18 February 2004

 

First Impressions of Mumbai from Randy Sutherland, February 19, 2004

 

I escaped Paris a few days ago before the air traffic controller strike stranded travelers there (although "stranded" is hardly the right word for an opportunity to extend a visit to the City of Light).  As I shuffled through the security queue with legs still aching from climbing the Eiffel Tower, I struck up a conversation with Lalji, an Indian hydrologist.  He told me that he was raised in Kenya and had worked in Swaziland for seven years.  I told him that I had lived in Swaziland for 11 years.  He warned me that, even though I had lived in Africa, I would see things in India that would shock me.

 

When I walked into the Mumbai airport, heat, steam and flies enveloped me.  Quotes from Ghandi decorate the walls.  The English-speaking taxi company representative assured me that my driver knew how to get to my hotel but we found it by stopping periodically to ask pedestrians.  The taxi was an ancient black Fiat.  The trunk lock has long since broken and he secured my suitcase by tieing the trunk closed with a piece of frayed string.  The roof was so low that I had to bow my head.  Every time he decelerated, the seat underneat me would slide forward and pin me against the front seat.  The roads were filled with human-drawn carts, cows, dogs, bricks, garbage, and speed bumps.  Pedestrians walk down the middle of the road because the sidewalks were lined with sleeping families, so our progress was often no faster than walking speed, which allowed begging children to walk alongside my taxi with pleading eyes.  The driver entered each intersection with his horn blaring.  Even though it was past midnight and this is winter, I was sweating from the heat and wishing I had spent the extra rupees to hire an air conditioned taxi.  The air was full of smoke.

 

The next day I was jetlagged and could only find the strength to walk outside for one hour in the heat and smog.  There are 22 million people in Mumbai.  It is difficult to walk down any road.  Women dressed liked goddesses carry heavy cans of petrol.  Mothers load piles of scrap wood onto their little daughter's heads for carrying.  Men assemble transmissions in alleys using medieval-looking tools.  I saw a man sharpening knifes on a bicycle-powered grinder that uses a fanbelt connected to the rear wheel to spin the sharpening stone.  Sewers and garbage ferment in the heat.  Bleary eyed men smoke chillums of hashish next to cows with beaded necklaces and painted horns.  Some shops are nothing more than a closet with a pullout ledge on which the owner squats.  People eat food from plates that the street vendor rinses in a bucket of filthy water in between customers.  Particulate matter floats in the air and lands in eyes and forms a film of grime on the skin.  Even though I had showered just before my walk, an hour later when I wiped my face with a white handerkerchief, it was black.  I took another shower, cranked up the air conditioner, and watched "Apocolypse Now" on cable TV.

 

Yesterday, I decided that I needed to go somewhere and breathe better air.  I stepped onto a two-dollar ferry (just outside the hotel where Ravi Shankar taught the Beatles how to play sitar) and went over to Elephanta island to explore the 600-year old Hindu caves and sculptures.  I did not realize that I had chosen a special day to visit.  It was the Mahashivayatri festival and there were 40,000 people there celebrating.  A swami tied saffron-dyed yarn around my wrist and painted a red thikal on my third eye while chanting a Hindu blessing.  The caves are very big and contain fascinating sculptures, bas reliefs, and Shiva lingams.  There were so many people that I felt like an ant in an ant farm. 

 

I was impressed to see Catholic nuns paying their respects to Shiva.  Apparently they do not misunderstand the mystical truth of "I am the way, the truth and the life" in the way that Western Fundamentalist Christians twist this Jesus quote into intolerance. 

 

I hired a guide, Nittim, who was born on the island and continues to live there with his parents.  He showed me caves that are not even mentioned in the travel guide books.  He showed me a cistern in a cave with Hindu sculptures that is the water supply for the 1,500 people that live on the island.  There is no running water.  His mother fetches water from the cistern in buckets.  He praised the sweetness and purity of the water and said that they just ignore the bottles and cans and plastic and paper that float on the surface.  They have electricity for four hours a day:  7am until 11am.

 

On the ferry back to Mumbai, I chatted with a 70 year old marathoner from Manchester, England, who has been traveling the world for six years.  I had been feeling quite smug about finding a three-star hotel for $26 a night until he told me about his $5 a night hotel!

 

When I got back on land, a dodgy looking Indian man offered me a young woman for $15 and I was approached by charming beggars with such fascinating stories that I gave them a few rupees just to honor their imaginations and the earnestness of their delivery.

 

Mumbai is a human tragedy so horrible that I find myself having to shut down part of my heart in order to stay sane.  Part of me wants to flee this place immediately and another part wants to experience more. 

 

Namaste

 

 

                     

posted by Lorenzo 22:50

09 February 2004

 

Yesterday I arrived in France. I flew from Casablanca, Morocco, where I was visiting my French friend, Franck LeClercque, who runs North African sales for Dell. As a bonus, Franck?s parents were also visiting. Franck ran European public relations for Cisco when I was at Cisco, so he used to visit me in San Jose. I visited him and his wife Sharima and their two sons, Indie and Enzo, in London during the Nineties. Now they have a third child, Emil, 14 months old. I was Emil?s age when I lived in Morocco, so it was fun to try to see Morocco through his eyes.

Franck and Sharima have a big and beautiful villa in Casablanca with a huge walled yard, magnificent garden and swimming pool. I had my own bedroom with private marbled bathroom. A pair of lively and unusually social tortoises live inside the garden walls (video attached).  In a land with not much of a middle class, one form of insurance for the well-to-do inhabitants of ?Quartier Californie? (the most upscale residential section of Casablanca) is to hire staff such as gardeners, housekeepers, and drivers. Residents of Quartier Californie who do not hire staff are more likely to be robbed. Franck and Sharima have a full complement of staff, including a 24-hour armed guard. The housekeeper is a strong, and wise woman who has endured much. At age 10, her parents married her to a 20-year old and she had the first of her six children when she was 12. On the night that I arrived, she cooked a delicious couscous to celebrate the 65^th birthday of Franck?s father.

Franck?s father was in the French army stationed in Morocco during the time that I lived there as an infant, 1956-1958. Like me, he had not returned until now. I took a walk with Franck?s parents through Quartier Californie to view the beautiful villas. Shepherds tend flocks in the empty lots between the houses. Right now there are many newborn lambs. Morocco is the second Moslem country that I?ve visited on this trip (first was Bosnia). The Moroccans were friendly and kind. If they are willing to name the most prestigious area of Casablanca after California, I guess they must not hate us that much.

On Saturday, I awoke to the sound of doves that I associate so much with Africa and to the sound of the morning call to prayer, Allah u Akbar, which I also heard wailing from a medieval mosque every morning while I was in Sarajevo. We drove inland about 100 kilometers because Franck?s father wanted to visit the town where he was garrisoned with the French army during the Fifties. It turned out that our driver knew the town and had lived there as a boy so we found the base, which is now a Moroccan army base. The French army was in this particular place in order to protect French interests in the largest phosphate mine in the world.

I was curious as to why there were French and US military bases in Morocco at the same time and the driver explained that the French allowed the US to maintain four large bases in Morocco after WWII. After independence in 1956 the French stayed until 1958 and then the King of Morocco asked the United States to close bases in the early 1960s. The driver told me that the Moroccans were happy to see the French go but that they cried when the Americans left.

After lunch in the only restaurant in town, where we paid a total of about $25 for our party of nine people, we drove to the coast to tour Jedida, a former Portuguese fort that had been built in the early 16^th Century and abandoned in the 18^th Century. The fort contained a very large cistern that nobody knew about until 1916 when a shop owner began to expand his space. By accident he punctured the wall of the massive cistern to release a flood of water that had been standing for more than a century. Local firefighters still use the cistern. We bought bread that was still hot, baked in the original oven of the fort.

People inhabit this old walled town in the same way that I saw in Dubrovnik, Croatia, but Jedida is neglected and crumbling whereas Dubrovnik is cherished and well maintained. As we walked around Jedida on top of the fort walls, we sidestepped a lot of human feces, endured foul stenches, and observed squalor, filthiness and decay.

Our drive in the countryside exposed the extreme poverty of the Moroccans. Nevertheless they love their current 37-year old king. Perhaps Islam allows them to be pacified that their poverty is the will of God so that they don?t make the connection between national poverty and administrative policies. People told me that, if not for the massive cultivation and sale of hashish, starvation would be worse. A monthly salary of $200 is considered good enough to support a family. There are police check points in many locations where the game is to accuse drivers of infractions so that the police can collect $20 bribes. Franck?s driver and I were pulled over one day and falsely accused of speeding, so the driver just mentioned the names of a few friends that he had in the Police force and we were allowed to continue as if nothing had happened.

Right now I am in Versailles, walking distance from the grand chateau of the Sun King. Franck and Sharima are letting me stay in the flat that they keep in this posh Parisian suburb. A week from today I fly to India.

 

 

 

posted by Lorenzo 03:21