Astad Deboo

Yesterday I went to the Prithvi Theatre in Juhu to see Astad Deboo, one of the few Indian modern dancers/choreographers. The Prithvi Theatre is quite an interesting venue; I had wanted to go see something there for a while. Tickets are only a bit more than a dollar, but unfortunately there were many empty seats, and probably not because the evening's program leaflet was almost half the price of a ticket. I can't say I loved it all, but it definitely had its moments. He is quite fascinating to watch, and the eight dancers (all of them deaf teenage girls) were very impressive.

Afterwards, I went to a place called Seijou, which had its regular French DJ evening. He wasn't so great though, but the place is nice (and pretty much empty until midnight), despite the assembled collection of blinking red yellow green blue orange lightbulbs. Maybe those were leftovers from Ganpati, or maybe they are already preparing for Diwali or Christmas or something. Or maybe they thought it looked cool, which it didn't.

In other news, I don't know what my maid did today, but she must have done something to disturb my local cockroach population, because when I got home, there were five big and fat ones running around in the kitchen. The strategically placed can of NEW! HIT! COCKROACHES! came in handy though, so that was the end of that. Unfortunately, I also dropped my bowl of yummy Indian food, so there was a nasty mix of dead cockroaches and food on the kitchen floor, and me without any idea where the maid keeps the mop. I do remember her buying one, or at least asking for money for it, but I ended up using old issues of the Times of India, which gave it a nice original touch I felt.

I also ventured out onto the Western Express Highway for the first time in two weeks or so, just to see how the highway construction mafia is coming along. Not surprisingly, they are doing great, and so the highway still looks like one of the tougher stretches of the Paris-Dakar Rally. So I was thinking, if even a Texas DA can manage to finally get Tom DeLay by his balls and hopefully throw the guy in jail, I wonder how long it will take ... But, ah well, I guess until then I will take the local roads to get to work. And this weekend I am set on getting out of town to Kashid, which is supposedly a very nice and quiet place, one of the nicest beaches outside of Goa, and only three or four hours outside of Mumbai.

Condensation Detected

Maybe I have gotten used to the weather, or maybe it is actually getting better, but today seemed like an exceptionally nice day. Pretty hot, but not too bad, and not too humid. Unfortunately, I had slept too long; I should have gone for a drive out of town. Especially, since I picked up my car from the workshop yesterday. The muffler had made some odd sounds, and also I wanted to get a few dents fixed, because they started to rust pretty badly. Obviously, with the humidity around here, a little paint damage very quickly develops into a rusting sore. And those weren't just paint damages, they were real dents from a three rickshaws running into my car. Or maybe it was me running into them; it doesn't really matter.

I sort of expected I could drop off the car in the evening and then pick it up 24 hours later, but of course it took Tuesday to Saturday to get the job done. They told me they would call me to tell me what the total bill would be, but that never happened. When I called them Saturday to ask for it (mainly because they take cash only), they said they would call me back, and that never happened either. I am really no longer aggravated by stuff like that; I don't even really know why I still bother asking anybody to call me back. I had a pretty shit week at work due to two people being even more unreliable and unethical than my car workshop, so by now I have generally pretty low expectations, which is a bit sad. A lot of people are fantastically warm and helpful, but, if I had to choose, I'd rather have people be cold and impersonal than lying and sneaky - not that this is a real choice, but that's what I am thinking.

I took the train to the car workshop, just like I took the train to work once (the other days I got a ride from a colleague), and it really wasn't bad at all. There were no free seats, but because it was a reverse commute during the week and a weekend day yesterday, it was no problem. I almost missed my stop yesterday, but luckily the trains have no doors, so it was easy to jump off the train as it was slowly pulling out of the station. When I got to the car workshop, the guy who knows what to do was out for lunch, while twenty or so either people were busy reading the newspaper, playing with their mobile phones, sitting around looking at me, or playing with each other. It was quite the scene. So I had a tea and waited around for an hour, half of which I watched three people clean my car, in between taking breaks laughing and fooling around. These guys are all in their twenties or so, only speak Marathi, and to an outside observer who doesn't understand a word, their behavior reminds of a bunch of teenage boys screwing around on a lazy Sunday afternoon. In a way, it's quite charming and fun to watch; and in a way, it's quite annoying.

In other news, it looks like our camcorder has become the victim of the weather here. Whenever I insert a tape, it tells me to remove the tape and sometimes it tells me Condensation Detected. No kidding, you got that right! Yes, it is humid in Mumbai, thanks for reminding me. I am guessing that getting this thing repaired here will be a minor adventure, so maybe it would be smarter to just send it back to the US, because, as far as I can tell, there is no certified service center for the thing in Mumbai. Ah well.

Ganesh Chaturthi III

So the grande finale of Ganesh Chaturthi was indeed pretty grande. The firecrackers started going off sometime in the afternoon, which made me frantically search for earplugs. I found them, because Ksenia is always fantastically well prepared for this sort of stuff, but then I ended up not actually needing them. Rumor has it that people tend to go crazy with these things - kind of like with the rats during the floods: the boys just throw them into the crowds, having a laugh. But no such thing happened.

Instead, we starting walking towards Juhu, got drenched by a quick rain shower, and assembled with quite a few people on the beach. It was still light out, so we were somewhat early. The main event at this time was that we got constantly mobbed by people begging us to take pictures of them. It is quite strange, but people just love to be photographed; they can't seem to get enough of it. But that's great, because one doesn't usually get a chance to take people pictures all that often, and of course the faces and clothes are always fantastic. So we did that for while, and then it was slowly getting dark, so we moved further along on the road to the main Juhu Beach area.

The crowds by now had noticeably densified and there was a good amount of pushing and shoving, and of course constant drumming, chanting, and lots of laughter. We were lucky to find a troupe that had a sizable big Ganesh and a lot of women. Also, it seemed like the smaller the Ganesh the louder and more ecstatic the crowd in front and behind of it. A lot of the crowds seem to enforce a strict teenage boys only policy, which was a bit scary, especially for K and S, who weren't in the mood to be the only women among a hundred teenage boys. So our troupe was pretty grown up and solidly serious, which was nice.

A few heavy rain showers later, we were passing the VIP stage. There was bunch of important looking people in either all white Indian dress, or in uniforms, some of them well beyond retirement age and bedtime. I was later told that if they were wearing white, then they are most likely politicians. So these politicians and the uniformed brass were sitting there on their armchairs overseeing the crowds like Napoleon a battlefield. It had an odd feel of Soviet Russia, but I guess it was really just India. In any Western country during this sort of event with large teenage crowds one could hope for an odd plastic cup of beer or maybe a paint or water bomb here and there being thrown at the VIP stage, but there was probably no danger of any such thing happening here. After all, Ganesh Chaturthi is also a dry day, i.e. no alcohol whatsoever is being served or sold anywhere in the country, unless it's a private club, i.e. some place like the Gymkhana. Imagine 4th of July in the US, or Rosenmontag in Germany, or any day in the UK without drinks? People would call for a general strike, I suspect.

Anyways, we then proceeded towards the water, there was a Pooja, i.e. some prayer, offerings, chanting, etc., a small fire was lit, and a few other things were happening, which I couldn't quite make out. At some point, I was politely asked to take pictures later, and so eventually the big Ganesh got lifted off his pedestal and off he went, slowly being carried into the muddy waters of Juhu Beach. It was quite the spectacle and a lot of fun to watch.

On the way back home, there were hundreds of trucks fully loaded with worshippers and Ganeshes, and the most elaborate one attracted quite a scene. This Ganesh had its own little elaborate house. Inside was what I suspect was a Hindu priest, and so this truck slowly made its way to the beach with an enormous crowd around it, cameras rolling, people dancing, the whole nine yards. Apparently, some of these Ganeshes are 25 feet high, but this on was the biggest that we had seen, and it was quite impressive. I got a few nice pictures of the whole story, which I will put up on my photo blog overthe next few days.

Head-On

Monday evening I drove downtown to see a German/Turkish movie called Gegen Die Wand / Duvara Karsi (Head-on) at the Goethe-Institute. The little room where they were showing the movie was packed with maybe 80 people, mostly Indian intellectuals, young and old. The movie plays in Hamburg, Germany, so I was happy to see some pictures of my hometown. It is about a slightly confused young Turkish couple living there. He is suicidal (well, they both are), she wants to get out of her traditional Muslim family. They meet and ten minutes later, she asks him to marry her for show, so she can live a little, have a little fun, do some drugs and fuck around a bit, and then it goes downhill from there. Not surprisingly, the movie is rated R in the US for strong graphic sexuality, pervasive language, some brutal violence and drug content, while it is PG13 in Germany (actually FSK12). So watching this in India, which is even more prude than the US, was quite interesting.

I quite liked the movie. The characters are very believable, the music is great, and the story is pretty good. Also, the couple might as well have been Indians living in London, so I thought, I wonder what the audience is thinking. After all, there's a lot of suggestive dancing in Bollywood, but certainly no real kissing, let alone full-on sex, full nudity, or cocaine - and there was plenty of that here. Some seemed to be squirming around in their seats a bit and going tsk, tsk, and at least one was leaving early. Unfortunately, there was no talk or discussion afterwards, but given that censorship is still alive and kicking around here, this movie won't make it to the theaters any time soon.

Tuesday was another long evening in traffic, and when I got home and the next day I felt kind of sick. It wasn't anything serious, and I am actually surprised that I've been here for three months now and still haven't been really sick. Judging from the doctor in NYC, who had given me all my shots, I would have thought that I'd be guaranteed to catch a life threatening disease just by looking at the food here. So I guess he was just full of crap. Another expat at work did actually end up in hospital for a few days a while ago, but that was because he went to get food at the local Subways, and, well, you kind of deserve to get hospitalized for going to Subway in India, or anywhere else, for that matter.

In other news, yesterday I read in the paper that India ranks way behind Iraq in terms of doing business, as measured by number of forms to produce and red tape to consume in order to open a business. It doesn't really surprise me, because bureaucracy really is spelled in all caps here. There is a pervasive culture of rules and regulations that don't seem to make any sense whatsoever and for which no-one seems to know or care about what's the reason. My simple standard question Why? is regularly met either with blank stares or with excuses and explanations that are incredibly surreal and mostly represent a very tight circular loop.

But I'll stop my rant there and move on to the Western Express Highway, which I have basically stopped using. After the sewage of the big floods had receded (final number is 944mm in one day), they had fixed up the highway pretty well and traffic was moving swiftly. A week or so ago, everything was great. Then there was another day or two of heavy rain last week, and the surface developed potholes the size of the Grand Canyon again, and the road looked like someone had set off thousands of little landmines. It was truly ridiculous. The funny thing is, there's only a few long stretches like that. Other parts of the highway are perfectly fine. So it is obviously not incompetence or lack of construction materials or engineering skills. It is simply criminal corruption and big business. Well, if they fixed it up properly, they wouldn't make any money, I was told. Is anyone going to try to throw the construction companies and the politicians that give them the contracts into jail? I guess not - after all, everybody seems to agree that law enforcement and the judicial system are pretty much non-existent. So I guess the Haliburton business model is alive and kicking here as well.

OK, enough of my rants, I will go get some sleep so that I will be fully rested and prepared for tomorrow's final Ganesh extravaganza.

Ganesh Chaturthi II

So we are in the fifth day of Ganesh Chaturthi, and my neighbors have been having a ceremony or other twice a day every day. Our parking lot is the temple for family, friends, and neighbors, there's is a master of ceremonies, there's singing, and they have set up big loudspeakers which they use to play what seems to be the same Ganesh Chaturthi CD over and over again at full volume. It is actually quite nice and touching how everybody comes together and seems to have a big blast. The whole extended family part is not something I would particular want for myself, but on the surface it looks as if everybody is having a great time, so who knows, maybe these are all picture book happy families with no dirt whatsoever under the carpet. Strangely, later in the evening, after the ceremonies and after they are having some food, they usually end up huddling around a laptop looking at I don't know what.

Getting home on Thursday was a royal pain in the arse. It was ok until Juhu, but since it was the first immersion day where thousands of people go to Juhu Beach to immerse their Ganesh. Traffic was crawling for a good one and a half hour to get me home the last 5km from there. The cops were a bit overwhelmed trying to separate the processions from the traffic and to stop drivers from ignoring their improvised directions and traffic lanes. Me included, of course, since I am quite happy to report that I am getting pretty good at driving like an Indian.

I had one rickshaw driver pull up next to me at a red light the other day, slamming his hand onto my car, shouting or yelling about something or other. I guess I must have cut him off or maybe he didn't like the way I was trying to zig zag my way around those atrocious potholes while I was passing him. I have not yet perfected the art of being on the fastest side of the road at various intersections, but I am getting there, and the fact that this rickshaw driver was not the only one yelling at me for my driving can only mean that I would now qualify perfectly well as a NYC cab driver.

Yesterday we had a little expat party in my apartment. That was all fun and well, even though I ended up checking my Blackberry for messages from Ksenia, as usual these days. My maid had made two big bowls of rice and chicken, which apparently no-one was hungry for. Unfortunately, at some point in the evening there was no water in the house, and it didn't come back until later today afternoon, when I was way overdue for a shower. We also managed to break my CD player somehow, and when I tried to connect the little boombox that we had brought from NYC, it turned out to be covered in stinking mold from sitting around in a closet somewhere. Besides, as soon as I hooked it up to the electrical outlet the fuse of the extension cord blew, so we were without music. At that point, it was raining cats and dogs again, and our neighbors were still chanting and drumming I think. But who cares?

It apparently was a special day for my neighbors, because this time they actually set up a huge buffet and placed a woman onto a special chair centerstage, and everybody looked particularly dressed up. First I thought there's going to be a wedding, but then I realized that the woman was very pregnant, so no doubt she was already married. I am guessing it was some kind of special child blessing. So while we are having a party on the terrace with our Muslim furniture, there was lots of singing and chanting for Ganesh Chaturthi on the parking lot, later followed by their usual play of Bingo or some sort of raffle, which seems to always come with the food after the ceremonies.

We ended up placing a delivery order for 20 big bottles of Kingfisher, so everyone was happy (well, apart from that there was no diet coke, no water, and no juice I guess). Not surprisingly, I ended up going to sleep while the party continued, but when I woke up, my apartment was in a surprisingly good shape, thanks to K and P, who will hopefully help me finishing off the remaining ten large bottles of Kingfisher one of these days.

Of course, I had a very lazy day at the coffee shop today. But when I got back home, there was a small procession of teenage boys (for some reason, most of these processions seem to be conducted by teenage boys), who were driving their Ganesh in a big truck, spearheaded by about a hundred of them drumming and dancing like crazy. So when I went to take some pictures, they went really wild and put on an extra show. Before I knew it, they pulled me right into the middle of them, and of course my first idiotic thought was Uh oh, there goes my camera!

They had no interest whatsoever in my camera other than shouting and yelling to take pictures of them while they were dancing around me like, well, I guess like Indian teenage boys at Ganesh Chaturthi. The fun only lasted for about 15 seconds, when some important looking older guy said thanks, shook my hand, and escorted me out of the crowd back to the sidelines, i.e. basically into the traffic. I almost got hit by the car, took some pictures of the back of the truck, and then went home.

The big final day, when supposedly thousands of Ganeshes get immersed into the water is either next Saturday or next Sunday; there's different reports about that. I bet it will be one crazy scary event, but I am determined to go right into the middle of it, wherever that is.

Ganesh Chaturthi I

Today is the start of the annual Ganapati festival, Ganesh Chaturthi, the second biggest festival in India and maybe the biggest in Mumbai. The little parking lot behind my building was turned into a white, yellow and blue tent over the last few days, and sometime last night I was waken up by crowds of neighbors, bringing in a big Ganesh, the elephant-headed deity, singing, dancing, and playing the drums at 3am or so. This festival will last for the next 10 days, and depending on I don't know what, the Ganeshes will be immersed into the ocean or various lakes after a day and a half, five days, seven days, or, for the grande finale, after ten days.

I can actually see our Ganesh from my bedroom window. Later this morning, I smelled a thick sweet incense, and neighbors, friends and families gathered for a prayer with an often repeating mantra of Ganapati Bappa Morya (I don't know yet how that translates). At some point, I went out of my apartment and sat down on one of the assembled chairs in the back, trying hard to be invisible. I really wanted to take some pictures, but I thought it might be better if people get used to me being there first.

At first, nobody seemed to want to even notice me, and it was a bit awkward, but then the guy who a few weeks ago very importantly pointed out that one of the parking spots is reserved for the doctor, asked me to have some food. Another guy asked me why I don't join them for some prayer, and after the ceremony was over, a young woman smilingly passed me some sweets and fruits and just said it's God's blessing. So everybody turned out to be quite welcoming, but I still didn't take any pictures - maybe next time I will ask someone if anybody would mind. Apparently, everyone will assemble here every morning and evening for the next ten days, and I can't wait to see what will happen.

Random Stuff

My internet connection at home was down for three days, because apparently there had been some thunder and lightening last weekend, putting my ISP (and others) out of service. I have no idea how that is actually possible, but I guess it is. On the plus side, I had missed the thunder and lightening, because I spend the weekend recruiting in a very small college town, a village really, in Rajastan. We flew into Delhi and then went on a 4 hour drive over solidly potholed roads across the border to Rajastan. Well, Rajastan is of course still India, but for some reason or other our driver had to stop at the border to Rajastan to pay some taxes in a little hut of a control post.

This college village is really more like a little gated community with a bit of an army barracks flair. The whole village seems to live off the students, but if you picture lots of college gear shops, book stores, movie theaters, let alone regular theaters, then you would be utterly wrong. In fact, we went out to the central student meeting area, which has a large number of good and cheap eateries, and there were hundreds of students late in the evening hanging around having dinner outside under the stars. Kind of nice, but two things were notably missing: beer and women.

There was not a single bottle of beer to be found and our attempts to buy some were met with apologies. I didn't quite get whether alcohol is actually illegal, or whether there is simply no demand. Among the hundreds of students there were maybe 20 women. Not that there aren't any female students in the college, but the girls' housing complexes (of course, no coed here) are actually closed at 11pm. Boys can roam around all night, but the girls get locked up behind the Berlin walls that surround their dormitories.

The campus does look a bit like a nice and pleasant peaceful army compound, and so basically students spend four years of their lives here, in complete isolation, with no distractions whatsoever, under blistering heat in the summer (it was a good 40 Celsius), and chilly cold in the winter (when it gets below freezing). What a life! The college campus temple was very beautiful though, and there's a bunch of peacocks running around (and away from my camera), so I guess you win some you lose some as a college student in Rajastan.

Before our trip to Rajastan, I had gotten a call from my car dealer who asked me whether she can give my number to the Hindustan Times, because they were writing an article about the HM Ambassador. I said, sure, why not, so the newspaper called me. They actually wanted to do a photo shoot the next morning, so I told them to come early, since I had to go bring my car for service and then go to the airport. When they didn't show up at the agreed upon time, I called them, and they told me, ah, well, sorry, we don't have time for a shoot. So they interviewed me on the phone, I e-mailed them a picture of my silver machine and apparently there was a half page article in the Mumbai section of the Hindustan Times last Saturday.

I still haven't seen the article, because I was out of town, but apparently it praises the HM Ambassador and then used my quotes (plus the Italian embassy employees who bought two Avigos) as solid proof that Made in India stands for style and quality in the world. Of course, I had expressed my utmost satisfaction with the most beautiful car gracing the Indian roads, so everybody was happy. So happy, in fact, that both my car dealer and some guy from the Hindustan Motors company called me to express their thanks for my valuable input. I guess it was at that point that I realized I should have tried to make deal with them - maybe become their official HM Ambassador ambassador in news, print, and media, in exchange for a minor donation, of course. Anyways, it was all very amusing and now I am famous for being that crazy Westerner driving around in an Amby - by himself, no less.

The trip to the HM service center was also quite an experience. So this car needs the first service stop after 1000km - not 10000 miles, or even 5000 miles, but 1000km, which took me all but three weeks to rack up. That's the first joke. Then it took me forever to find the place, because the address was useless as usual, and when I called them, they basically refused to give me precise directions, but just told me to ask around, as it would be so much easier.

So I asked a cop, who actually spoke English (a premiere), and he swore on his mother's grave that he knows exactly where the FortPoint service center is, except, he couldn't for the life of him explain it to me (it turned out to be a few hundred meters down the road on the right). Eventually, I found the place, in a tiny lane under a bridge next to the Mumbai race tracks, and was greeted by a very disgruntled guy who took my service book, filled it out, and asked my to sign it, right were it says something like Customer Signature. I hereby certify that all work has been completed in a timely manner to my fullest satisfaction. - Of course, at that point, nobody had even driven the car into the completely overcrowded workshop, let alone told me how long it would take or how much it would cost.

Of course, being the narrow-minded Westerner that I am, I refused to sign squat and just asked him how he can possibly expect me to sign this when they haven't even touched the car yet. The guy wasn't in much of a mood for minor details like that and just shot back: Sir, we cannot start the work without your signature. So that really cracked me up, but then his boss came around and just told him to start the work and make the customer happy. Yup, that's right!

They said it would take 90 minutes to do whatever it says in the service book, and after a number of reminders that I have to be at the airport pretty soon, they were done two hours and fourteen hundred Rupees later. I am sure they didn't do everything they were supposed to do, but then again, what do I know? I really regretted not having brought my camera, because the workshop crew was quite a troupe. I guess they couldn't believe that I had actually bought an Amby and even drove it there myself, so there was a lot of laughter and hellos, and good spirits all around. Not that many of them were actually working, and they took a half-hour tea break while I was sweating about making it to the airport in time, but I will definitely bring my camera to the next service stop, which is due at 5000km or probably in less than three months.