there from every angle and in every season and at almost every time of day, but preferably early morning or dusk. This is the last photo that I took of Marine Drive, before the lockdown was imposed and we were confined to our homes, Marine Drive and its ability to attract crowds being especially off limits. Work had been going on to shift the concrete tripods out to sea and make way for the new coastal road. I'm going to cherish this photo, as I will cherish the one that I will take, early in the morning, before I will go for a run,  after the lockdown has been lifted.

It was my birthday yesterday and I don't think I imagined the particular intensity in the messages and well wishes that rolled in from different parts of the world as they went beyond the customary 'happy birthday' to wish me and my family but by extension also each other health and safety and well-being. These were the friends with whom I had been to ISA in Amsterdam or to university in Groningen or with whom I had worked at KLM and Maersk, as well some of my teachers, including my English teacher who attempted to teach me the frugality of word choice as he hacked away with his red and later green pen at my overgrown bushes of colorful but otherwise superfluous words. Only to join me in falling in love with Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a forest, a Sunderbans of colorful language if ever there was one. This was but one of many communities worldwide checking in with each other to see if we are well.
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Having been given almost every tool imaginable over the past ten years through which to voice our opinion we're suddenly realizing how powerless we truly are. The state has come down to ban flights and trucks and trains and cars and we the opinionated are realizing our place in history, of having to search for assurance, rightly or wrongly, in the words of our political leaders. Children are stuck in far away places but no amount of tweeting will get flights instated.

Some supporters of the French President, always a step ahead of the rest of us, in thought if not in action, have apparently launched a Jour d'Apres (the day after) website, but the end of this pandemic we know won't be a sudden affair, there won't be a V - Day celebration, no sailor kissing a young lass on the streets of New York. On the contrary, it will be a tepid, hesitant and tenuous re-emergence as if after a long winter, eyes blinking against the sunlight, with distant waves and namaste's from across the street.
Will we return to consumption with a vengeance, unleashing our pent - up demand or will some of what we have been forced to not do stick with us? Will we feel in any way embarrassed by what we used to convince ourselves we needed to buy and in some way voluntarily extend these frugal times? I don't know. 
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What I do know, with absolute certainty, is that within hours, not days, of the Government of India lifting the free movement of vehicles on the streets of Mumbai drivers will be back to horning at each other, urging each other to start driving even before the light turns green, back to 'beep beep yeah!' with a vengeance. And maybe for a brief moment that horning and beeping will be an assurance that part of life at least has returned to normal.

The view from our living room window is at odds with October in Mumbai. It's overcast and drizzly, more like a pre - winter day in Delhi than a post-monsoon hot October day. The view is also new to us as we have moved, all of five hundred metres, from not-so-shabby Nariman Point to also not-so-shabby Churchgate. Because Mumbai is a city of neighbourhoods and buildings, with their own distinctive names, rather than streets and house numbers, a move can mean a life altering change of dhobi, sabziwala, phalwala, kabariwala and newspaperwala. 
The dhobi we were ok to change, although the new dhobi is a bit nocturnal and non-plussed, ringing the doorbell at 10.00 pm to return my ironed shirts. The new sabziwala and phalwala rolled into one turned into something of an aggregator of fruits and vegetables, bringing us what he had managed to procure from other vendors as opposed to what we had ordered. Two such deliveries and it was back to Premchand Tamaaterwala from Colaba. The previous kabariwala has probably retired on the stuff that he dragged out from our old apartment, so we're looking for a new one and the newspaperwala, Mr. Yadav (of course), we're guarding with our life, because who else will keep track of our mix of Times of India during the week and the Mint Lounge, the FT and Navbharat Times on the weekend?

The confronting thing about this move has been the re-acquaintance and re-confrontation with our accumulations of the past twenty eight years, and some unmarried years before that. My bride calls me a hoarder, which I think does me injustice. I like to think that I curate history as it passes us by, if not for humanity at large then at least for our family. That said, the patterns that have emerged in our collections are  illuminating and sometimes confronting. Books on India becoming great, having been great, making it work, going down unwinding roads, India unwinding and India calling, as if buying all of these books will in and of itself will India to achieve the greatness that is its due.

Books on Chicago from the sky, Chicago planned, Chicago unplanned, Los Angeles from the sky, San Francisco from on up high and, from a people who are probably tired of being high, Ecuador From the Ground.
A truly inordinate number of books written by Dutch people for non - Dutch people to advise them on how to better get along with Dutch people, as if the biggest fear of the Dutch is to have their fully attuned lives disrupted by non - Dutch people, which as it happens, it is.
Certain authors float to the top as we discover that we have accumulated more than a few of their books, not all by design. Mr. John Irving, Mr. Naipaul, Mr. Stephen Fry, Mr. William Dalrymple, Mr. Amitav Ghosh and Ms. Isabelle Allende, to name but a few. But the winner by a stretch is Bombay / Mumbai's own prolific and erudite hometown boy Salman Rushdie.

As a family that has lived in five countries we have of course every electricity and power adapter known to mankind, most of which are not of any use to us now. Close contenders for non - useful  items are these things called ties.

Or caps, definitely not not useful but always in the dog house until the annual summer holiday.

Remember maps, from the pre - Google era, those huge beautiful paper things that you unfolded on the car bonnet to find out if you were on your right way down the autobahn? The nature of quantity of maps by country is fascinating. The Americans love them and every self respecting town has one, pointing out areas of interest, with local pride and self awareness shining through. The Dutch have some particularly detailed ones, often focusing on bits of nature such as mud flats that they think are or should be of interest.
The Indians for years didn't have any but the most perfunctory maps, rough broad outlines of the country, all driven by the fear that the horrible Pakistanis might actually figure out where we live. 

It's only recently that we not only have maps of cities but even of neighbourhoods, showcasing historic sights and local retail. For now we're getting used to our new neighbourhood, adjusting to the view from the window, the shorter run to Marine Drive and the longer walk to the Oval Maidan, all of it still a hop and a skip away.

Ahemdum*
My missus had the idea to group our collection of Lonely Planet books acquired through the years, leading to the realisation that at least against our collection of single publisher travel books Mr. Rushdie has been outranked. The books are, as they should be, earmarked, bookmarked and literally stuffed with post-its and local brochures.

*from Ahem, as in 'you forgot something' and addendum, an add on.

This monsoon is certainly one for the books and I got soaked again during my Sunday morning run, the dark clouds hovering over and darkening the southern most tip of the city, Navy Nagar, warning me of what they had in store for me as I headed back from Babulnath Temple. I squelched my way back home, stooping to pick up stray bottles (​plogging) along the way, the forced stooping and bending accompanied by grimacing and wincing as the stiff legs and back are forcibly stretched.
Our time at Advent is coming to an end, compelled by the owner's desire to sell the place. Our next apartment, a hop and a skip away from where we have lived for the past nine years, two streets away, will take us from Nariman Point to Churchgate, from 400021 to 400020. It will be goodbye to the familiar neighbours and the guards, to Raja, who true to his name is now the King among the pets in the building, pampered by the security guards and drivers. 
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This is also the weekend of India's attempt to land an explorer on the South Pole of the Moon. While the attempt looked to have failed, or contact was lost with the rover, it was met with an outpouring of support from people from all walks of life, celebrating the ingenuity and persistence that a dedicated team of scientists displayed over many years over the 'success' as measured at a particular moment in time. It is perhaps a cathartic moment for the country as a whole, wedged as this moment is between the more binary defeat and victory in traditional arenas such as sports, business or even war.
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As the weekend progresses the rover has been spotted and contact may yet be established, but plans for the next journey, the next run, are already afoot.

I'm meditatively harvesting pure vanilla from a pile of pods given to us years ago by someone actually from Madagascar ("Mada Hoo Ha??" Marty asked). Some of the vanilla has gone into an Ottolenghi chocolate cake recipe (btw, am I the only person who didn't realize his first name isn't Otto?) and the rest is being kept for future use. As I cut and scrape, my mind thinks back to the mad road trip (are there any other kind?) we were on a week ago. A Bangalore to Pondicherry trip that at best should have taken six hours ended up taking close to twelve hours. The driver took us on a detour that added another 150 km to the trip past Salem, the very non - direct way to get from Bangalore to Pondicherry. The side benefit was a view of the beautiful Tamilian countryside with the hills surprisingly well covered.

The French part of Pondicherry, 'White Town', a few square kilometers at best, has the typical white, ochre and red buildings that seem to characterize French cities in Asia, be it Phnom Penh, Hanoi or in this case Pondicherry. The boulevard looks out over the beautiful waters of the Bay of Bengal. Go straight and you'll hit the Andaman and Nicobar islands, closer to Thailand than they are to India. 
There are trendy boutiques and coffee places, Tarini and Mira acting as our guides as both of them came here on school trips. A band celebrating their fiftieth anniversary are belting out hits from stage set up at the waterfront. The lead singer, white haired and dressed in a green polo shirt and shorts, somehow still manages to bounce up and down the stage.

The trip back to Bangalore, less than 36 hours after we finally arrived is calmer than the way in. We have swapped drivers and are now in the company of the talkative and self - appointed tour guide Vijay. Vijay is himself a resident of Auroville, established by followers of Sri Aurobindo. Call it what you like, ashram, commune, kibbutz, it's amazing and gratifying to see something started in the 1960's thriving and successfully propagating a balanced lifestyle beyond the immediate confines of the township itself.

Several hours into the drive we pass through a temple town where Vijay points out the Shiva temple with four imposing entrances, dating back to 1100 AD.

A little over the half - way point, in the middle of nowhere we stopped for hot sweet tea at a road side stall. The imposing and corpulent aunty seated on a plastic chair guarding the way to the loos yells "five rupees" after me, as the price for using the facilities. By the time I come back she has changed her mind and it is now 10 rupees. By the time we set off for the last leg of the drive she is walking back to the main building and contentedly closing her plastic box with bank notes.
"Ten rupees too much", Vijay shakes his head as we drive off, but the ladies have voted these the best loos of the trip. We drive into Bangalore a little over six hours after we set off, thoroughly shaken and stirred.

...and a few thousand volunteers gathered at Versova Beach last Saturday for a bit of corporate pep talk, a short three k run on the beach and then an organized beach clean up. A lot has been written about the man behind this effort @AfrozShah1, the young lawyer who together with a neighbour began cleaning up the garbage filled beach behind his apartment building. A five foot deep layer of garbage got cleared over several years but that was as it turns out only one half of Versova Beach. Today was the day to start on the second half, part of #RunForTheOceans and co-sponsored by a sports goods company.

Afroz was there, wedged in between a corporate type who was still passionate about Mumbai, despite having moved to Germany for his employer, a VJ (let's put our hands together for MALINI!!), an actress (let's put our hands togetha for Gul Panaaag!!!), a perky Australian fitness instructor who took a few thousand people through their warm up exercise and the predictable announcer himself (come on Mumbai, let's make some NOISE!!!).  

For a South Bombay resident to get out of bed and to Versova by seven a.m. takes an hour of travel. Afroz Shah and his army of citizens dedicated to cleaning up this city's beaches and rivers do this every single Saturday. Versova has become their backdrop now, their weekly work goes on at Mithi River, which they're trying to clean of plastic

Here we were, most of us first - timers, cleaning up bits of the beach. Every mound of sand revealed layers of plastic bags and clothing. Everyone's energy was infectious. There was seven year old Anshu, a portly young boy dressed in a bright red t - shirt and shorts who refused to go home. His father's repeated, "come on Anshu, Mama is waiting for us", had no effect as Anshu's eyes were focused on the next bit of garbage that he could wrest from the sand and throw into collection bin. 
There were students from local colleges, housewives, and members of the Dawoodi Bohra community, who had signed up en masse.
These are baby steps and Afroz and his team are under no illusions that it's going to be easy. Apart from cleaning they're trying to get the surrounding communities to buy into the circular economy and stop participating in the throw - way single use economy. Let's see. If one man can get us to this level imagine what a few thousand of us can do.

At 7 am Marine Drive, where the pavement meets the road, is strewn with litter. Empty plastic bottles, aluminium wrapping from food packets, the odd beer bottle, soiled nappies sometimes, thrown onto the pavement and the edge of the street. Thanks out - of - towners, for messing up a piece of real estate that manages to look spotlessly clean from dawn, when the sweepers start their work, until late evening, when the likes of you descend to make memories and leave us with your trash.
Five years into the launch of Swachha Bharat Abhiyan and the Government's attempt to get us to clean up our act as a nation, it seems as if behavioral change still has a long way to go.
My dadi's house next to Dilli Darvaza, in Rajnandgaon, Madhya Pradesh, now Chattisgarh, was spotless. She wasn't a wealthy woman but in the two story house that she and my aunts ran not only could you eat off the floor but meals were actually served to you seated on a wooden plank with your thali resting on the floor.
The habit of throwing your trash onto the street, without a care as to whether it will be picked up, or by whom, looks like one that India's newly affluent classes have acquired, while leaving behind manners that must have been in their families at some point in time. Whether we unlearn these harmful habits, Government program or not, remains to be seen.

Families, day laborers and stragglers still lie asleep as I walk the last stretch after my run, the hot summer sun already beating down on all of us. The farmer's market is up and running alongside Mantralaya, the Seat of Government, and affluent residents from Churchgate and Nariman Point weave in and out of the stalls. A stone's throw away, in the shadow of Mahatma Gandhi's statue, the usual band of harried men and women live on the edge of the LIC bus terminal. The children run to a neighborhood stall to buy or sneak, I don't know which, something to eat.
Congress Government or BJP Government, neither seems to have been able or willing to deal with the shame of people living on the streets of this part of town.

Crow couples are hopping along the pavement, picking up twigs and strands of straw where they can find them, balancing two or more in their beaks in order to go and make their nests. By early June, when the first rains start lashing the city they will have lain their eggs and will take turns guarding the nest as the tree sways dangerously from side to side.
Apart from picking away at baskets of fresh fish being carried to the train station on the roofs of black and yellow taxis, the crows are very effective rat killers, swooping down on them in the early morning as a lone adventurer scurries along the edge of the street. Within an hour the carcass of the rat has disappeared, no sweeper required. The crows are much more effective than the well cared for and thus hopelessly disincentivized fat cats that live in my Churchgate office building. In the winter months you may still catch a glimpse of them during the day, a fat bottom wedged in the nook of a tree as they sleep for hours on end, but in the hot summer months the five of them only appear at seven in the evening, in anticipation of their neighborhood benefactors who brings them their food.

​The elections are over in our neck of the woods and Mumbai as a whole hit a turnout high of 55%, although our ward, Colaba, Nariman Point etc was actually two percentage points lower than the last time. The temptations of Alibaug and Goa were still too much to resist for the SoBo crowd. Why skip a weekend trip and vote for a Government that could influence your life for the better?

It takes a certain amount of gumption as a member of the opposition or a critic of the current Indian Government to look at their achievements of the past five years, shrug, and say 'I don't think they really did very much'. Electricity to 98% of Indian villages, guarded railway crossings, 5% more coal production in five years than in all ten years of the previous Government, toilets and sanitation for 75% of the populace, LPG connections for millions of households to replace firewood, increased solar energy production, twenty eight vs twenty kilometers of new roads laid daily for five years, more villages connected by road than ever before, water filtering plants for the large cities, direct flights to smaller towns in North, East and North East India, but no 'I don't think they did very much'.

I certainly don't like everything about the ruling party, the BJP, and like any political party it has its share of unsavoury characters. I don't believe it's good enough to quietly tolerate such people in the 'larger interest', but essential to call out people whom I believe are intolerant of the opinions of others.
I don't need a political party to defend my religion or my beliefs, as my religion is just that, mine, and having been around for a few thousand years perfectly capable of defending itself. More than that, a Government needs to strive explicitly to defend the religion of those less capable of defending themselves.
After five years of rule by the BJP and its allies there's much that still needs fixing and improving in this country. In a city such as Mumbai, one of the richest municipalities in Asia, there are scores of public schools without proper benches or studying material for the kids. Twenty five  percent of Indian school kids graduate without the most basic of reading and arithmetic skills, ill equipped for a rapidly changing world. Indian railways last year had 'only' 27 accidents, less than the 56 of the year before, but 27 too many. 

I do believe however, that it's incumbent upon a ruling party to get the most basic aspects of running a Government and thus a country right so that people can progress and be equipped to fend for themselves and rise above their current station, and I believe that this Government has made important strides in that direction. More than caste and creed I think there is an impatience with the status quo that unites large parts of the country, an unwillingness to accept poverty and incompetence. In fact, there is an impatience with incompetence that has re-surfaced, and it doesn't just belong to the youth. People who remember a long ago era when not everything was dictated by the Government, but during which busses and trains ran on time and schools and colleges, however simple, functioned.
Seventy years of ill - conceived socialism has today left India poorer than South Korea, a country which until 1959 was measurably and arguably poorer than India. It is time to move ahead, not only for the few, not just for the cronies, who by the way have always flourished more under socialist governments than those of the right, but for all Indians of all religions and creeds. For the young entrepreneurs who wish to set up businesses, for women who wish to enter the work place and feel safe traveling to and from work, for people who wish to be able to commute and travel by train without fear of dying in an accident, because ticket prices have been frozen at the same level for decades and because there's no money for safety equipment, for young children who wish to study and develop their minds, for the soldiers guarding our country who have been waiting for basic fighting gear for more than a decade, for the poor who deserve access to basic healthcare and for the elderly, who now for the first time have a basic pension, and this is why I shall be voting for the ruling party on the 29th of April in Mumbai.

I may not be running this race, but I applaud all those who do.