Horn OK Please

Deepak

2006-03-24T23:57:00.000-08:00

The other day, Deepak, our driver, went to a big party. He was very tired. The party was in honor of the birth of his friends child, and Deepak drank a lot. Big drinking, he would say, and he felt sick. We never knew that Deepak drinks at all, and sure enough, it turned out that they were drinking two liters of Coca Cola. Very cold, Deepak said. His stomach really didn't agree with all that coke, and we really can't blame him for taking a sick day.

A few weeks earlier, he had been very upset and told Ksenia that he couldn't sleep all night. The evening before, he had picked me up from the office and we dropped off two friends from work. As he was driving, I made some remarks about Deepak being the best driver on the planet, but he completely misunderstood and thought that I had said he's the worstdriver on the planet. He didn't say anything until the next morning, but he really could not sleep after that.

Luckily, we managed to assure him that this was a misunderstanding. Ksenia did teach him a number of new English phases, so now Deepak knows that I know doesn't mean No, and that something something usually better translates as a little bit. These days, whenever yet another rickshaw driver cuts Deepak off, he will happily announce in almost perfect English: Bad man. Very bad man. I am angry.

Sadly enough, I have received plenty of unsolicited phone calls on my mobile from AirTel, pestering me about this that or the other discount offer - and quite frequently the person on the other end speaks even less English than Deepak. But Deepak says he likes his job - he will be very sad not to drive the most beautiful car in Mumbai anymore, which as he often happily remarks is not perfect, but I couldn't really imagine him being satisfied in a call center.

Savatri

2006-03-24T23:03:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, Savatri, our maid, had invited us home for a late lunch, which was very sweet. When we got there, after an hour in traffic, her husband just got out of bed and looked pretty miserable, but her two daughters and one son were pretty excited and shyly curious. Her son is 17 and dropped out of school. He is working as a DJ to hire and wants to become a famous professional DJ, much to the distress of our maid. One daughter is still in school, the other works in a call center.

Savatri lives in an area that our Mumbai map designates as a slum area near the Eastern Expressway. For about $7000, she owns a very small house with a cramped living room and kitchen on the ground floor and another bedroom on the top floor. Her children sleep in the living room - the two daughters on the floor and her son on the little couch. It's all very cramped, but it's clean and homey, and the television was on the whole time. Soon, the entire neighborhood is going to get replaced to make room for new constructions, and Savatri thinks that the government will provide them with new housing.

As Ksenia and I we were sitting down having lunch while the rest of the family watched us, some curious neighbors stopped by to say Hello. In between Hindi television commercials, the daughters and her mother kept serving us food and orange juice. After the Hellos were said and the lunch was eaten, the maid took us to a visit at her childhood friend and neighbor. Savatri is originally from Kerala and her friend from Goa, but they had moved to Mumbai for better prospects. Savatri's friend finds Goa boring now, especially since her husband spends most of the year in Dubai. He used to live in Kuwait and was there during the Gulf War and had sworn never to go back to the Middle East, but then he went to Dubai for the money. One of his sons works for Dell now; he still lives with his parents and was sporting a baseball cap.

Savatri is thinking about going to Dubai, but she doesn't want to work for a Muslim family, because, she says, their families are too big and they don't treat Indians very well. After yet another tea with our maid's friend, we took off to make our way home through the Saturday afternoon insanity called Mumbai traffic. Due to the bird flue panic, chicken prices fell from Rs100 to Rs15, and fish went from Rs300 to Rs1000.

The Cigarette Lighter

2006-02-25T08:36:00.000-08:00

When we got back from Goa, we found a dead rat stuck in the A/C grill leading out to the terrace. Ok, maybe it was a mouse, but it would have had a decent size if it hadn't already been well on its way to decomposition. We never got into the right mood to remove it, until Ksenia and the maid decided to take action. Well, more like Ksenia decided, and the maid took action. The same maid that only a few weeks ago complained about our neighbors throwing their food onto our terrace - although I think it seems to be dry food only now, no more wet French fries. So she fingers the thing out of the grill and without much looking throws it over the wall onto the driveway to the parking lot. Luckily, there was nobody walking around there, or maybe there was, but nobody seemed to mind.

Maybe it's the same thing with the ongoing road construction saga. A few months ago, pretty much the entire stretch of 13km road between Bandra and Malad was reconstructed. Well, at least the sidewalks. Not there was much of a sidewalk to begin with, but in any event, they built nice new walkable lanes to the left and right of the road. It stayed sort of nice for a few weeks, so nice in fact that at least some of the pedestrians chose to walk on it, instead of on the road itself. That was over after a while, when cars started to park on it, the garbage and dust piled up, and it slowly turned into a public bathroom again.

So far so good, no news here. But what's amazing is that last week or so they ripped open the entire stretch of sidewalk/bathroom again, the entire new stretch of 13km. Maybe they weren't happy with the first results I thought, but in fact it turns out that apparently they had forgotten to put in the electric cable and sewage pipelines. No big deal, let's just do it all over again and take care of it. I am willing to bet that they'll do a third time in less than a couple of months, maybe for the telephone lines.

It is this sort of spectacular incompetence or corruption or maybe both that's the most mindboggling about Mumbai. The fun part of it is that during the last almost two weeks, I had to make this trip in the auto rickshaw, because that's how long it took the service station to do the regular 10,000km maintenance and a bit of a paint job on my car. Going in the rickshaw in Mumbai inevitably means being stuck between a hot stinking bus on the right side and a pre-war truck on the left, preferably with the truck's diesel exhaust pipe sticking right into my face, which always makes for a good dose of black fumes anytime the traffic jam moves a meter or two.

I guess I could take a regular black cab or even a cool cab instead, but that only means four to six times the price of a rickshaw, plus the regular cab's exhaust pipes quite often seem to end right in the passenger cabin themselves, and the cool cabs aren't that cool, because the A/C typically doesn't work as advertised.

I took the trains a couple of times, but watching grown up and relatively well-to-do men fighting for their lives in a desperate attempt to get a seat in the first class compartments is not my kind of fun early in the morning. Nevermind that the first class cars going uptown in the morning are actually not crowded at all, people nevertheless seem to think that unless they knock someone over while jumping onto the train as it enters the station they haven't done a good job upholding the traditions of good train travelmanship.

Meanwhile, it took Ksenia and Deepak an hour or so to explain to the car service station what needs to get done to the car. After plenty of nodding and reassuring Yes, Madams, they said the car would be ready three days later, last Saturday, but then changed their mind to Monday. Monday turned into Tuesday, Tuesday turned into Wednesday, and then it turned out that they did the paint job, but forgot about doing the regular 10,000km maintenance. Instead, they seemed to be genuinely surprised that you would want to do the 10,000km maintenance when the car only has 9,761km on its clock.

The paint job was equally so-so - in fact, Deepak speculated that maybe they didn't have enough light on the right side, which looked substantially less polished than the left side. Ok, so the maintenance job would take another two days, but unfortunately, they are out of stock on a number of spare parts needed - including suspension pads and petrol tank lock, both of which we needed, especially the lock, because it regularly takes half an hour at the gas station for the attendant to figure out how to lock the tank.

Anyways, to get those spare parts would take another month. Two days later, they hadn't done much and the job obviously wasn't finished. Deepak observed dryly that at least they seemed to have washed the car. But there was not much left of that when we went back again today. In fact, some of the interior was black with oil, and the brake pedal was squeaking and one door was rattling more than ever. Not to mention an entirely new big scratch they've added for extra convenience.

So, what have you done? we asked and the guy tried to convince us wholeheartedly that they've done everything, all painting, all maintenance services, and new lock for the gas tank. I tried to check out the new lock, but was immediately assured no, no, new lock, new key, but then we wondered, wait a minute, so where did you get the new lock from, we thought you were out of stock on those? Maybe not surprisingly, it turned out that there was no new lock and no new key after all, the guy was simply and completely talking out of his ass.

So we talked to the manager instead, who was reasonably straightforward, and we explained to him that we'd like to see the list of things they have done. Well, we've done everything as per the regular maintenance service (as per is always a good expression to impress with). Ok, we asked, what does that regular maintenance service include? As expected, just like the other guy, the manager also answered this question with the attempt to reach for our service handbook, so that he can read its contents to us.

Well, we were not in the mood for a little reading session, and the obnoxiously demanding foreigners that we are, we asked for their checklist, some work list that shows that some mechanic has checked of on his the oil change, and the transmission fluid, and maybe even the brake fluid. After some shuffling around someone comes back with that list - except it didn't mention brake fluids or engine oil, it only listed the really essential parts of the regular service: side mirrors, backseat reading lamp, and most importantly, the cigarette lighter.

At that point, I almost lost it, but there it was: a signed and approved checklist for the cigarette lighter, but no such thing for brake fluid or engine oil - after eight months in Mumbai, some things still manage to shock me. The manager's explanation was that the engine oil and brake fluid and such they have to do, but the cigarette lighter they do, because people complain, so they make a checklist to their customers' satisfaction.

Anyways, so that was our Saturday afternoon. Three hours at the service station. The rest of the time there we spent waiting for them to fix the door rattling and the brake pedal squeaking. The door they managed, the brake pedal apparently was a lost cause, and we didn't even bother with the steering wheel squeaking. After that, we took refuge at the mall, which, given our contempt for malls under any normal circumstances really says something. At least we passed on McDonald's though - I think we'd rather drink that new brake fluid that our car may or may not have gotten than go there - but we did end up at an Italian restaurant, which wasn't half bad.

Meanwhile, our little adventure in Mumbai is drawing to an end. We'll go trekking in Sikkim for two weeks in April, and then we are out of here. Not that we regret having come here, not at all, it was definitely an experience, but maybe Central Park in May won't be so bad either. We'll ride our bicycles around Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, in the middle of traffic on 2nd Avenue, and we'll think: aahhh, New York City, fresh air, quiet roads, laid back people. But we'll also search for the perfect Dosas and masala chai, we'll miss Deepak and our maid, and if we ever find a dead rat in our A/C, we'll know what to do with it, no problem.

Goa

2006-02-18T00:24:00.000-08:00

Ahhh... Goa! The hippie paradise, the charter destination for potbellied middle aged Germans (and plenty of Russians, too), the weekend destination for Bollywood celebrities... Well, we had put off a trip to Goa for all these reasons, and also because it took me a while to convince Ksenia that we should be driving down there. As it turns out, it was a lovely drive and Goa is indeed quite lovely, especially if you make a big circle around the hippie, raver, and charter destinations.

Since the 9th this month was a holiday, we had five days to play with, taking off the Wednesday and Friday as well. We wanted to leave Mumbai at 6am, but as usual, we packed last minute and didn't leave the house until 7am. Still, there was no traffic to get out of Mumbai to Panvel, where the NH17 starts. National Highway is of course a bit of a misnomer, because it's a pretty narrow road, one lane each direction, no dividers, but plenty of pedestrians, bicycles, and cow carts for added entertainment and diversion during the 600km trip.

Nevertheless, I had been a bit worried that the road would be the standard pothole infested diet we've come to love to hate around here, so that it would indeed take 15-17 hours to get to Goa, as some websites had said, but in fact the road was for the most part quite good. Narrow, but smooth and curvy - apart from a few stretches up and down some mountains, it would have been fun to go on a motorbike. Plus, there were surprisingly few Horn Ok Please trucks on the way, and even fewer maniac bus drivers. The landscape is very nice all the way, and it changes quite often between lush green fields and dry yellow mountains, but I kind of forgot taking pictures, because I had two much fun driving.

We stopped over for lunch halfway at some posh hotel in Chiplun and reached North Goa at 6pm. It took another hour or two to find a place to stay that wasn't booked, but then we ended up at the very nice River Cat Villa in Mandrem. The next morning, we walked to the beach, spotted the first topless tourist and were surprised to find that the water does indeed resemble the color blue, which is an enormous step up from the brown sewage at Juhu Beach in Mumbai.

Shocked by the sight of so much blue water and almost empty beaches, we left and drove down to Old Goa, the former capital of Portuguese India. There seem to be more churches then souvenir shops in Old Goa, and there's not much else, but it was nice to walk around without much bother, and with vendors restricted to a small area around a main parking lot, which was almost empty. Goa is close to completely banning plastic bags, so it is probably the cleanest place we've been to in India so far. Of course, a lot of tourists seem to have an addiction to potato chips, so there's still that, but ah well.

Our next stop was the Savoi Plantation, a tropical spices farm pretty far east in Goa. When we got there, there was an army of charter tourists being served some yummy organic food, a traditional Goan dance and music performance, and a very efficient spice sales show. Thankfully, they got bussed back to wherever they came from, while we stayed to sleep in a most quiet and lovely little farmhouse on the plantation. The owners were very nice and not too pushy or in our faces, so it was very relaxing.

Having gone so far east and away from the beach, we went to a nice little 13th century Hindu temple the next day, deep in the forest. There was a Brahmin family stopping by for some prayers and it was all very laid back. Then we drove to the south and made a lunch stop in a little restaurant. The owner was some local politician, and it was quite interesting as he told us that he's first of all a Goan, then an Indian - he still speaks Portuguese and even has a little Portuguese flag in his car, much to the dismay of some people who consider such a display anti-national, he told us. He complained a bit about the foreign invaders in Goa, by which he meant Marathis from Maharashtra - apparently, there was a row about what the official language in Goa should be, and it almost became Marathi instead of Konkani. There's also some discussion about whether the Roman Konkani script should be on equal footing with the Devanagari Konkani script.

Anyways, Goans, especially women, are by the way considered the lazy, laid back, catholic and fun loving people of India, with the loose morals to match, even though Christians are a minority here (nevermind that being catholic anywhere else doesn't exactly signifies loose morals). And speaking of stereotypes, hippies are generally despised, while Israeli tourists are now even more loathed than Germans, the reason being that they are all fresh out of the Army and hence prefer drugs to sauerkraut with beer, and a good fight to lazily drunken roasting in the sun. All of this according to our Indian Goa travel book, which marveled about the story of a bunch of Israelis being kidnapped in Afghanistan, who then proceeded to close combat their kidnappers to death.

So we drove further south to Agonda, after we made a quick stop in Colva, which seemed packed with lobster red vodka infused Russians walking around town half naked. Agonda in contrast is a very laid back little strip of lovely beach, so we stayed there and actually went for a real swim the next day. Of course we had to also check out Palolem further south, which was predictably overcrowded, but the Oceanic Hotel, outside of Palolem, was one of the nicest little places we've been to in India so far.

The next day, it was back to Mumbai. We decided to take the NH4A from Goa to Belgaum in Karnataka, where we'd get onto the Bangalore - Mumbai express highway. Unfortunately, a large part of the 150km to Belgaum was on the most horrific stretch of road ever. There were literally thousands of trucks loaded with red dust from the Goan ore mines, and the road itself was totally destroyed; it basically didn't exist anymore. The dust from the trucks and the road was so thick that we felt like we were in the middle of a heavy red London fog, so we chugged along in first or second gear for many many miles.

But eventually reached the express highway, the pride of Indian civil engineering connecting Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, and Delhi, and from there it was a nice ride at 120km/hour all the way to Mumbai - then and again interrupted by trucks and cows going the wrong way on the fast lane, while we were passing some rickshaw or cows going the right direction on the slow lane. Quite obviously, after spending probably billions of dollars on the highway, there wasn't enough money or thought left to also build underpasses or overpasses at the exit points, so instead the cows and the rickshaws and the trucks just cut over to the other lanes and go the last bit against the traffic. We had seen people parking their cars on the highway, preferably on a bridge or in a sharp curve and where the highway has no shoulder, just to say a prayer or to take some pictures, but these cows and rickshaws going the wrong way were a bit like the icing on the cake.

Anyways, we got home eventually, where we noticed that our building had yet another watchman (they kind of change like people change their underwear), who immediately rang our door and asked for money. We also noticed some bite marks on our couch that strongly suggested mice, and sure enough, we saw a mouse running around in our apartment, plus a dead one caught in the grill of our A/C. Well, maybe they eat the mosquitos, of which we have more than we can kill. On the plus side, it's 35 degrees Celsius in Mumbai every day these days, and we don't even really feel it anymore - we'll be freezing during New York City summers when we come back.

Rajasthan

2006-01-29T07:54:00.000-08:00

In case I ever said anything about Mumbai being polluted and having bad air, I take everything back. Now that we've spent five days in Rajasthan, we can proudly announce Bikaner to be the most unbreathable place we've been to in India so far.

But let's start at the start. Our flight to Jaipur was uneventful enough. Deepak insisted on driving us to the airport, and we survived the usual shenanigans of chaotic security checks, travelers cutting in line and middle aged men picking their noses with gusto in public. We arrived at our hotel (the Umaid Bhawan) quite early in the morning, and the place was very nice with a lovely rooftop.

We took off in a car to the City Palace, which wasn't all that great, followed by the very nice Amber Fort, where we spent a long time wandering around. There was plenty of Western tourists and the appropriate number of touts and hawkers to match, but overall, it was a lot less hassle than we had anticipated. The weather was quite cool in the morning, but it got pretty warm later in the day. Jaipur really is quite nice, thanks to one of its founder, Jai Singh II (1688-1743), who according to our travel book was a bit of an urban planner and introduced some revolutionary ideas, namely hygiene, beauty and commerce. Of these, only the last one seems to have survived into the 21st century, but at least the wide roads of the old city are still pretty wide, the town is still mostly pink, making it almost possible to walk around relatively unscathed, at least in the morning.

Unfortunately, hygiene standards don't seem to have been upgraded in the last 200 years, so there are plenty of open sewage canals, everybody is spitting and snotting everywhere (just like Mumbai, only more so), and an abundance of camel and cow shit takes care of the rest, not to mention the autorickshaws, which are (thankfully, slowly) replacing the bicycle rickshaws. Some of the sidestreets really are an incredible sight of disgusting filth. Nevertheless, Jaipur is a shopping heaven, at least in terms of quantity and curiosity; quality not so much, but we are almost used to that caveat by now. Even the hawkers and touts we could deal with, or maybe that's because we had feared the worst and therefore immediately shut up anyone who got on our nerves too much too quickly.

We left for Bikaner by late afternoon the next day. We've know by now that train stations in India tend to be the cleaner parts of town, and at least when we are leaving a town, there's less of a chance of getting hassled by some rickshaw driver about which country we are from, where we want to go, and that he will drive us anywhere we like. Of course, there's still always someone who will try to lure us into his rickshaw back into town, even as he sees us walking fast and straight towards the station entrance. The train arrived 90mins late in Bikaner, but on the upside, we only had to stand in line for half an hour to fill out the application for seat reservations, which as usual required vital information such as our gender, age and address. Since the clerk was unusually slow even by local standards, the crowd got proportionally more pushy, as if rubbing belly against backpack could speed things up and as if ruthlessly cutting in line were a matter of spiritual pride and honor. When we told someone to back off, the helpfully happy and proud explanation was this is the system here.

Late as it was when we finally made it to Bikaner, the town came as a bit of a shock even to us jaded expats. The rickshaw ride from the train station to the hotel was like cruising through a garbage can in a desert, which incidentally describes Bikaner quite well. The town is dusty as dusty can be and the rickshaw fumes eat at your eyes like little ants. Someone said traveling India is like traveling for Graduates (Thailand I guess being for amateurs), but at this point we are wondering whether it maybe isn't more for the demented. Then again, as we now look at our pictures, the explanation is clear: all pictures lie, because they are never able to show the dust, and the stink, or record the cancerous coughing and yacking all around you. All the Rajasthan travel books show gorgeous colors, graceful women, majestic forts and
beautiful landscapes, but the predominant impressions, at least this evening and most of the next day in Bikaner, are incredible dirt and filth, unbreathable air, and enormous pollution. If I had to go here in the summer, when it gets as hot as a frying pan, I'd shoot myself, even though there were a lot of gorgeous empty houses in Bikaner's old city.

On the other hand, our hotel in Bikaner (Bhairon Vilas) was the best we've stayed at so far in India. The owner is a descendant of the Maharajas and of the Prime Minister of Bikaner, a young guy who decided that he likes restoring old furniture and stuff, so his hotel has a lot of character and is quite lovely. Maybe we should have stayed in the hotel all day, because there was a film crew doing some shoots of a traditional Rajasthani music and dance troupe, but we went to the fort instead, which was rather shabby.

We also went to a camel farm, which was a bit sad looking (although the two minute camel ride was surprisingly comfortable), and to the Karni Mata Temple in Doshnoke, where hundreds of unhealthy looking rats live in and run around in filth, enjoying being worshipped as the reincarnated relatives of the local villagers. There were a few equally scrubby looking Western tourists around, who may have thought this temple was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but we kind of thought that it was ... well, interesting, and sheer insanity.

Back in the hotel, the film shoot continued as we were having dinner. There was a British guy who had spent five days at the temple shooting a documentary and a female Spanish dope head who we speculated was doing the hotel owner. As they were finishing off a bottle of rum at the bar, three middle aged Germans talked loudly and waltzed right into the film set, twice. We briefly considered joining the bar, but then thought better of it, so we could get up in time the next day for our train to Jodhpur.

The train ride to our last stop was another 7 hour affair, but the 3AC class is comfortable enough and you get a pillow to sleep on. Our hotel wasn't exactly nice or beautiful; in fact, it seemed to have on offer a large number of small imperfections. Some call that charming, we find it inexplicable, whether it's the layer of oil swimming on top of the coffee, the curtain rods being installed in all manners crooked, the curtains being of wildly varying length, the hot shower being cold, the bed sheets missing, the paint being applied rather liberally at the wrong places (i.e. on the windows and lamps), etc. etc. In an effort to save electricity, the city shuts it down from 8am to 11am every morning, but at least it wasn't as cold as Jaipur, and the roof top restaurant was actually quite nice (well, not the rooftop, nor the restaurant, but the view was). In terms of air quality, Jodhpur was only a marginal improvement over Bikaner, but the fort is high enough above the rest of the city that it was ok.

That fort was actually quite nice, even though one would have to be a real nut for armor and weaponry to appreciate a lot of the exhibition in these Rajasthani forts. It was the first such place that offered an audio tour (more expensive than a live guide; I guess they know how annoying those guides can be), and it was pretty well restored and preserved, with money from both the Getty Foundation and the UN. The tour was well done, although at the end they lost it a bit, when two female descendents of the Maharaja were asked to talk about their lives now. One was shamelessly promoting her publishing house, while the other was blubbering incoherently about how looking at the fort to her is like looking at a computer window and how she's crying thinking about it and how it's all for her family god.

Anyways, at that point my camera battery was empty and we were pretty exhausted after all this, so we just made a quick stop at the very decent Jaswant Thada memorial to Jaswant Singh II, and then took off to the airport. Arriving back in Mumbai, we had to yell at some tout as soon as we left the terminal, since he wouldn't take our ignoring him at first and then saying no twice for an answer. Soon after that we took in some fresh Mumbai air, realizing that maybe this place isn't so bad after all; there's always worse, apparently.

We are still a bit puzzled about the great allure of Rajasthan to Western tourists. The British guy in Bikaner had told us about Peru, and slowly walking up the Andes or floating down the Amazon river sounds so much nicer right about now. We are also wondering whether we could possibly be the only Westerners prepared to tell the endless touts and hawkers and scammers to fuck off, because they obviously keep trying and sometimes seem genuinely surprised when we respond unkindly. Could we possibly be the only Westerners who are wondering what people must be smoking when they talk about spirituality here? We see a lot of in-your-face religiosity and a lot of praying and talk about god, yes. Everything seems religious here, but spiritual? Not so much. We can't see much spirituality in driving like an ass, talking out of your ass, cutting in line like an ass, or feeding plastic garbage to your holy cow. Another one is warmth and hospitality. Getting asked literally fifty times a day which country we are from stops feeling warm and fuzzy real quick, as does getting stared at like a two-headed Martian in the zoo. The usual mix of having people bend over backwards to crawl up our ass on the one hand and getting scammed and taken for a ride on the other doesn't help much either.

Anyways, enough of that. Not sure where we'll go on our next trip, maybe Orissa, maybe Gujarat, and maybe we'll have a little less to whine about then.

Bordi

2006-01-24T07:52:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, we drove up to Bordi, a small Parsi town with a lovely beach 150km or so north of Mumbai. Well, let's be clear, the beach is lovely, in that it's 17km long, when the tide is low, it's 1km to the water, and there's hardly anybody there. Other than that, the water is sewage brown, there's plenty of plastic garbage, and plenty of people going for a shit onto the beach.

First we thought we should go to a place further inland that advertised itself as a Nature Retreat. We got there after passing a number of dusty and already pretty dried up villages - monsoon ended only two months ago, but around here, there's not much green left. The place itself looked green enough, but we knew we were in for some trouble when we saw three large tourist air-conditioned busses on the parking lot. As soon as we opened the doors of our trusted Ambassador, we heard loud screams of fun and teenage laughter from what turned out to be the dining hall. Since that's not exactly our idea of refuge from Mumbai, we made a quick round to take a look at the premises and left for Bordi.

Bordi also had its fair share of hysterical fun and laughter, but it came from the town's cricket field, which was far enough from our little Parsi hotel that not even the over-amplified loudspeakers announcing this and that and the other could reach us. Our host seemed a very laid back chap and didn't even get his pants in a knot when we told him that we'll first take a look at the other hotels in town before we decide to stay at his. Of course, he did try to convince us that the other hotel in town was entirely booked, which didn't seem likely, since his was entirely empty, and as expected turned out to be BS.

But we stayed at his hotel, the Gool Khush Resort, because it seemed nicer than the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC) hotel nearby, whose manager had a bit of a smell of a bureaucrat, whereas the Gool Khush seemed very hospitable. Of course, hospitality necessarily means that the host gets to ask all kinds of nosy questions, orders us around ("Sit! Lock the car! You should not smoke! You don't eat enough! Go for a swim! Come back in half an hour!"), and generally becomes a bit of a pain in the ass pretty quickly.

But we are good guests, so we locked the car, we even shut down the car engine before that, just as he told us, then we went for a half hour walk to the beach and came back to meet him, so we could drive him to a nearby village, where he would introduce us to a guide, who would sheppard us up some mountain to a debilitated Parsi cave the next day. It seemed a matter of life and death that we get a guide, and a good one at that, someone who speaks English to explain everything to us. In addition, we were also told not to trust anyone, so we should bring some chalk with us to mark our way up the mountain, so that we wouldn't get lost on the way back. Fair enough, an English speaking guide might be good, and we'll see about that chalk.

Anyways, after being told to drive slowly, shut down the engine, and lock the car, we met our guide. Needless to say, he was drunk and didn't speak a word of English, and the second one seemed sober and didn't speak a word of English. But the village was interesting, with lots of women coming down from the mountains, balancing tons of wood on their heads as they walked very quickly and barefoot. As usual, hardly any men could be seen working. It still seems one of the mysteries of rural India that the guys don't seem to be doing much other than getting drunk, while the women seem to be working 24/7. Of course, it would also be entirely inappropriate for a man to offer a seat to a woman in the bus, so they are usually the ones standing, no matter how old.

The next morning, we were told to eat glucose against the terrible exhaustion and the paining that we will feel after walking up the mountain, but to stay away from water. A little bit of mango juice we were allowed though. Our host strongly advised not to go to work the next day, because we'd be paining just too much, and in any event we'd be much too tired to drive home to Mumbai after that walk. Oh, and we should lock our car before we start walking.

What he didn't mention was that at 6am, the railway crossing to the village would be permanently closed and that we'd have to honk the horn to wake up the attendant. Luckily, he of course called us on our mobile a few minutes after we left to let us know that we have to call him when we find the guide. Not that Ksenia hadn't already figured out by then that honking the horn should get us across the railroads, but it was a gentle reminder that we aren't alone in the wilderness.

The walk up the mountain to the Parsi caves was nice and as expected not exactly like climbing up the Mount Everest. Our guide was for some reason racing like it's a competition, so we made it up there in less than two hours, and one would have to be fairly short mental capacity to get lost, because there was a trail and not many other choices to go, other than up the mountain, following the trail. The caves themselves were pretty sad and appropriately littered with plastic garbage, but the views were not bad and the air was sort of clean. Despite originally being the location were the first Parsis fleeing from Persia were in hiding and kept their holy fire for twelve years, there was also a little Hindu shrine nearby and two orange Hindu flags. Our pre-selected guide didn't speak a word, but went for a prayer, then disappeared somehow, and then came back.

Back in the hotel, we witnessed a modern day grown up woman and what might have been a brother splashing around in the swimming pool, she in bikini, paddling around with her glasses on, he in Speedos silently ruddering the short distance of the pool back and forth. It was a bit strange, but maybe not as strange as the extended family lunch that followed, in complete silence.

Back on the so-called highway to Mumbai, some other modern day guy in a baseball cap and expensive car tried to cut us off by an inch or two, like driving is a videogame, and when I showed him the finger, he proceeded to play some child's game with us whereby he'd pull up next to me, forcing me to step on the brakes as I was approaching the next truck or rickshaw crawling about at pedestrian speed on the highway.

Meanwhile, I still haven't gotten rid of a pretty constant cough and running nose that I've been basically having since November, a month after the monsoon ended. Sometimes a nice headache and a slight fever gets added, so I have decided that maybe Mumbai really is a health hazard. Turns out, by Indian standards, RSPM (Respirable Suspended Particulate Matter) concentration of 100 µg/m3 is considered acceptable, but it's more like 350 µg/m3 on average during the winter, which is well above what's called the hazardous danger mark of 300 µg/m3.

Ah well, tomorrow until Sunday we are going to Rajasthan. Maybe desert dust is better than Mumbai. Ksenia will be looking for fabrics, while I am tempted to look for a gas mask.

Going South

2006-01-19T09:47:00.000-08:00

So our trip to the South was moderately successful. One thing Indian airlines have going for them, is that the food is consistently edible. The coffee is unsurprisingly the worst on the planet, but the food isn't bad. It sort of even makes up for the fact that no-one ever wants to see any ID. They instead prefer to have you show them your boarding card about five times, and God forbid your hand luggage has no luggage tag, or even the luggage tag of a different airline. They have a little box with the luggage tags from all the different airlines, and you better pick the right one, or else it won't get stamped as the bags get x-rayed. The box looks a bit like a box of candies, so in that regard, their security measures are kind of cute, although probably even less effective than the ridiculous taking off your shoes ceremony they invented in the US.

Anyways, we arrived in Bangalore and were almost impressed with the fact that Bangalore's name Green City isn't entirely pulled out of thin air. It's noticeably greener than Mumbai, which of course doesn't mean much. There's a hole bunch of colleges, an army of software companies, and then the real army in town. I don't know for what purpose exactly, but the Indian Army occupies large areas right in what seemed to be the middle of town. Or maybe it was the Air Force, because there was also a sad looking statue of some little jet fighter or something right in the middle of some intersection.

We eventually made it to Nrityagram, which was quite nice. Right next to it is a fancy Taj resort, and Nrityagram itself is a nice little place. They take on only six dance students every six years, two of which, we were told, actually make it all the way. We saw them rehearsing for an Odissi performance, which was really quite fascinating. The were performing at The Joyce Theater in NYC last year, and apparently will go on tour in the US later this year.

We then took off to Mysore and arrived pretty late by train. As we got off the train, we got, as usual, mobbed by an army of rickshaw drivers, but we always prefer to stand in line for the pre-paid rickshaws, even though it might not actually be cheaper. This time, we got yelled at by some guy who told us that it's against the law to smoke in public and that we should study the law before coming here. We were too tired to tell him to shove it, so we just stepped away from him. Presumably it's decidedly not against the law for the rickshaw driver to yell out to everybody standing or sitting around which hotel we had asked him to drive us to, because that's exactly what happened. At least no one gasped ah, expensive hotel! like the rickshaw driver in Kotchi did a few weeks ago.

Anyways, the next day our itinerary brought us to the Karnataka State Silk Factory, which, sad as that may be, turned out to be pretty much the highlight of the trip. Basically, they just let you walk around the factory, no one bothers you, everybody was friendly and no one made a fuss. So we walked by a zillion machines (the older ones Swiss, the newer ones Japanese), from where they twist, wind, double, and rewind the silk yarn to rows and rows of screaming loud silk saree weaving machines, all operated by one or two guys. Unfortunately, photography was not allowed, but the machines were quite complicated, and some of the patterns were quite elaborate. The people were obviously proud of their work, and were happy to try to show us how the machines function. This one jolly happy chap was asking me how much money I make in Mumbai - it's a pretty common question of strangers to ask - and then he complained laughingly that the Rs6,000/month that ($150) he makes after 30 years of service are not quite enough.

Our next stop was the Government Sandalwood Factory, pretty much next door, but that place was more like a deserted museum and there wasn't much to see. So we went to the Mysore Palace. For some reason, we couldn't really warm up to that building. Maybe it's because it's probably the youngest palace I have ever seen (it's not even 100 years old), or maybe it was the crowd. Our Brahmin tour guide told us at least six times that the palace is decorated with 100,000 light bulbs, which didn't really help, and by the 10th time he marveled over useless stupid facts like this chair is made of 65kg of silver, that box is made of 17kg of gold, these windows were made in Belgium, those mirrors were brought here from Bohemia, and so on and so forth, we were about ready to smack him. Funnily enough, their website only mentions 97,000 light bulbs, so maybe that explains his silence when I asked him whether those 100,000 light bulbs all work. By the way, the palace was occupied by the last Mysore Maharaja, whose father had built it (well, he didn't build anything, he just went on an expensive shopping trip to Europe). His big fat son is now a politician.

After that, we had about enough of royal families and annoying tour guides, so we took off in a bus to Mudumalai. It was a bit of a challenge to actually find the right bus, because no one seemed to know or care when there's a bus going in that direction, or if they did know, they all seemed to be talking out of their asses, because we got about five different departure times from three different people. Eventually, we found our bus, kick boxed our way to some seats and there we went and arrived pretty late in the evening.

We stayed two nights in Mudumalai, because it was green and calm, and because it turned out that it wasn't actually simply a rumor that there's wild animals living there. The first morning we went for a two hour walk with a guide and a French couple from La RÃ©union, and we saw a whole lot of elephant shit. No elephants, but at least their bathroom. We saw a lot of deer, some peacocks, but no tigers or even boers. I wouldn't completely rule out that people here would simply get up even earlier in the morning than we did, just to strategically place some elephant shit here and there to scam the tourists, but the next day, we did actually see a real wild elephant and a boer. And tiger shit, or so we were told. The evening before, we had also seen a pretty impressive elephant feeding ceremony in an elephant camp and made acquaintance with one elephant that was rumored to have killed 18 people. He was a bit mad, we were told, but now he is fine.

From Mudumalai, our trip went literally downhill. First we made a stop in Ooty, which was pretty unattractive. Always on the hunt for the ultimate fabrics, we were led to the house of a Toda family. The fabrics weren't very impressive, and the man sadly smelled of alcohol on this early afternoon, but their houses were quite interesting.

Then we took the toy train to Mettupalayam. Because that utterly unhelpful woman at the Mysore train station ticket counter was not in the mood to make reservations for us, we were left with buying last-minute tickets, which got us standing room only in the completely overcrowded general admissions car, right behind the criminally loud steam engine, with hot steam and smoke for added pleasure. That trip lasted about three and a half hours, and really wasn't all the fun that it's made up to be. Judging from the ecstatic screaming every time we went through a tunnel, the other passengers were having the trip of their lifetime though.

These three hours of madness were only the beginning for us. We then changed into the Express night train to Chennai. Luckily, we got a private sleeper coach, but we didn't get much sleep, not least because the train conductors were helpfully knocking on our door asking about this and that and insisting that we fill out their customer satisfaction survey before they would leave us alone and let us sleep. The train arrived at 5am, and by that time we were seriously ready for a shower, but we still had another day to kill, and what better than taking a two hour bus ride to Kanchipuram, a town of many temples and many hand looms for silk weaving.

We went to RIDE and had a chat with their director, who was quite the character. There weren't many sarees to see, but it was still pretty interesting. The director was basically saying that the poor get screwed by religion and corruption and that his organization is trying to teach them how to take their lives into their own hands, especially the women. We didn't quite get what he was saying about getting death threats from some Swedish guy, and what the story was about him getting his feet washed by his maid, but it was an experience nevertheless.

The bus ride back to the Chennai airport was another death trap, but we somehow survived it and actually managed not to miss our flight. For some reason, you get cold wet towels in the plane these days. This time, we didn't mind, and as we wiped our faces with them, they turned suitably brown from all the dust and dirt, so at that point it was definitely time to get home.

Holidays

2006-01-09T11:48:00.000-08:00

So I haven't blogged in a while, but we are still sort of alive. It's not that the holidays were particularly time consuming or that nothing happened, but basically it seems like the entire town of Mumbai is getting new roads (and even some sidewalks) these days, so traffic has been, well, even worse. In fact, I've been heeding Ksenia's advice and now let Deepak drive me home then and again - and even he has been quietly complaining about the traffic. They basically ripped open everything left, right and middle between home and work and are slowly starting from scratch. With hammers and little buckets of concrete carried by women in flip-flops, mind you, but there's plenty of those around, so I guess it could be slower.

Of course, people still like to double park wherever they please and rickshaws still like to wait for customers practically in the middle of the road, and everyone still loves to make a u-turn against all odds, blocking all traffic in both directions. Nevermind the hawkers and slum dwellings that seem to re-appear within days on the shiny new sidewalks, pushing the pedestrians into the road. Anyways, I've been getting wild fantasies of running over rickshaws, pedestrians and little children, so I guess that was sort of a sign that maybe I should let Deepak drive then and again.

The holidays were pretty much non-existing. No snow, no Christmas trees (apart from plenty of fake ones in malls and stranger places), no days off, a busy business trip to Kanpur between Christmas and New Year, it was not the best birthday for little Jesus. It got a lot worse when we went to church on Christmas eve and the church choir started to sing, because not a single one of the 10 singers could get out a straight note. In fact, they were all solidly atrocious. Nevertheless, the church was packed to the hilt, people practically sitting on our laps, the fully unmemorable sermon and the, entirely dysfunctional sound system nonwithstanding.

Speaking of sound systems, we have yet to see an event where they use some sort of sound system that actually works. It is a given that there will be ear splitting feedbacks, crackling drop-outs, and some sound technician jumping around trying to fix the unfixable. Of course, if and when it does work, usually for a few seconds at a time, the volume is turned up to deafening levels, probably to make up for whatever was missed during the drop-outs.

But what else is new? Well, for starters, our apartment is missing a large mirror, a curtain rod, and the rod for the terrace awning. All gone since the last days of renovation while we were gone to Kerala. Instead, one wall is already leaking moisture again, and the awing has got a nice little hole now. That hole is new, courtesy of our neighbor who for some reason dropped a heavy steel kitchen utensil from her balcony. I have no idea how that utensil is called, suffice to say that it ripped straight through the awning and would certainly have killed anyone who might have happened to sit under the awning. Maybe when people talk about spiritual India what they really mean is that these sorts of things don't even faze you all that much any more.

Or maybe they mean people like Deepak, our driver. He is the only one working in his family of mother, wife, kid, and two brothers, but he's always in a good mood. He had tried to get a job in the army but was too slow a runner, and he tried to get a job with the police, but can't afford the ridiculously high bribes required for that - $3000 or so, he says, and even that doesn't guarantee a job; they might just keep the money. So now he's a driver, and he says: my job no future, but I enjoy. Of course, the big attraction to a position with the police would be the large extra income in bribes, but we can't even imagine him being able to take a bribe, he just seems more like the type who'd be happy to make the world a better place by standing at some road junction detangling traffic jams.

Anyways, he went out of his way to buy Ksenia a flower for Christmas, and we love him. At Rs7000 a month for five days a week, we are paying him a bit more than the standard Rs5000 or so for six days a week, but I think we'll make him a big present when we leave, and I am not even sure he would take money. Our maid, by the way, has already asked us whether she can come with us back to New York, and if it weren't so decadent and illegal, we'd actually be tempted, because she is great as well, even though she was very upset when we got back from Kerala and said to Ksenia: Oh my God, you are turning black! Madam, you have to use bleach creme!

One thing that isn't illegal, but should be are Bollywood movies. The other day we made another desperate attempt at finding some quality entertainment and so we got Salaam Namaste, which was a big hit last year and apparently caused a bit of a circus, because it features a live-in relationship. Bottom line is, it's simply and utterly unwatchable crap. How on earth anyone above the age of four can find this stuff funny is totally beyond me. It's not even Louis De Funes or Jerry Lewis kind of stupid funny, it's just painfully atrociously unbelievable not funny. It's way beyond so unfunny that it even passed any chance of becoming funny in a twisted kind of way again. That's how bad it is, and, yes, that's pretty bad.

But enough of that. Wednesday is a holiday. I don't even know which one, really, but we are off to the South again, until Sunday. We might have cramped our itinerary a bit too much, but the plan is to go to Nrityagram near Bangalore, then to Mysore, two nights in Mudumalai, via some weird mountain railway and a night express train to Kanchipuram, and then back home via Chennai.

Kerala

2005-12-23T22:49:00.000-08:00

Our trip to Kerala started at 3am in the morning with the riksha driver making a big detour via the international airport to get us to the domestic airport. I suppose he was assuming that we must be wanting to get out of India, even though we repeatedly told him domestic airport. Or maybe he just wanted to take us for a ride and a little early morning scam. Either way, we were passing hundreds of parked rikshas, most of them with the driver sleeping under a blanket on the back bench. Even Mumbai gets a bit cooler at night at this time of the year.

We landed in Kochi at 8am, and the air was noticeably nicer than Mumbai, even while walking from the aircraft to the terminal, which looked like a repurposed train station. Most men were wearing white lungis, which look very comfortable. It would be nice if one could wear those in NYC, but then again, seeing that all the men in Kerala are constantly playing with their lungi, tucking them in and out, lifting them up or down and adjusting them, maybe not.

The can ride to the ferry for Fort Kochi was a bit of a ride from hell. The roads are much better than in Mumbai, but the drivers are even more suicidal. There was a disturbingly large amount of huge advertising posters everywhere along the 20 miles road, but eventually, we got dropped off at the ferry. Of course it was the wrong ferry, the ones for the tourist, so we got immediately harassed left and right, as we must have been the day's first prey. But we successfully dodged this second scam of the day and rather than paying Rs400 for the tourist boat, we walked a bit further down to catch the Rs2.5 regular ferry, which had the added bonus of watching the security guy lock up all the passengers behind a steel gate as they were waiting for the boat to come in. Which it did, 15mins late, with another ferry in tow, whose engine had apparently given up.

In Fort Kochi, we had our first of many encounters with riksha drivers who simply refused to turn on the meter. At first, we were rather annoyed, but over the days it dawned on us that maybe this is one of the features of Kerala's long history of communist governments. Maybe you can't have the highest literacy rate and lowest infant mortality rate in India, a noticeably more equitable distribution of wealth and a school in literally every village, and still expect the riksha drivers to use the meter. Of course, the rikshas were still pretty cheap, but at two or three times the going rate in Mumbai, one had to wonder whether this was the tourist rate or whether the locals really pay Rs2000 or so a month just for their daily commute.

Kochi is quite nice, but the some of the aggressive sales tactics got a bit on our nerves quite quickly, and almost every riksha driver made the same joke about wanting to give us a ride in his Ferrari, which also got a bit old. One driver tried to tell us that petrol is much more expensive in Kerala than in Mumbai (it is not, as the central government sets the price). A waiter ordered us to sit and relax. And we tried a ayurvedic massage, which Ksenia loved and I found a bit too up close and personal for comfort (I take a Thai massage any time over that).

Somehow the nicest part was to sit in a tea house just a bit away from the main drag. But in the evening we saw a Kathakali performance, and that was great. Yes, there were virtually no Indians in the audience, and it was more an exhibition than the real thing, but it was very interesting and beautiful. We finished the evening with a pretty bad dinner and the next day we had a cold shower and decidedly horrible breakfast in our overpriced hotel - white toast and jam consisting of 50% sugar and 50% gelatin. What the hell happened to idli, we wondered).

After that, we took a two hour bus ride to Alleppey. Ksenia got a seat and observed a very suave guy quietly and slowly slipping a piece of paper into a female passenger's hands, who took it after fifteen minutes with a coy smile, while I was standing the whole time, watching the communist flags go by. In Alleppey, we got picked up by the cook for the houseboat that we had rented in Kochi, and then we argued with the riksha driver, who also refused to turn on the meter. The cook got quite annoyed with us and said come on, sit down, everything is ready to go, which of course it wasn't. But eventually our houseboat got moving and we got some food, which was actually quite nice.

We spent 24 hours on the boat, which is about enough for our taste. It's nice and relaxing at all, but looking at rice fields isn't really all that thrilling, nevermind the fact that one basically takes the boat through other people's back yards, where the women wash their clothes, bathe, and brush their teeth, and some children (much better dressed than in Mumbai) ask the tourists for money.

Ksenia and I entered a lengthy discussion about possible explanations for the size of the paddles that the locals use with their little wooden boats. These paddles are basically teaspoon size: they are very small and look almost fragile, with an undersized surface for effective paddling, and they are only one-sided, i.e. they have to change their grip, if they'd like to paddle on the other side of the boat. If they had better paddles, let alone contraptions for actually rowing instead of paddling, they'd be quite a bit faster. After pondering many theories ranging from lack of materials or engineering expertise or rowing muscles, to they aren't in a rush to get anywhere, to maybe they had never thought about it, we settled on the explanation that maybe they used to use these little boats to go on tiny canals into the rice fields, where rowing would have been impossible and paddling with teaspoons offered the best balance of moving forward and protecting the rice fields.

Anyways, somehow the engine of our own boat gave up pretty much in time for sunset, so we got towed for a bit by another boat, and the next morning we woke up to the smell of diesel exhaust as the cook and the two other crew members tried to repair the engine. Eventually, we got back to Alleppey, where we found a number of touts who didn't understand the meaning of the word no, but also a bus station attendant with badly deformed legs who pointed us very helpfully towards the right bus to Thiruvalla, our next stop.

Thiruvalla has the only temple in Kerala where Kathakali is performed daily as part of the religious ceremony, and it also has a number of temples in the surrounding villages, so that's where we wanted to go. But first Ksenia needed another ayurvedic massage, so we went to a place that was listed in our Kerala travel book, but that place really looked more a hospital than anything else. They didn't seem to have any patients, because the owner/doctor pretty much spent his whole afternoon with us, embarrassingly eager to please us, to make us want to come back tomorrow, and to tell all our fiends. He even reserved a room and drove us to a hotel that he insisted we stay in, even though we had told him a few times that we don't know how long and where we want to stay and that we might actually leave town altogether.

So instead, we just had lunch at the hotel, pondered our options and called a place outside of town, which sounded much nicer than this hotel in the middle of Thiruvalla. Of course, the receptionist followed us onto the street wondering where we are going, but ah well. We took one of the many HM Ambassador taxi cabs, and even the cab drivers that were immediately surrounding us were laughing with me when I laughed about the price the driver wanted for the 2km ride.

But at least we got there, and we were quite happy with our choice this time, the Vanjipuzha Palace in Chengannur, where it was quiet and green, the food was great and the staff was very helpful. Maybe a bit too helpful, because, since it is more a homestay than a hotel, the staff had no problem asking us all kinds of private questions, insisted on watching us eat while they served us very yummy food, and tried to walk into our room for our wake up call at 7am. Like many in Kerala, they are also Christians, which got a bit annoying when they started preaching about it or acted as if that were a special accomplishment, and downright embarrassing when one of them gave us a tour to a number of Hindu temples while going on about how Christianity is the opposite of Hinduism's idol worship, as he called it. Strangely, he also was a devout anti-communist, the main reason seemingly being that the communist government was to blame for labor costs being too high and so many rice fields were no longer economical.

Either way, he was quite knowledgeable about the area, and he showed us a lot of things that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. In the evening, we went to the Kathakali temple and apparently he was able to tell us what the story was all about just from reading the hand gestures. Amazingly, the Kathakali performance is almost every night from 10pm to 5am. Not there were many people there apart from us, but it was quite impressive. Later on, there was a bit of a cat fight amongst the staff, because he hadn't told the others where we were going or when we would come back, so they got all worried and showed up at 2am at the temple to find us and take us back to the hotel. Sadly, both staff members were strongly hinting that they would like to help us get themselves or their children a work visa for the US, again emphasizing that they are Christians.

Anyways, we left after three hours of sleep to catch a 6am train to Trivandrum. We only had time for a quick stop at the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, whose inner square was closed for non-Hindus anyways, as is the case in a number of temples, and then it was back to Mumbai, Ksenia's backpack enriched with a number of fabrics and a hand-made metal mirror she had bought and me already looking where should we go onto our next little trip.

Crying About Your Nanny

2005-12-16T07:42:00.000-08:00

So I've been kind of lazy in terms of writing here, but while Ksenia was a bit obsessing about sewing some curtains and pillow cases, I was obsessing about re-writing my photo blog. Neither of us is done yet, but then again, nor are the painters, so our apartment is still a construction site. Of course, the difference with the painters is that they haven't even started yet. I guess that's a good thing in a way, because we really were not in the mood to have these guys make a bloody mess again - at least not right under our noses, so we told the landlord to have them patch up the walls while we go on vacation.

So rather than them doing a real full paint job while we are at home, they'll do a crap paint job while we go to Kerala for a few days, starting tomorrow. Not that they wouldn't have done a crap job anyways, but the hope is that they will actually be done by the time we come back. One can always hope. We'll be happy if the currently still barren and exposed walls display some sort of resemblance of paint when we get back.

So our flight to Kerala is tomorrow at 5am. Speaking of hope, the idea is that we'll catch a few days of semi-clean air in a reasonably laid back setting. Here in Mumbai, whenever Ksenia goes out during the day for this or the other errand (such as getting her own debit card from HDFC, which apparently is impossible, but that's another story), it only takes about two hours until she's entirely exhausted. I also have been feeling slightly sick for a good two weeks now, probably due to the air - after all, the daily pollution chart on TV keeps telling me that pollution is at unhealthy levels, usually just barely below hazardous. As if I needed confirmation.

Kerala holds the promise of green landscape, backwater boat rides, and mellow people. I am betting on a huge population of mosquitos as well, so we better unpack our Malaria pills. Everybody keeps telling me that Kerala is great, but then again, a lot of very intelligent people apparently really loved the movie Swades (Our Country). I only saw the last 10 minutes of it, but Ksenia had gotten it, because it supposed to be a thoughtful movie by the same director who did Lagaan, and not yet another Bollywood trivia. Apparently, I only needed to see the last 10 minutes, because there was more use of the word motherland than you can shake a stick at. It was an utterly unbearable patriotic shmaltz production all the way. Still, I was kind of disappointed that I had missed the best scene, which was when the main actor Shahrukh Khan (probably the top Bollywood actor at the moment), who played a grown up scientist at NASA, started to cry like a little girl because he was missing his childhood nanny...

Anyways, in other news, we tried to go to Shivaji Park twice now (to play frisbee), but both times the place was mobbed with hordes of pretty looking followers. Maybe it's not a coincidence that the acronym for Shiv Sena is SS, because they do look like a bunch of Hitler Youth guys (khaki shorts, white shirt, black head gear, dull faces), and they have an insane ideology and plenty of criminal energy to match. There were cops everywhere, including cops with machine guns cruising around on decrepit scooters. Not our scene really, so that was that in terms of playing frisbee in the park.

Alright, so I am trying to finish this on a good note. Ok, the weather is decent, the maid is great, we love Deepak, and we are going to Kerala tomorrow. Work is a mixed bag of good stuff and incredible insanity, but compared to other things, it is a place of retreat, which says something about Mumbai I guess. Which reminds me: a colleague at work told me that he was trying to bribe the MTNL clerk to get his DSL service set up properly and quickly. Believe it or not, the clerk ended up calling my colleague's father: Your son has very bad manners, I don't want a bribe, we have a capacity problem! Yes, apparently, everybody knows someone with influence in Mumbai, and it's ok to complain to grown-up men's fathers about their son's manners. I really need to see that scene with India's Brad Pitt crying about his nanny...

Holiday Party

2005-12-03T09:13:00.000-08:00

Well, our apartment is still a bloody mess and of course nobody has showed up yet to start painting the walls, so they are still dusty with cement droppings everywhere. On the upside, we got rid of our entirely overpriced and underperforming internet cable service. The bastards had charged us almost $100/month for a broadband connection that was 56kps dial-up at best. But Ksenia finally took matters into her hands and went down to MTNL, the semi-government telephone provider.

Back when we had moved in, MTNL weren't able to get us a working phone connection for ages, but I had been told that once they install DSL, it is actually very fast and cheap. We had tried at some point, but nothing ever happened after they determined that the phone lines in our building are crap. Funnily enough, they had left the DSL router in our apartment for about two months. Phone bills come every other month, so we weren't all that pleased when we discovered a few weeks ago that they were charging us for DSL service anyways.

However, to our great surprise, two days after Ksenia went to their office (it's a decrepit building that looks more like a prison, and the office rooms look more like disorganized torture chambers), they installed DSL and everything worked. Well, they couldn't be bothered or were incapable to get their DSL play nicely with our router, but that was to be expected, and we took care of that ourselves. But since then, speed is great, Vonage works, and we are happy.

There were more positive developments this week. Our new maid started and she's great. She is Karilyn's maid's aunt, a bit older, and positively pleasant. She actually figured out to best mop the terrace, which is really advanced service. Also, Deepak, our trusted driver, keeps cracking us up. He always seems incredibly disappointed when we tell him that he doesn't have to work tomorrow and asks but why, Sir? And when Ksenia told him that on Saturdays I am her driver, he cracked up laughing. If I happen to see him in the evening when he drops off the car at work, he always tries to drive me all the way home, even though that means he's got to take the train all the way back to his home, and he can't believe that I of course insist to drop him off near where he lives and drive myself.

Ksenia tries to teach him a bit more English, so by now he knows that it's not something something but a little bit. Apparently, it took him quite a while to learn the words a lot, inside, outside, and flyover - flyover is what Indians call the highway bridges that cross local roads, and Deepak would always call them flowers instead. Anyways, we are overpaying him by quite a bit, but he's great.

Finally, yesterday was my company's year-end party at the JW Marriott. The theme was Bollywood Bash and it really was the strangest company party I have ever been to. In New York, the company usually pays for some professional entertainment at these sorts of events - some band and/or acrobats or whatever. In Mumbai, employees insist that they will provide the entertainment themselves, no outside help needed.

So they had a sort of competition with a number of Bollywood movie scenes being re-enacted, including the costumes, dance and singing. Of course, I didn't understand a word, but within minutes, the crowd of about 500 was absolutely ecstatically screaming and cheering. The whole thing culminated in senior managers doing an absolutely gay looking and incredibly funny dance scene, and that kicked off the open floor with hours of Bollywood dance music (interrupted with a bit of Smells Like Teen Spirit, oddly enough).

There was plenty of food, but no tables. I had wondered about that at the beginning, but I then realized that nobody needs any tables, because absolutely everybody was dancing like crazy. And I mean like crazy - dancing at Indian office parties apparently does not mean to shake your leg a little, trying not to make a complete ass of yourself. No, making a complete ass of yourself is the absolute requirement here, it is in fact the whole point.

Rather than just dance, you have to re-enact the dance scene of the movie that the song originated from. I had seen a bit of that in clubs, but I had not realized that my colleagues apparently were all total experts in Bollywood movies, because they re-enacted, and how! Grown-up men in their 40s doing the silliest dance moves imaginable, the arms waving wildly in the air, legs all over the place, hips going left and right, and pelvis going back and forth. The whole deal, for hours, and unlike in New York, they weren't even slightly drunk. It was quite a scene, and of course the only one making an ass of himself was me, by trying very hard not to make an ass of himself...

So this was a pretty good week, I have to say.

Ready To Strangle Someone

2005-11-26T05:41:00.000-08:00

Well, I think we've about reached our all-time low in India these days. At least I have, but I think Ksenia is following suit at a life-threatening pace. Today we moved from the hotel back to our apartment. We are not sure yet whether that was a good idea, because the air in our apartment definitely has a certain aura of cancerous dust and disease about it. Then again, our almost three weeks in the Grand Hyatt cost us bloody $1200 just for food and laundry etc. alone. Not that the food had even been any good. In fact, we got pretty sick of their menu, really. Worse, their morning coffee was absolutely poisonous. When the waiter asked me the other morning whether I'd like some coffee, I just told him, "yes, I'd like some coffee, but your coffee is so atrocious that I'd rather decline". I suppose it is a bit of sign of my current state of mind, because I don't usually treat waiters like that.

Anyways, either our relocation guy is even more useless than I had thought, or maybe it's the Grand Hyatt that's to blame, but when it was time to check out of the hotel, nobody seemed to have any idea about the fact that my company will be paying for the room, while I pay for food and laundry, etc. A bit of name dropping and half an hour later they had sorted it out and presented my with my bill of fifty-two thousand Rupees. The price tag of Rs9000 a night didn't even include their crappy breakfast. To top things off, the concierge made me sign my bill twice, because he wasn't pleased with the way my signature looked like the first time around.

We stopped at Barista on our way home for some coffee and breakfast. How is it even possible that breakfast for two at Barista is 10% of what they charged us at the Grand Hyatt? Of course, at Barista they served us our coffee, but then they completely forgot about our food. Add to that the fact that some motorbike rider on crack drove into my car the other day, giving it a seriously nice big scratch. Oh, plus, every evening that I'd come back to the hotel from work, their security staff would stop every car, look underneath them, and peek into the trunk.

They didn't actually really look into the trunk, but they did insist that I open it every single evening. Which, because it's an HM Ambassador, meant that I'd have to switch off the engine, get out of the car, open the trunk, close the trunk, get back into the car, switch on the engine, and drive off. Why? Because I have yet to find a single person around here who is capable of closing, i.e. actually locking, the trunk. Granted, the locks don't seem to be the strong points of my car - it regularly takes 10 minutes every time I get gas for the attendant to figure out how to properly lock the gas tank.

Anyways, so it wasn't even 11am this morning and I was already fully in the mood to kill someone. Mumbai is bloody hot these days and the noise and dust and pollution just never stops. Coming back to our apartment didn't exactly improve my mood. There was cement dust everywhere, there still is. It smells damp and poisonous. It took my an hour to clean my PC - obviously, my landlord's brilliant construction crew had not even considered covering my PC. Our shoes they had managed to first cover in dust and then just throw onto the terrace. Last we spoke to our landlord he proudly announced that he had cleaned the apartment, whining about how much money he had spent, but of course wherever we touched, our hands got covered in dust. The furniture shows nice streaks of dust, because some genius had simply used a dirty wet cloth to smear the dirt around a bit. The couch now displays a cigarette burn, and a piece of wooden ceiling just in front of the terrace is now completely ruined and covered in cement.

So eventually we needed some food and we drove to this fairly decent vegetarian restaurant. Last time we were there they had valet parking. I always use valet parking, because there is zero regular parking to be found in Mumbai. Anyways, this time the guy in the restaurant tells me to just park over there, on the sidewalk. Ok, I park over there and some other guy comes running towards me and tells me to park over there, where there's obviously not enough space for my car. So I go back to the restaurant guy and tell him what the story is, but he obviously doesn't give a fuck, nor does he speak any English now. So I yell at him a bit and ask him why he doesn't just tell me right away that he doesn't have any valet parking. Then I get back into the car, trying to drive off and somehow manage to rip off some other car's front license plate.

Of course, that car's driver gets out, doesn't speak a word of English either, but starts gesturing around. We are immediately surrounded by a dozen gawkers. I tell one of them that there's nothing to fucking see here, why doesn't he just move on? His very thoughtful reply was: "This is India. This is not your country." So the driver can't explain to me what he wants, or rather: how much he wants, but then this very important looking woman comes along, and she's obviously the owner of the car. She has no idea what to do either, other than ordering her driver to write down my license plate number and than turning towards me and telling me all huffy and puffy that I should have seen her car. "Yes, I should have, but I didn't." - "Well, if you drive, you should look." She quite clearly was the expert driver, which would explain why she needs to get driven around by her chauffeur, but I left it at that and drove off.

Our next stop was some other restaurant where the waiter insisted that he doesn't have any cold bottled water, only mineral water that comes in a bottle that is cold. It's one of those small language things. The food wasn't bad, but unfortunately we were sitting outside, next to a main road, and one could just see and smell the dust and exhaust fumes settling onto our dishes. I haven't had a cigarette in two weeks now, maybe that's why I am in such a pissy mood these days, but clearly I am just about ready to strangle someone, or to get out of this shithole, because it's giving me a serious headache these days. But I think we need to clean our apartment first.

Under Construction

2005-11-22T09:54:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, the wonderful effects of being lazy for 10 days in Thailand were pretty much wiped out the second we got back. Actually, before we even took off, Ksenia got sick as a dog with high fever. We arrived in Mumbai at 11pm, Ksenia looking like she was about to die, and the hot and stinking dust of Mumbai didn't help matters either. But it got a lot worse: When we got home to our apartment, we realized that we had returned to a construction site. The landlord had started renovating our apartment to get rid of the mold, and of course our ten days in Thailand were by far not enough to get the job done.

We had pretty much expected that this would be a quick patch-up job, maybe some paint here and there. Instead, the landlord's contractor had basically drilled open every single wall, presumably to waterproof them. Needless to say, the apartment looked like an unmitigated disaster zone. So we looked around a bit and then started driving around town in search of a hotel. At about 2am, after having been turned down by a number of hotels, Ksenia had enough and insisted that there's no way the Grand Hyatt wouldn't have a spare room for a woman on the verge of expiration. So we got a $210 room for the evening. Presumably, we were expected to be grateful.

We still don't know why neither our landlord nor our relocation guy thought it necessary to let us know in advance that we'd be returning from Thailand to a construction site, nevermind arranging for a hotel in advance. In any event, we've been back from Thailand for two weeks today, and we are still in the hotel. The construction crew just finished waterproofing the walls; some time over the next two weeks they will re-paint the apartment. Ksenia was sick in bed for the first week; then it was my turn to have high fever and stay in bed.

In other words: Mumbai has been giving us a fucking headache recently; we could use some vacation again. Ah well...

Koh Pha Ngan, Thailand

2005-11-22T09:31:00.000-08:00

So, rather than trying to get some relaxing vacation done in India, we buggered off to Thailand. A quick four hour flight to Bangkok, then another hour flight to Koh Samui, and there we were, on a tiny little airport with conveyor belts under a bamboo roof. A little boat brought us to Koh Pha Ngan, where we switch to an even smaller boat, and finally we get to a little beach, a couple of nice huts, a small restaurant, Thai massages, steam baths, peace and quiet - exactly what the doctor ordered.

I took us a couple of days until the fact sunk in that Thailand ain't India. While we cannot walk five meters in Mumbai without getting stared at, without getting harassed about something or other, Thais apparently couldn't care less about their tourists - and that's A Good Thing. Nobody trying to sell us anything, nobody yelling "Hello Foreigner!", no retarded young boys running around all giggly, holding hands, or driving around in their Tata trucks with Bollywood music blasting out of the open windows. Instead, people are quiet, calm, reserved. The streets and shops are amazingly clean and organized. What little we saw of Bangkok from the air looked like a well-functioning modern city. No potholes, for a change. Roads actually have markings. Real cars instead of rickshaws.

In short, compared to Mumbai, Thailand was pure paradise. I didn't even mind that I was sick as a dog for two days when we got there. A couple of days later, we were cruising around the island on a dirt bike, visiting a crazy Buddhist monk in his little temple, checked out some other beaches, and tried snorkeling. We gave up on snorkeling very quickly, because the water was full of slightly stinging fish eggs in jelly (or whatever it was), but who cares. The Thai massages were fantastic, the steam room was great, the restaurant food was not too bad, and the other guests were mostly bearable. We passed on a number of party events and instead slept forever and were generally obscenely lazy.

Love Letters

2005-10-22T09:56:00.000-07:00

Today we were walking around the Hanging Gardens in Malabar Hill, supposedly one of the poshest areas in Mumbai, wondering what it is that made someone decide they should be using metal penguins everywhere as trash cans in the garden. There were penguins everywhere. It was good to see that there were trash cans at all to begin with, but then again, judging from the trash people were throwing across the fences of the garden, we presumably weren't the only ones who couldn't quite understand the penguin thing. We also didn't quite get to see what makes Malabar Hill so posh, so off we drove, further down to Colaba.

After a number of detours through tiny streets downtown, we gave up in the silly idea of finding a parking space downtown. This was after we have been having a coffee, when a bunch of kids came to us screaming very excitedly about something or other. It turned out that they were telling us that the cops were about to tow our car. I had never seen a tow truck in this town and had sort of dismissed rumors about the cops actually towing cars, so I have been getting into the habit of parking anywhere where I didn't seem to obstruct traffic too much. But there they were, a bunch of guys in blue overalls, plus a smiling cop who actually spoke English, about to tow our car.

Of course, there was the usual back and forth and here and there and give and take that is the regular mode of communication for us. The cop wanted to see my driver's license and I showed him my New York State license, as I had done in other occasions like these (there had been two of them, both times for being on my mobile while stuck in traffic). In this case, however, the cop didn't simply look at the NYS license, only to decide that he can't be bothered to deal with me, but instead he asked what country I am from. I didn't want to confuse him too much, so I simply said, well, New York is in America. Somehow I came to understand that they wanted me to pay 100 rupees fine at the Dadar police station. I really wasn't in the mood for that, so I asked him, ok, give me a receipt and I pay you. I don't know which part of that simple suggestion did the trick, but somehow the cop then decided that he can't be bothered after all, so he just told me to park elsewhere and left. So I parked the car right next to another No Parking sign, but this one was in a dead end street, and that was good enough, I suppose.

Of course, the kids who had warned me about my car being about to get towed were very eager to get their tip, and I thought, ah well, I really never give money to kids, but in this case, they did a good job, so I gave them two rupees each.

Anyways, so downtown there was no parking of course, except that there are a few official parking lots that cost something like four rupees an hour. By that time we were absolutely starving, so we went to Indigo, which has very good Italian food. Well, the salad and the wine and the quiche was great, the pasta was pretty bad. As a special treat we had the slightly doubtful pleasure of sitting right next to a big table of Westerners who were surrounding Gregory David Roberts, the author of Shantaram, which is currently one of the two must-reads about Mumbai (the other being Maximum City).

After that we went to the National Centre for the Performing Arts to see Love Letters, a play by A.R. Gurney. Their parking lot had a big sign about being full, but this being India, we knew that such things don't mean anything, so when we asked the parking lot attendant whether we can park there he said but of course! We quite liked the play, actually. Well, first we didn't but it got a lot better. But what absolutely boggled our minds was that at the end, during the very final monologue of the very good male actor, right in the middle of his quiet tender speech, there were not one, but two people from the audience who walked out. With loud steps, one shuffling her feet, the other clicking her high-heels. The poor actor's eyes followed one of them as she was making her exit from the audience, and I don't know what he was thinking, but we just couldn't believe it, because, well, it was just un-fucking-believable that people would be so incredibly crass and rude to make that sort (or any sort) of exit during a final quiet scene of a pretty good play.

It was really quite amazing. I mean, this wasn't some kind of improv theater in a garage, tickets were relatively expensive and people seemed definitely upper class. But with all the crotch scratching and spitting everywhere, the car honking from behind in standing traffic at a red light, the blatant staring and Hello foreigner! wherever we go on the one hand and the obedient Yes, Sir! Thank You, Madam! one the other hand, these two walk-outs really get the first prize in our Incredible India Awards.

Matheran

2005-10-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we drove to Matheran, probably one of the most popular and nicest places in Mumbai's vicinity. Matheran is a hill-station, 2600ft above sea level, and is apparently the only village or town in India where vehicles are not allowed, so it has lovely air and a calm atmosphere, despite being quite touristy. It is only 110km east of Mumbai, but of course that still means a 3 hour drive. Add another hour, if you can't read Hindi like us. We were kind of hoping to see signs for Matheran or Chauk or any of the other places shown on our fairly useless map, but no such luck, at least not in English. I had noticed on the way to Kashid that there were big signs for Goa for a while and then, all of a sudden, none of that, and we missed the road to Goa. So I was extra careful this time, but we ended up doing a little detour, reversing directions and passing through the same highway toll booth three times, until we finally understood the toll booth guy's directions. We were meant to actually make a u-turn right at the toll booth, to get onto that little pothole infested dirt track, which then brought us to the road to Chauk. The toll booth guys only made us pay once, but they probably had a good laugh about those stupid Westerners. Try that on the NJ Turnpike, and you probably get shot at.

Anyways, so eventually we found Neral, which is the valley town where we could have taken a little toy train, which takes two and a half hours to climb up to Matheran, if that train weren't currently out of service, due to the heavy rains this year. So we drove up the hill to where the road stops at a big chaotic parking lot. The road up there was quite something - hundreds of feet straight down on one side, canyons of water drains ripped and carved into the semi-destroyed road on the other side. The road was basically made of clay and had a nice 20% or so climb. One really had to wonder when this road will go down the valley in a landslide, but after half an hour driving in first gear we arrived and left the car on the parking lot.

From there we took horses, which is the main means of transportation in Matheran. Of course, there were two horsemen enthusiastically fighting for our business and before I knew it they literally pulled me in two different directions. We are not exactly practiced horse riders, so the fact that our horses were a bit on the small side was quite welcome. Half an hour later our horses dropped us off at the hotel that we had made reservations for. The place was recommended to me, and it looked like an odd mix of Sovjet exteriors and British-Indian colonial - well, at least the dining hall did, the bungalow-type hotel rooms looked just Soviet and didn't have any windows to speak of. But they bathrooms were ok, and we picked the one that smelled a little less strong of whatever hotels in India smell like, probably some sort of anti-mold chemicals or maybe it's anti-cockroach spray or whatever. There also was a strangely shaped and unused swimming pool, a cricket field that had not seen a batsman in 50 years, and something that was threateningly advertised as a discotheque, but which luckily also just turned out to be a threat.

The food was fantastic though. All vegetarian (and of course no alcohol), but very very yummy. The dining hall had a huge mirror with a kitchy etching of some wild horses, but one could well imagine a bunch of stiff British officers walking around in jackboots smoking cigars, so we didn't even really mind that there was zero relationship between the price they had quoted on the phone, the prices on their price list, and the price we actually ended up paying.

The rest of the weekend we pretty much spent on horses and feet, going from one valley view point to another. People were annoyingly eager to try to nail us down on certain times of the day (or the next day) when they would be waiting for us with their horses, and wherever we went we or our horseman got asked where we were from and which hotel we were staying, but other than that, it was all good. One of our horsemen liked to watch WWF on television, the other one told us that his horse was the fastest horse in town, and of course the blatant staring and hello, how are you never ended.

We took one of the bigger horses once, but that was a bit scary, since it's not like we actually have any clue about how to ride a horse. We also firmly decided that we don't like monkeys. There were quite a few monkeys running around, and they are well trained to get their food by scaring tourists off their bags. Just a few minutes after we had seen one of the monkeys grab a plastic bag out of some tourist's hands, I was sitting down with my bag next to me, lighting a cigarette, and before I knew it some monkey had snatched my bag and ran away with it. I guess I should not have left my bag alone, especially not if it contains a few slices of sweet bread from a Bandra bakery. So that monkey grabs the bag and as I try to go after him, the bastard just retreats right to the very edge of the cliff, a couple of hundred feet of air behind him. And then he hisses at me like a bloody monkey who just stole my bag, which by the way contained my passport, foreign registration card and another camera lens.

But of course that monkey is too stupid to actually open the bag and get the bread. Just like they are smart enough to get scared when you simply pick up a stone and raise your hand, but they are too stupid to throw stones themselves, thank god. So eventually he gets bored with the bag, leaves it right at the edge of the cliff, where there's already a nice slope, and buggers off. Alright. Needless to say, we have an audience now and one guy deplores me not to go get the bag, because, you know, it is very dangerous and it goes down a couple of hundred feet. Well, yes, we are in India, and thankfully, it's not like they turned that view point into a plot of concrete with benches and garbage cans on top and nice railings and warning signs around it, like they would in the US. And if anyone fell down that cliff into the valley, good luck with trying to sue the town of Matheran, telling them they didn't know that falling down the cliff could hurt.

Anyways, so Ksenia was no longer in the mood to use her video camera or to take pictures, but just asked me nicely not to kill myself, as I got onto my knees, crawled towards my bag (go slow! someone yelled), and rescued my US passport and, more importantly maybe, my official Foreign Residents Registration Office book, the one printed on toilet paper, stamped many times by Indian government officials, the one and only document that sometimes allows me to pay local rates for museum entrance fees instead of the foreigner rates, which are usually ten or twenty times as high.

So apart from the nice views and the clean air, that life and death experience was another highlight. Well, plus the fact that it started to rain heavily just as we were about to head back home on Sunday afternoon. Not only didn't we have umbrellas and weren't in the mood to ride back to the parking lot in the rain, we also weren't particularly happy about the idea of trying to drive down that little nasty clay road in heavy rain, because that seemed like just asking for trouble. But then it stopped raining, so we rode back to the parking lot, and of course by the time we got there, it was dark and now it was raining again. Ah well. So we had no choice but to slowly slowly feel our way back down that road, 1st gear all the way, and then back home from there, this time without any detours. All in all, not bad, and we'll come visit Matheran again some time.

In other news, Ksenia is getting a tooth pulled tomorrow. The Indian tooth fairy hasn't been so kind to her so far. Also, one of her first exectutive decisions when she got back was to fire our maid. And when I asked her today what's new in the world, she said well, apparently, policemen in Mumbai are raping women left and right... Ok, so maybe some more on those things another time.

Dhamaal

2005-10-12T06:33:00.000-07:00

Monday evenings is Dhamaal night at the Prithvi Theatre in Juhu. Dhamaal means turmoil, frolic, and is a kind of song which is sung at the Holi festival. Basically, there were eight or so different performers and groups performing Shakespeare-inspired pieces for 10-15 minutes each. Sort of an open mic evening, except better, because they actually had to do an audition. Entrance was free, and the MC was a French-Indian guy.

The place was pretty much packed with about 200 people, mostly hip looking young people. The first performer was a very cute 10 year old boy doing a funny sketch, in English, about how William Shakespeare is actually an Indian guy. There were a number of pretty intense young men performing. Almost all the performances were in Hindi, but it was pretty interesting to me nevertheless. My Scottish expat friend and her French roommate were doing a scene in French, and even though probably hardly anyone in the audience understood a word, it was well received.

There was a very very good young actor doing a Hamlet scene in Hindi, and a very good older actor doing a scene from The Merchant of Venice twice, in two different ways (both with a fabulous colonial British accent). A smart-looking comedy scene had everyone cracking up, and there was a very weird slapstick scene of a bunch of guys pretending to be from Nagaland. Nagaland, a small province in the Northeast, has a number of indigenous tribes, so people were laughing before the troupe even entered the stage. So then they did this strange primitive dance thing around Romeo and Juliet, which sort of reminded me of how Native Americans used to be represented in very old American Western movies. Pretty dumb, a little scary, but generally harmless. It was a bit embarrassing, but people seemed to think it was very funny, which was sort of remarkable, given that the same audience obviously also had appreciated the very serious acting skills of the Hamlet guy.

Anyways, what do I know, after all, I could only get the acting and movements, and didn't understand a word for the most part. But I will definitely be back to Dhamaal.

In other news, Ksenia is finally coming back tonight, so I am very excited!! Next week we will have our old trusted driver Deepak back. Apparently, he has a salaried job, but he seemed pretty eager to quit his job and work for us. He seemed really happy back when I picked up the Ambassador with him and was looking forward to driving it. Speaking of the Ambassador, I took it to my regular gas station today. They usually also check the oil and water, but what really cracks me up every time is that the guy there seems to like to burn his fingers. Every single time he checks on the oil, he burns his fingers, then laughs about it, and then reaches for a piece of tissue paper to wipe off the oil from the stick. Then he throws the paper on the floor, reaches for the water coolant container, burns his fingers again, and laughs again. It is very strange.

Speaking of throwing paper on the floor, last Sunday I was in a public park in Dadar to play some frisbee with some expats. As I was walking around a bit, I saw three different people throwing their plastic garbage on the floor. Just like that. The park accordingly looks pretty shitty. Another day some guy was throwing his empty plastic bottle out of his car while driving. Just like that. Ugh!

Today is a holiday, Dassehra, by the way. From what I gather, it is a festival in honor of the goddess Durga. Dassehra means 'the tenth' and it is celebrated at the end of the nine-nights Navaratri festival, during which hymns are recited to Durga. Apparently, Dassehra is a special holiday for brides and engaged people. All I can say is that somewhere in my neighborhood last night there was a big disco evening, and they played that incredibly awful song by Queens We Will Rock You. Over and over again.

Kashid

2005-10-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, a Scottish expat, her French roommate and I drove down to Kashid, a very small village on what's said the be one of the nicest beaches in India outside of Goa. It's about 160km (100 miles) south of Mumbai, which, given the state of the roads means a 4 hour plus drive. They both speak and read a bit of Hindi, so we took the wrong turn only once, since they can actually read the road signs, and understand left and right, whereas I, embarrassingly enough, still can only remember straight.

Apart from the at times disastrous roads, it was a pretty nice drive. We drove down the Mumbai-Goa express highway, which is a little road with one lane in each direction without a median. Of course, that meant that we had to practically stop on the side of the road once or twice, because some maniac bus driver coming the opposite direction took up our entire lane as he was passing some car or truck. But the views from that road are nice, it was very green and mostly fun.

On the way there we passed through Alibaug, a small crowded town by the coast, and then later some monstrous industrial estate that looked like they were mining red stone. Kashid has absolutely nothing other than a green background and a long beach. There were a couple of options to stay over night, and we settled for a small place that had very simple rooms for Rs650 each. Probably overpriced for what it was (and I should have brought my own towels and bedsheets), but ah well.

I also tried to check out the fanciest place in town, but before I could even ask any questions there, I got stopped at the gate, they wrote down my license plate number, and then I was told that they are booked and, no, I cannot get in to check out the place. It later turned out that that was A Good Thing, because we could hear some horrific disco music all the way from the fancy place to our little spot.

As probably was to be expected, but it never fails to amaze me, even this quietest of quiet places, in the middle of nowhere, near a long sandbeach, was not all that quiet. Apart from the disco music coming over from the fancy place, there were a bunch of guys in the hotel who insisted on playing their car stereo, making a lot of noise fooling around, and laughing like little children - at seven fucking AM the next morning.

A similar bunch of boys was hanging around at the beach. The Tata truck parked by the beach, all doors open and car stereo on full throttle. For some reason, they decided it would be cool to play every shitty song on the 80s US charts for five seconds and then play the next one. Of course, they also came over and asked whether they can take a picture of us with them. Not sure why, but this happens very often. I was in a good mood, so I said, sure, why not, but regretted it immediately. When this happens with Ksenia, she always says no, before they can even finish the question.

Anyways, so of course they were taking the picture of themselves with the girls and then they buggered off. Unfortunately, I am now considering not taking any pictures of kids either, because, while it's cute when little kids want their picture taken (and they always go completely crazy with laughter when they see themselves on the LCD monitor), it is very bloody annoying when teenage and older boys do it.

The beach is pretty long and sandy, but not exactly clean, and the water isn't exactly blue or otherwise inviting. So we didn't go for a swim, but that was ok. At least the air was nice and despite the boys, it was quieter than Mumbai. We took a different and very nice route back, and stopped at some place for dinner. It took them a lot of official maneuvering to set up our table and to give us the menu and to take the orders, only to then tell us that they don't actually have a single thing from the menu, but only some sandwiches or something. So we went somewhere else, and that was great.

In other news, my phone was ringing with the same unknown number that had been trying to call me for days now. I usually don't take these calls, because it inevitably turns out to be my bank, which for the tenth time is trying to sell me some investments on my mobile phone. Sometimes it is the local liquor store that has delivered beer a few times now, trying to sell me some wine that they apparently just got in. Anyways, so it was Airtel, my mobile phone service provider, and the woman is telling me that I am way over my credit limit with them. I think last time Airtel had called me, the woman only spoke Hindi and was in complete disbelief that I only spoke English.

Anyways, so the conversation went something like this Hello, Sir, you are over your credit limit. - I have a credit limit? What's my credit limit? - Excuse me? - I didn't know I had a credit limit. How much is my credit limit? - Sir, you are over your credit limit [this goes on in a loop three more times] Your credit limit is 5000 rupees, Sir. - Ok, so what's the problem, my last bill was 8000 rupees, and I paid that, no problem. [Yes, I am spending a fortune on international calls from my mobile these days, but twohundred something dollars is still bearable] - You are over your credit limit, Sir - Ok, so what do you want me to do? - Sir, can you pay the bill now? - Well, send me the bill and I will pay it. And please stop calling me while I am at work. - I am very sorry, Sir, but can you pay the bill now? - Well, I don't have a bill. You need to send me the bill, then I will pay it. - But can you pay the bill now, Sir? - Well, no, I can't pay any bills when I don't have the bill, right? - Ok, thank you, Sir. Have a nice day.

So, I don't really know what to make of that. I guess I will be waiting for the bill now. Meanwhile, I still have the original of my rental lease, which I had needed to buy my car, over a month ago. Now, the relocation company that took care of the legal stuff has been wanting that lease back ever since. Since apparently noone here would ever even think about using the postal service, they keep calling me in the afternoon, asking whether they can pick it up from my apartment, either now or tomorrow. And for many weeks now, I have been telling them, you have to come in the morning, when my maid is at home, or I can bring it with me to work, and you can pick it up there. And for many weeks now, they never actually come by to pick it up, but just keep calling me (sometimes twice a day, two different people from the same company), asking the same question again. Maybe they are hoping that they might catch me on a sick day, but basically, the concept that someone, anyone (maid, mother, wife) might not be at home, is completely foreign to them, it is kind of bizarre, and apparently just showing up at a certain place at a certain time is impossible.

Anyways, I think I need a vacation. Luckily, Ksenia is coming back next week and we are off to Thailand in two and a half weeks!

Astad Deboo

2005-09-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-25T05:46:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-16T10:57:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-07T01:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Film Shoot

2005-08-31T10:48:00.000-07:00

So our Mumbai tour guide from San Francisco told me last Saturday there is a film shoot for some commercial at one of the better known film studios and they are looking for a bunch of white people to participate. A couple of weeks ago I had met a Scottish teacher-in-training here, who goes to these film shoots all the time, because she actually needs the money. I had also heard that the producers are actually loading those white tourists into a bus and drop them off at the studios.

So I thought, ok, what the hell, why not. Let's not mention how much I was supposed to get paid, because apparently there's a good amount of politics around that. Tourists get paid close to nothing, presumably because they do it for fun, or maybe they think they'll get famous, and I didn't care about the money either. But some people actually do need the money and rumor has it that there's a few westerners living in Mumbai who live just off those film shoots.

So I get there at 2:30pm on Saturday. Supposedly, this was to be done by 8pm or so. I didn't even know exactly what the commercial would be for, and I figured it can't possibly be for Viagra, so I should be safe. There was a whole bunch of westerners, maybe half of them tourists, the Scottish expat also showed up, and there were a few other regulars like her. So we started waiting. This is a film shoot, after all, and film shoots mean 95% sitting around doing nothing.

On the way to the studio, I had passed a couple of trucks fully loaded with human tower competitors - well, it was also Krishna's birthday, so from what I gathered, numerous communities sponsor their young strong men (and women, although I didn't see any) to drive around town, or maybe just in their community on these huge trucks. They are all dressed in uniform t-shirts, usually orange or yellow, and then they have a competition about which group can make the tallest human tower or pyramid. So there were a few 3-4 men tall human towers, of course in the middle of traffic, masses of spectators, drums and music everywhere.

But I passed those guys, after all, I had to do my film shoot, and I had not realized that this the big deal that it apparently was. So we were waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Usually, at some point at these shoots, there is food. But all we got was tea and Coca-Cola. So I was getting a little hungry. And we were waiting and waiting. Outside - it wasn't exactly hot, but it wasn't very pleasant either.

Now, apparently, the commercial was supposed to be for ready-made dosi. Ok, so this is going to be a fast-food commercial - now wonder they need a few white people! There's a whole lot more people in my office here who bring homemade food to work than in NYC (even though our cafeteria here is heavily subsidized), and there is a whole lot more people in my office in NYC who eat fast food on a regular basis - so, really, a fast-food commercial for Indian dosi would be pretty much unthinkable without some white people. In a crap fast-food commercial, white people are of course an absolute must-have and probably the only straw of hope for any credibility whatsoever.

Anyways, so at 6pm or so I head enough. I was done with getting famous in a fast-food commercial, so I left and had some real food. I really should have gone to check out those human pyramids, because I later heard that this was quite the spectacle indeed, and it sure looks like it...

On an entirely different note, if there could be a picture today, it would have to be one of that Muslim couple that I saw today, right next to the mall. She was fully dressed in a burkha, standing in front of this guy who was sitting very cool on his motorbike. And they were holding hands, very tenderly, totally in love and obviously sweet talking. I guess the fact that I even noticed it, and think it is worth mentioning, and that I found this scene just very remarkable, just shows how dumbed down and stupid daily western images of Muslims, let alone traditional women in burkhas, have made me already. Either that, or Ksenia has been out of town for too long already, or probably both.

Random Mumbai Facts

2005-08-28T05:18:00.000-07:00

From the latest issue of TimeOut Mumbai:

Mumbai's 7.2 million slumdwellers constitute 60% of the population

In a four month period starting last November, government bulldozers demolished 90,000 dwellings, making 300,000 people homeless

Only 40% of households are connected to sewers

There are 800 functioning public toilet blocks; this is 20,000 less than needed; the public toilets are so deep in shit that city workers refuse to clean them, even for extra pay

Suburban trains have a capacity of 1,750 passengers; at rush hour, 4,000 passengers are crammed into each train

110 new vehicles are added to Mumbai every day; average traffic speed: 6-8 km/h

Mumbai Mirror's Daily Sexpert Question earlier this week:

"I am a 25 year old married woman. I need some advice regarding our sex life. We got married in May this year. My husband faces the following problems during intercourse: 1) he breathes heavily and gets exhausted very soon, 2) he sweats a lot 3) our sex does not last for long and we don't enjoy the act. Kindly suggest a solution to these problems"

Downtown Mumbai

2005-08-28T04:29:00.000-07:00

Friday night, my boss took out a few expats for a bit of bar hopping downtown. Our first stop was the Dome, a nice lounge bar on the roof of the Intercontinental Hotel right on Marine Drive, a.k.a. Queens Necklace. Nice view, a pool, and expensive cocktails. After that we went to the Gymkhana. I had been told that this is probably the most exclusive private club in Mumbai, so I was quite afraid that this will be some sort of Connecticut Country Club place, with men in white shoes and white hats or something like that. It turned out to be a very laid back and relaxed place where everybody seemed to know everybody. Some people looked like a bit of show-offs, but generally it was pretty apparent that money alone doesn't get one into this club, what matters most are relationships, so presumably a lot of the members have been downtown Mumbaikars for generations.

I thought the atmosphere was quite different from a few places that I had been to in Bandra. I guess like many big European cities, there is always an invisible divide between the newly rich and the old money spots. Where the nightlife of the Mumbai suburbs of Bandra and Juhu seems to be dominated by Bollywood people (or those wanting to become Bollywood people) and the growing call center brigade (a term I saw the TimeOut Mumbai use twice), this place seemed quite different.

Afterwards, we went to Indigo, a very happening bar and Italian restaurant, which the wife of a British diplomat whom I had met on the way from St. Petersburg to Delhi was raving about. I remember thinking then that I don't really want to go to some posh downtown exile for Western diplomats, but the place was actually quite nice and laid back as well - and now that I live here, I realize that this town would be simply unlivable for me without these sorts of places. Sadly but true enough, now that I have a car, I don't even take the riksha anywhere - it is just too exhausting to be sitting in these things right next to the big stinking busses and passing by open sewage systems and mountains of garbage. So I drive in my air conditioned car with the windows rolled up and Madonna or Eminem in the CD player - kind of like a submarine floating in stop-and-go speed through a zoo approaching hell.

British DJ

2005-08-24T07:56:00.000-07:00

So for a week now I was looking forward to this British DJ coming to Mocha in Juhu. Mocha is of course the hipper version of the Barista coffee shops, and there's one in Juhu. Actually, some people refer to Juhu as Juhu Beach, because, well, it does have a beach. Anyone going swimming there, and there are a few crazy ones, must be seriously suicidal, because the water is a dark brown soup of sewage and plastic bags, and the beach itself, although fairly large, is pretty firmly in the hand of hawkers, drug addicts, and a wild assortment of food stands. Nevertheless, the beach is crowded with people going for a leisurely stroll.

Across from the beach is Mocha. They usually have apple pie shakes and tiramisu and things like that, so I was curious to see how they turn this into a dance club for the occasion. Well, they didn't really. The DJ wasn't bad, and they even had beer (well, Foster's), but apparently the crowd wasn't very interested. Still, for some reason there was a waiting list for the airconditioned room, and even though there didn't seem to be anybody in there, it took half an hour to get from the boiling hot outside space inside.

Apart from our Mumbai tour guide from San Francisco, there was another expat from work, plus a Canadian and a French/Austrian couple, so the expats were well represented and at times made up the majority of the dancing population. The decidedly best part, however, was the Indian lady, around 50, who sat down by herself at our table, pulled a little bottle of Jack Daniel's out of her bag and proceeded to pour herself some into a plastic cup under the table. She very proudly announced that she was invited by the British Council to come to this event. And indeed, apparently the British Council thinks that India might need some development aid in the form of a DJ, because they were noted as the main sponsors of the event. Certainly, Mocha didn't pay the DJ's bills.

So it was all pretty relaxed and somewhat sad. But at least, there was no Bryan Adams or Led Zeppelin being played, so it was great. On the way home, I almost ran into a car with a mobile phone equipped driver who very lazily crossed the street without looking left or right, and I missed a riksha or two by a few inches, so all things considered, the evening included a bit of excitement as well.

Lonavala

2005-08-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

Originally, I had wanted to drive out of town yesterday, but then it was raining cats and dogs, so I just ended up going for a coffee at the Juhu Mocha with a Scottish expat whom I had met a week ago at the other Mocha in Bandra. I find myself going to Mocha quite a bit. Anyways, this Scottish expat is a teacher in training at the Mumbai Rudolf Steiner School, which is kind of interesting. On Wednesday she, her friends and I went to a club called Seven, which happens to be located in the sixth floor of a shopping mall. This club actually would have a nice view, except it was of course dark. The music was as usual total crap - why on earth people love Bryan Adams so much that they have to play three songs of it, is beyond me. But the crowd was ecstatic and sang along with full gusto.

Then yesterday I went to Club IX with our American Mumbai tour guide, her boyfriend and another expat from work. Club IX has equally atrocious music, but at least no-one is singing along and the place feels a bit like a Jugendzentrum - i.e. one of those youth clubs they have in Germany, Russia, and elsewhere, where 15 year olds (like me) grew up on beer, ping-pong and foosball (which we called kicker). It had plush brown couches and incredibly tacky paintings, but the Kingfisher was cold, and so what else can one ask for. And despite being called Club IX, there was no dancing.

So this morning I set out to drive out of town. It takes a good hour to actually get out of town, but then heaven starts. Well, at least there's a real highway with three lanes in each direction, actual lane markings, and a surprising lack of potholes. This is the Mumbai-Pune express highway, and my little silver machine did a solid 120km per hour, no problem. I was tempted to go a little faster, but who knows what happens if you push your luck with a new Ambassador. I wanted to go to the first destination listed in the 52 Mumbai Weekend Getaways book, but of course the important directions are in Hindi, or maybe I am blind, but in any event I missed the exit to the road towards Goa.

So I drove to Lonavala instead. Lonavala is pretty high up in the mountains, and as I drove up, the rain and the fog thickened with every kilometer. When I was still in the plains, the views and the green were really quite fantastic, but here I was, crawling up the mountains to Lonavala. I guess if it weren't for the fog and rain, the views from up there must be quite spectacular, but as it was, the view was gray. Nevertheless, the place was packed with weekenders. There's lots of waterfalls there, and everybody just goes take a shower in full clothes. Truckloads of young men (hardly any women), singing and dancing next to their parked cars, drenched from the rain and from their adventures in the waterfalls and rivers.

The air was very nice and fresh, but the weather was too crap for any pictures. I had some chicken masala, which I think ended up being mutton, but what the hell. I was hoping to be able to sit down and continue reading Maximum City, but unfortunately it was a bit too wet and crowded. Maximum City currently is quite the bestseller - it's written by a guy who left Bombay when he was 14, lived in London, Paris, and New York, and then returned 21 years later. So far, it's great, because it really helps me be able to actually read the newspaper, as it gives a lot of context to the daily reports on the incredible extent of corruption, the Shiv Sena party (which is basically made up of thugs and religious extremists, and which rules parts of Mumbai), the slum lords (which apparently control the majority of the Mumbai population). Not to mention the currently almost daily riots by commuters who are fed up with the non-functioning railway service, so they frequently start attacking railway workers, block trains for hours and wreck all kinds of additional havoc on a weekly basis.

The Insanity Called Commute

2005-08-19T08:21:00.000-07:00

So now I have a lovely car, and I am driving it. Myself, to work every day. What kind of looked crazy from the backseat of my former driver's car, can now indeed be diagnosed as exactly that: insanity. The morning is not so bad, and today was actually pretty quiet. I take the Western Express Highway and after about 30mins and a few potholes here and there, I am at work. The way back, however, is absolutely mind-boggling. At around 7pm, it's usually already dark, and today it was raining a bit as well. Not that the roads would be slippery or anything - the fact is, The Western Express Highway on Friday evenings is never quite express enough to anywhere near any speeds where one could slip.

The best part, however, is getting onto the highway to begin with. It's about 3km or so through residential areas (well, in Mumbai, everything, literally, is a residential area), on pretty narrow lanes, each occupied by two or three cars each direction. There's thousands of pedestrians fighting for space with the traffic. The road has fantastic potholes that make the cars look like little cogs in a whirlpool, or maybe toilet bowl.

I knew I was in a bit of trouble when a riksha coming the opposite direction got close enough to fold in my side mirror. Matters got a little more exciting when another riksha cut me off and scratched the left front corner of my car. It was my turn next when a truck to my right started swinging so heavily from the potholes that I saw it coming within fractions of an inch of my sidemirror, so I took a little swing to the left to evade him and immediately made contact with a riksha. So I heard a nice scratching sound and felt very sorry for my left door.

Drivers around here are incredibly impatient. The traffic is not moving one bit, there is absolutely no movement in sight in front of me, and the guy behind me keeps honking his horn like his life depends on it. There's pretty much zero courtesy - instead it's an all out war for every single inch of space. The Western Express Highway has a couple of stretches that could be considered fast road, but there's other stretches where one has no choice but go down into first gear to make it over the potholes relatively safely.

Of course, the highway is filled with rikshas as well, and just like on the NJ Turnpike, the very slowest cars are happily crawling along on the center lane. Except they are passing two wheelers (helmet optional, flip-flops mandatory) and sometimes the odd pedestrian. Still, some folks in their Hondas and Hyundais will use every split second opportunity to zig zag their way around the mess, always with the hand firmly attached to the horn, never too shy to come within inches of anything the pass.

I don't think accidents happen all that much - traffic is generally too slow for anything serious to happen, and the bumps and scratches are just part of the deal. Of course the absolutely last thing I'd like to happen would be to hit a pedestrian. As it is, no matter what, it would be my fault - if the guy walks onto the street without looking, as seems to be the custom, it doesn't matter. Interestingly, however, if the driver is a woman, at least that's what I was told, it is never her fault.

Anyways, so my commute back home usually takes an hour or more, for a distance of about 20km. And at the rate of three little bumps per day, my car will very quickly develop some lovely patina. I guess that's the way it should be, although the amount of cars with dents and scratches is actually pretty low, so maybe this just means that I've got to learn how to drive. I thought Italy was pretty good practice, but really, it's just elementary school compared to the masters of the Mumbai roads.

Family Electrician

2005-08-14T04:44:00.000-07:00

Well, against all odds, I actually got my car. The dealer called me Friday to tell me that I can pick it up at 5:30pm on Saturday. And, surprisingly enough, it actually was there, in all its beauty, ready to get picked up, and so I did. Of course, it quickly turned out that I had bought a piece of crap junk car, just like many Indians had told me. The door handles are pretty flimsy, the doors are close to impossible to lock from the inside, and the gear box is one clunky piece of mechanical engineering gone pretty wrong. And the engine sounds a bit like some badly underpowered 70s Oldsmobile, but I love this car with all its faults.

Sadly, I had to say Good Bye to my wonderful driver. We had developed a very nice relationship, and he turned out to be fantastic. He was pretty sad, but I told him that we will call him, when Ksenia comes back from NYC, because then we'll need him again. The last couple of weeks, he had sometimes tried to teach me a bit of Hindi, so now I know that sticking your pinky finger into the air means going for a pee. And the main phrase he had learned from us was "a little bit", because up until recently, he would always say "something something" instead. Whenever I thanked him at the end of the day, he would say "It is my duty, Sir" and laugh - at one point, when he had found me a place to buy TimeOut Mumbai, he actually said "It is my duty, Sir" and laughed like Ernie from Sesame Street, as if he was laughing about that phrase himself, which he probably didn't. Or maybe he was, I don't know.

Our maid also seems to be doing ok. Well, she came pretty late twice, and she left some laundry in the dryer instead of taking it out, but I don't really care. She's not bad, and I quite like her. Of course, the other day I made a bit of blunder when my landlord came over with his family electrician yet again, and I actually tried to introduce him to my maid. So when I asked him, have you met my maid, he looked at me as if I was out of my mind, and just said "I don't know, if I did, I don't remember her face." Ooops. I guess I had forgotten that in some Indian households the maid never leaves the kitchen and actually sleeps on the kitchen floor.

The landlord by the way is a bit of a character himself. He had lived for a while in NYC, so he's quite understanding about a number of things. But since our phoneline is still not working, he keeps bringing his electrician in, always repeating the same old and apparently cricially important story that this electrician works exclusively for his family, because it is very hard to find one in India, so he works exclusively for his family. Why the electrician keeps coming back for "full investigation of the problem" (quote my landlord), and nothing actually gets fixed, I don't know, but that's a different story. Bottom line is that the walls must be soaked with dampness and mold (the mold is actually showing everywhere on the walls), so the main fuse keeps blowing then and again, and one of the many switch panels is unusable, because turning any of its switches will make the lights go out in the whole apartment. The funny part is always that clearly the landlord is telling the electrician what he needs to do, because apparently the family electrician is not really an electrician. But the two of them keep showing up in my apartment unannounced, seemingly discussing the progress of their full investigation.

The landlord also told me that I can park the car on the little parking lot that's part of the apartment building. There's really not enough space for the six or seven cars standing around, so I asked him, how does it work, and whether it's on a first come first serve basis, or what? He assured me, no problem, I can park, there are no designated parking spots. So when I tried, the watchman makes a few wild gestures, so I understand I should park on the other side of the building. Now, there is a very small elderly's home in the ground floor of the building, so as soon as I park there, some young modern chap comes up to me telling me in a very important sounding tone that that parking space is reserved for the doctor. Of course, the doctor doesn't live there, he just works there, if that. He probably just shows up then and again, because the home is pretty small, the size of my apartment. Anyways, but the parking space is for the doctor, very important. I am not in the mood to get into an argument with either the landlord or the neighbors, so I guess I will be parking on the street, which should be fine.

In other news, I finally found a very cool little club that's the way little clubs should be like. It's in a stinky little hotel that looks like it had seen better times. The club was nice and very laid back, people obviously just wanted to dance, so there were no posers, macho guys, or bimbos, like there are in so many clubs in any city you go. The music was pretty good as well, so I guess I will be going back there some time.

Oh, and very funny, I find, is this...

Indian Dance

2005-08-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, just before Ksenia took off back to NYC (and actually was lucky enough to get out of the floods on time), we went to her Indian Classical Dance teacher's performance. Ksenia had taken up classes a while ago with that teacher and is trying to get her foot and finger movements straight, which is quite a challenge. Of course, I know nothing about Indian Classical Dance, but basically, a lot of them, if not all, have religious roots, there is not just music, but also vocals, and it seems like the vocals tell a religios story, which is then acted out by dancing and by the all-important hand movements, where every single hand gesture has a very particular meaning. So if the hands and arms are one way, it means "Lion", and held a slightly or not so slightly different way, it means "House". Or something like that.

So the art is then in the execution of these movements, there really is not all that much space for interpretation - and improvisation or any other Western concept of dance is entirely foreign. Of course, in the West, art is most of the time all about me, myself, and I, so this is a whole different world. Apparently, if not for the Love Of God, then why bother dancing or being an artist? Unfortunately, if one has no clue what the story is, or what the hand gestures mean, or how they should look like, if executed correctly, then watching a performance like this, is a bit of a challenge. I can't say I hated it, but I was definitely looking for the subtitles somewhere.

The teacher's husband very helpfully spoke some introductory words at the beginning of each segment, but of course it was in Hindi, and I could only make out a Shiva here and a Vishnu there. My seat neighbor tried to translate a little bit, but it was pretty hopeless. The fact that these introductory words tended to drag into rather longish 15 minute monologues didn't exactly help. But certainly the costumes were very colorful, and her student dancers very very cute and dedicated, and the whole thing had a nice family affair touch to it, even though it was performed in a real auditorium, with a light manager, a sound manager, etc. I didn't quite get the light effects, becuse they were a bit like Disco, and it was too dark to take any good pictures during the performance, but maybe it was meant less for entertainment as for reflection and devotion, so I should shut up.

Surprisingly, maybe, my seat neighbor knew all the tunes and all the lyrics, and he was happily humming along. The teacher's husband's words also seemed to make an impression on the audience, and he spoke with a lot of pathos. In between, there were flowers and ovations, I suspect for the benefactors and supporters of the dance company, who were called on stage as well, gave a longish nice speech, and then went back to their seats. The auditorium was sadly empty, and a lot of people left early. The whole thing was over two hours long, and they started maybe one hour later than what the invitations had indicated. The Temptation hipsters would happily refer to that as Indian Stretching Time (IST), and I can't argue with that.

Pvt. Ltd.

2005-08-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

Today I got a call from my car dealer at work saying that my Demand Draft (i.e. certified check) has been rejected. Why? Because it's been made payable to "FortPoint Automotive, Mahim, Mumbai" instead of "FortPoint Automotive Pvt. Ltd., Mahim, Mumbai". Well, I don't use checks all that often, but this was a new one to me - I mean, what were they thinking, really? That the car dealer faked the check? That they found the check on the street and it was really meant to go to Mr. FortPoint Automotive, who happens to live in Mahim, Mumbai as well?

Maybe this is better than Chase Bank in NYC, which once cleared a check that I had forgotten to sign, but please! Of course, everybody I talked to seemed to think that surely, there must be a good reason that such a check would be rejected - no, there isn't, it's pretty unambiguously clear whom this check was intended for, so any reason there may be is just legalistic nonsense, by definition not a good reason. Well, the upshot was that I had to go to the dealer yet again, pick up the check and have it changed at the bank - except that, of course, banks around here close at 2:30pm. I am pretty sure they are need to close that early, so they can manually spell check every single Demand Draft. Or maybe they just look at all the passport pictures they've collected that day.

In other news, I found a college bar. On Saturday, I had gone to Mocha, the better one of the two Indian Starbucks, and started talking to some hipsters, who told me where to get a beer on a Saturday afternoon. The place was packed. It's right accross from a mall (that's bad) and is called Temptations (that's really bad). But it's just your regular drinking hall, a dark but large space where they spill their beers, watch Cricket and sing along some rock tunes. At first, I actually thought I had hit the Jackpot, because when I walked in they were playing Eminem. This was followed by some cheesy rock ballade, but at least that one was somewhat more recent than the usual pre-1987 stuff, so I can't complain too much.

Since I no longer have any inhibitions in terms of acting inappropriately (well, not too many anyways), I quizzed the hipsters about a bunch of things, like who is hanging out here, what do they do, etc. Turns out that this Mocha cafe and this Temptations bar are both heavily frequented by students of St. Andrew's College, which is right next to these places. Now, St. Andrew's College is a catholic school, there's also St. Andrew's Church right there, so most of these students are catholic. As it turns out, around here, the catholics are the progressive/modern types, if those labels mean anything, which I found a bit surprising.

So these kids have no inclination of having arranged marriages (which, by the way, don't strike me as all that preposterous as they might seem at first glance), and apparently being catholic means three D's - drinking, drugs, and dancing. Well, I didn't see too much dancing, but there certainly were drugs - albeit only in the form of waterpipes, and at Temptations there was a good amount of drinking, too. I guess now the name Temptations also makes a whole lot more sense. Hm, I should tell the Pope or maybe Mel Gibson about that!

An Even Better Day

2005-08-06T03:56:00.000-07:00

Incredible India! So I was able to get my router play nicely with my cable internet access and I just dialed my NYC number - and guess what? My phone in India is ringing!! Gotta love voice over ip!

Even better than that: this morning, I got a call from my car dealer, and my lovely HM Ambassador Avigo has arrived from the factory. It still needs to get registered though. Unfortunately, that requires the original of my lease plus some official letter from my company, both of which I had left in the office. So I had to go pick them up, but that was no problem. Of course, the car dealer also wanted the full amount of money, but I insisted that they only get another installment and then the full payment once they have registered the car and hand me the keys. Apparently, that's not how things are done here, but eventually they agreed.

So I went to the bank, then to the office, then back to the car dealer. I was thinking the car has arrived means I can actually see it at the dealership, but no such luck. Apparently, it's on some lot somewhere outside of Mumbai. Ah well. But the registration should only take a few days, so the sales woman promised everything will be done and ready next Saturday. Life is Good.

A Better Day

2005-08-05T12:29:00.000-07:00

Alright! Things are happening. In the morning on my way to work I get an SMS from Karilyn, our personal Mumbai expat guide, who tells me that all I need to do to get gas in my apartment is have the building's doorman flag one of those gas delivery guys on the bicycle down. (Thanks!)

Of course, this was after I had already gone, for a third time, to the gas distribution office, where they promised gas is on the way. My driver even insisted to have a word with them himself. So when I got that SMS, I tried to get his confirmation - it took a little while, but eventually he enthusiastically exclaimed: "Yes Yes, Sir, bicycle much cheaper, watchman smart man, 10 rupees tip! Bicycle no salary, 2 rupees commission!"

Ok, so that makes a lot of sense. Screw that office and their customer number!

Then, at work, I get a call from the long lost furniture guy. The furniture is ready for delivery in the evening. As it happens, when I got home, not only did I have new big shiny (ok, I exaggerate) gas cylinders, but I also had some yummy food in the fridge. So I thought, I should go with the swing of things and call the TV guy, who had never showed up to install digital cable. Amazingly enough, he said, his guys will be over in ten minutes.

Alright, so it wasn't 10 minutes but more like an hour and a half, but they showed up - incidentally pretty much as the same time as the furniture guy. So the house was full and the confusion complete, when the TV guys asked where's the computer? I didn't quite get what they needed a computer for, but it turns out that the cable guys were under the impression I want internet cable access. Well, apparently some sort of typical misunderstanding, but I couldn't argue with that and just said: "Sure, who cares about digital TV, just give me your broadband cable internet access - how fast is it?" - "64 kilobytes, Sir" - "You have something a little faster?" - "Yes, 128 kilobytes, Sir" - "How about 256?" - "Yes, we have, too, Sir" - "Alright, if that's the fastest, I want that."

So while the two cable guys started playing around with my router settings, etc., the furniture guy, his sister, and their cab driver were spreading out the furniture on the terrace, four chairs and two little tables, with gorgeous wood carvings and golden inlays. At least I think it's gorgeous, because our terrace was a bit dark already. But then I noticed that one table was smaller with the other table, so I asked what happened here, how come this is smaller? I couldn't really get a straight answer or explanation, aside from an unsuccessful attempt at convincing me that that was what we had wanted, so I said, ok, you can either come back with a table a bigger size, or you'll have to give me a discount.

In reality, I found this more amusing than anything else, but I am kind of starting to like this whole bargaining business. Anyways, so the response was that they can make another table with the same size, but it would be a different design. Smart move on their part, because even though there was zero logic to that, I didn't really want to risk getting a plywood table top in exchange, so I said, ok, I'll keep it, but I am not paying 10,500 rupees (which was the originally agreed on total). Ok, so the game begins, but these guys are pretty good and I knew I'd lose, especially after I then started with a half arsed counter offer of 10,000 rupees.

Of course, they looked very shocked, and just said: "500 rupees less? No, Sir, impossible!" - "Ok, how much?" - "200" - "300" - "No, Sir, impossible, 200" - "250", at which point everybody was pretty much laughing. "No, Sir, impossible, 200." Alright, so I give them 10,500, because I didn't have exact change and I ask, so do you have 200 rupees change? Well, of course they didn't, so the whole bargaining procedure was completely useless, and that really made me laugh. Alright then, what the hell! So they took the money, everybody is smiling and then, as they are walking out, he asks, "Oh, and taxi money!" Well, that was a nice try, because I know we had argued about free delivery weeks ago, and they had eventually agreed, and so I just said, no way, that was included, and so they didn't argue with that and off they went.

Meanwhile, the cable guys had real problems with my router, so eventually they gave up and connected my computer directly. Fine, I'll figure it out myself. So we started a little test drive - and it turns out that 256 kilobytes broadband connection actually manages a blazing fast speed of 90 kilobytes per second. Well, that's pretty shitty, but for now it's better than nothing. Plus, they are coming back for the digital TV setup tomorrow afternoon.

Daily Life

2005-08-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

I am afraid this will be another whiny blog entry, but such is life. So on Monday it was raining some more. Well, a lot more, and the office was closed. Our maid still made it on time, which was great. Unfortunately, she ran out of gas while boiling some rice - literally, and not because of the rain. Our apartment has a gas cylinder beneath the kitchen stove, and if it's empty, then you call for a new one, and it gets delivered.

So far so good, except today is Thursday, and there's still no gas. Calling the number for the gas man didn't work - first, because I didn't have the number, then because the number didn't work. I guess I am not the only one whose phone isn't working because of the rains, so I had to go there myself.

The gas man is basically a tiny office behind a screen, so nobody can hear a thing being said. After I practically forced my way behind the screen so I can at least try to communicate with the guy, above the street noise and beyond the usual language problems, the conversation went pretty much like this: "I would like to have a new gas cylinder, mine is empty." - "Eight days, Sir." - "what do you mean, eight days, I don't have any gas to cook." - "Ok, Sir, today or tomorrow." - "Well, can you be a little more specific?" - "Ok, Sir, tomorrow before 10 will do?" - "Ok, tomorrow before 10 is good, but it has to be before noon, before 12, oherwise there will be noone at home, ok?" - "No probs, Sir, tomorrow before 10 will do?"

So, apart from people really saying 'no probs' a lot, it wasn't really a surprise that of course nobody showed up the next day. In fact, I expected as much, so I made a point of stopping by the place at around 9, asking them whether they will deliver the gas today, before 10, and of course the answer was yes. Well, that was this morning, I know the maid was here untill 12:30 at least, but there is still no gas. And the probably very yummy chicken dish she had made on Monday, before the gas ran out, is gone as well - but that's because I told her that if there's no gas today to have the chicken with, then I don't want the chicken anymore (it's a bit too hot here to have chicken that was cooked four days ago, and the chicken is a bit too spicy to be had without any rice).

Anyways, so what better to do in such a situation than go out for food, besides, after all, a lot of neighborhoods don't have any gas at all, but instead stand in long lines to purchase kerosine, which comes in a wild assortment of plastic containers, which are sold to them basically in the middle of huge mountains of garbage on the street.

So on my way to a new eatery that I tried to discover in my neighborhood tonight, I walk by a real modern Reliance WebWorld shop, i.e. an internet cafe, which I had discovered last night. I regret very quickly not having hired a rikshah for the short distance of maybe 200 meters, because by the time I get there, I am already pretty exhausted from the heat and humidity, not to mention my unsuccessful attempts at trying to avoid getting splashed by cars and rikshas that are passing me at very close distance while running over another pothole puddle.

In any event, I get to WebWorld at 9:30 tonight, hoping to check some gmail (which is blocked both at work and on my BlackBerry), before they close at 10 - except tonight they were in the mood to close right in front of my nose, so I am writing this from my BlackBerry. I guess I mentioned that my landline phone is still not working?

Alright then, so let's find a place to eat. A few near death experiences as a pedestrian later I walk into a place called D'Nosh, which greets me with an American Diner style interior with a black and white checkered bar counter, a large flat screen TV showing some Rap for the pretty pictures of some rapper ladies doing their thing (I am guessing, because there was no sound and the picture was quite distorted due to bad reception), plus, most importantly, The Scorpions followed by Led Zeppelin followed by other crimes to humanity commited at least 20 years ago - of course played by a real DJ at the CD deck, and played at full earsplitting volume with a number of air conditioners and fans adding to the general feeling that I might have walked into the wrong place.

Not surprisingly, the food was equally bad, but I didn't really care anymore and marked it down as yet another day that I have been unable to find a place that doesn't try so damn hard to look American. It would be nice to find some place that has music that's maybe post-1985 and not Bollywood pop, but untill then I should probably stick to the regular dark holes in the wall that just have great food designed to strengthen my immune system. Or maybe I should just stay at home on my terrace, having nice home made food. Oh, wait, there's still no gas in the kitchen, and I have never heard back from the furniture store that was supposed to deliver some terrace chairs last Tuesday. Hm, I guess I should call them, except their phone is not working either. Oh, and even if it does, no doubt they also expect that somehow someone is always at home to greet their delivery.

I must be doing something wrong, because the TV cable guy certainly seemed quite surprised not to find anybody, not even my wife, at home this afternoon at 4pm when he tried to install a digital cable box for the TV. That conversation went pretty much like this: "Sir, there is noone at home." - "No, I know there is noone at home, because I am at work." - "I am trying to get into the flat, but noone opens the door." - "No, there's noone at home, that's why I said twice, you need to come before 12, when my maid is at home." - "Ok, Sir, tomorrow will do?" - "Yes, tomorrow will do."

On the plus side, when I got home after that bizarre Rapper/Scorpions experience, I made a very quick kill. Maybe that cockroach had just had dinner as well, but it was too fat and too slow to survive for more than two seconds under my "NEW! HIT! Cockroches - Rs.33 off!" spraying onslaught.

Weekend In Pune

2005-07-30T05:37:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, before the flood disaster, we drove to Pune with my co-worker. Pune is about 100 miles from Mumbai and there's a three-lane express highway. Still, it took three hours to get there and four hours to get back, due to heavy rain and insane traffic on the way out of and back into Mumbai. But it was worth the trip.

When we drove there, it was dark, and we didn't see much of the landscape. What we did see where heavy trucks crawling up the Ghats mountain range at the speed of snails - except we didn't actually see them, because hardly any of them had any rear lights, and a lot didn't have any front lights either. Of course, that didn't stop them from using the middle lane or pulling over to pass an even slower truck without much notice. Add to that a good amount of wind an rain and an "express highway" that, while in surprisingly good shape can have curves like Marilyn Monroe only more dangerous, and one can say it was an exciting trip.

Apart from the truly insane truck drivers, there was also a number of people parking their cars right in the middle of a blind spot after a curve, where there is no emergency lane or anything, so basically on the middle of the highway. Why? Well, because they were in the mood to get out of the car for a piss or maybe to take some pictures.

Anyways, we got to Pune at 11pm or so and checked into a little hotel with the obligatory Barista on the grounds, right next to the Osho Ashram. One of the first things I noticed in Pune was the number of hipsters walking around, sitting at Barista, and standing around in front of some modern movie theater/mall. The term hipster of course simply denotes college kids in jeans and t-shirt, as Pune is actually also known as the Oxford of India, due to the number of IT colleges and universities here, so don't think East Village, as the dress code is rather unimaginative, and labels win over originality any time.

Now, we are anything but hippies, but the Osho Ashram promises to be a very quiet green space where one can relax and meditate. Osho, of course, is the guru that at some point got deported from the US for tax evasion, and whom Western tabloids used to refer to as the sex guru, because he had pretty liberal views on sex. But really, it is just big business, and a pretty weird place. I had somehow expected that we would only find Westerners there, but there were about 30% Indians as well.

The first thing that happens when one gets there is you need to pay Rs1200, fill out a bunch of forms, show your visa, have a picture taken, and get an HIV test done. No, you don't see anybody having sex or anything, but basically, it's part of the belief that sex is natural and shouldn't be discouraged, and besides Osho apparently was pretty paranoid about hygiene, so there's also big signs everywhere about how not to handle the food, where not to go if you have a cold, and where to wear socks instead of bare feet.

Then, during the day, everyone has to wear a maroon robe, no exceptions. In the evening, they have a huge two and a half hour evening meeting, where white robes are mandatory. At the swimming pool, maroon swim suits only. It's all quite cultish and rather unenlightened, and of course they want you to buy these things on the premises for inflated prices. On the other hand, the pool is very nice, and they have a sauna and a tennis court (for extra cash). Oh, and taking pictures on the premises wasn't allowed either.

We also went to a couple of meditation sessions, which are basically a mix of dance therapy and Osho philosophy brainwash. An interesting experience maybe, but why anyone would want to devote his or her life to this sort of thing is a bit beyond me. Add to that the obvious big business mentality - Osho's Rolls Royce is exhibited right next to his ashes in the "Silent Meditation Area" - and one could easily get pissed off by all of it. Or one could travel thousands of miles from Europe or elsewhere, just to spend a few weeks here, as many people do.

The big evening meeting was in a gorgeous auditorium - a huge square space with a black marble floor and a huge triangular ceiling. Absolutely no coughing allowed for two and a half hours. There were 200 or 300 people there, and the thing starts with some music and "meditative" dancing, which in our case ended with some freak woman hysterically crying out for Krishna, untill she got escorted out. Maybe she was a real freak, or maybe the whole thing was staged, either by her or by the Osho Ashram head of marketing, who knows.

Then there is an hour long or so video of Osho giving a speech. I kind of fell asleep at some point, but basically he was saying that Western religions have been created by the poor and for the poor, with Jesus having been a carpenter and Islam promising 72 virgins after death, Christianity promising heavenly paradise, etc. while Indian religions were created by kings, who had everything materially, and desired nothing but solitude and nothingness. No wonder than that Indian religions have found such a large following among the spoiled and sated Western population, while Hinduism has nothing to offer for the poor in India, he said.

Well, I don't know, it sounded like an odd mix of half-truths and bullshit, but it certainly seemed to show that Osho knew his target group and built a pretty successful marketing and product line around it, because Westerners are coming in droves. Besides, he probably had trouble getting laid, so what better idea to help him out on that account than coming up with a sexually liberal cult targeted at rich Westerners? I had thought this was a cliche, and maybe it is, but we definitely saw a number of single older Western ladies hanging around with young Indian boys.

In the immediate vicinity of the Osho Ashram is a "German Bakery", which was crowded with Indians, hippies, and regular travellers, and, as Ksenia observed, the atmosphere was a pretty much like they took everything stereotypical Indian, digested it in California, and spat it back out here in Pune. Somewhat interesting, and somewhat revolting, just like the Osho Ashram itself, which would make a fine relaxed place to go to, as it is clean and green and has nice facilities, if it weren't for the cultish freaks and the many strings firmly attached to visitors' wallets.

Anyways, bottom line: I am still not enlightened, despite having walked around in a maroon robe all weekend, looking like I don't know what.

The Maid

2005-07-30T05:21:00.000-07:00

In NYC, we used to have a cleaning woman, who'd come in every two weeks and clean everything in three hours. She is from Chile and does a great job. Now, having a cleaning woman in NYC was strange enough for me, at least at the beginning. It's not like I grew up on Beverly Hills or Windsor Castle, quite the contrary. But living in Mumbai, it is pretty clear pretty quickly that spoiled Westerners that we are, we need a maid on a daily basis, at least part time. First of all, this place is dirty and our apartment would get covered in dust very very quickly. Also, we have no idea what to buy in terms of groceries etc., where to buy it, and what it should cost. And even if we did, we'd have a hell of a time communicating with the shop owners. So we were recommended a maid and hired her.

She came with a number of references and spoke English quite well. She said she would clean, do the shopping (or rather order the stuff for delivery, since everything can get delivered), do the laundry and cook a couple of times a week. Unfortunately, we were not prepared for the fact that having a maid is basically a full-time job. We were naively thinking that you could just have her come in, and she would know what to do without much prompting. Instead, Ksenia tried for a week to show her how to clean, to convince her to do the shopping, but basically nothing got done.

Other people confirmed then confirmed that getting a good maid is very very difficult, and that one basically needs to spend a few months explaining to them exactly what they need to do. Our maid basically refused to do the shopping, because she said there are no shops around (there are, besides, then she made a big long face when Ksenia asked her to call somebody for delivery). After a week of her cleaning our living room, our telephone was still covered in dust, because she didn't know that we wanted her to clean the telephone, too.

We still don't really have any idea about how this works, but we sort of thought that if our cleaning woman in NYC can figure out without being told that dusting the living room includes the telephone, then it should not be too much of a problem here. Well, apparently it was, plus at the end of the week we think that we are missing a number of Rs500 bills from a locked drawer, and although we cannot be 100% certain what happened to it, we figured it would be better to let her go.

Our landlord told us that you basically cannot trust any maid and that they will all rob you and need very strict supervision. Another expat told us that in her Indian friend's family, the maid is basically locked up in the kitchen, where she sleeps on the floor. So what do you do? We obviously want to treat our maid like responsible adults, but it turns out that this may be easier said than done.

Anyways, so we have now hired a different maid, who was also recommended to us with all sorts of references. Her English is not quite as good, but so far, she's quite a bit more thorough. She was cooking a tasty chicken dish today, and while she didn't do the vegetable dish that she said she would do, nor cleaned the kitchen cabinets that she said she would clean, she did call the grocery to get the chicken and vegetables delivered.

Speaking of which: at this point, we have slowly lost any concept of believing what anyone says. The cable guy said he would stop by in the afternoon to get us digital cable; he never did. The dry cleaner said he would stop by in half an hour to pick up some shirts; he never did. The furniture shop said they would come at 2pm to deliver the furniture; they never did. We then drove to the shop ourselves, and then the story was that the furniture was actually made in a different store outside of town and that it can't get delivered until Tuesday because of the floods. The travel desk at work told me they'd come by in 10 minutes to give me Ksenia's tickets to NYC; they never did. When I went there myself, it turned out that the tickets were double booked and that the real ticket will be an electronic ticket. I guess we have yet to learn how to get this sort of information on the phone, without actually having to show up in person. There's countless stories like this, and maybe even more so than the heat and the rain and the traffic and the pollution, it makes India quite an exhausting place to live.

In any event, I guess it'll be interesting how things will go once Ksenia is off to NYC for two months, and I will only have half an hour or so in the morning to tell the maid what to do. I think I might be bitching about my maid and become a Desperate Housewife myself. Of course, Ksenia thinks I will spoil her and let her get away with doing nothing, and then she will have to fire her, when she gets back, because her tolerance for questionable work ethics is a bit lower than mine, but we'll see. I am already calling Ksenia My Good Colonialist, but really, we have no idea what people were talking about when Indians in the US say: "Oh, you are going to India on US salary - you are going to live like a King, you'll have a maid and a driver, and everything is going to get delivered!" Yeah, right, but I'll have to quit my job first, so I have time to manage my maid and my driver.

The Flood Recap

2005-07-30T00:54:00.000-07:00

So far, the monsoon season has been very nice and pleasant to us. Temperatures are in the high 20's celsius, as opposed to mid or high 30's, and although it is very humid, the air feels better and fresher than before the monsoon started. It rains every couple of days for a few hours, but that is that.

But then last Tuesday, all hell broke lose, and as our luck would have it, we had the pleasure to experience the heaviest rainfall in Mumbai's history. As of today, over 450 people died in the State of Maharashtra, and about 60 in Mumbai. Some parts of Mumbai got 90cm of rainfall, that's three feet.

The rain started sometime in the early afternoon, when I was at work and Ksenia at her yoga class. Around 5pm we were told we could leave the office early. I took off with Manish from work in his Tata Sierra, a fairly heavy SUV. The rain was absolutely incredible, stronger than anything I have ever seen. It soon became clear that it'll take a while to get home. The traffic was crawling, but still moving, sort of. Eventually, cars started to use both lanes in both directions. Initially, the water on the streets was only a few inches, but soon it reached about half a foot, and in some spots a foot or more.

So by 7pm, we had gone through one particularly deep spot, we were maybe 3km away from the office and we were stuck. The water was too deep, and besides, people had started abandoning their cars in the middle of the streets. By now it was dark, and the traffic lights were out; there was no electricity anywhere. For some reason, I managed to call Ksenia on her mobile, and she said that she is walking home. Our car was flooded, she was knee deep in the water, and our driver was walking her home.

Luckily, Manish's aunt lived nearby where we were stuck, so we turned around and managed to park the car in a better spot. But both of us wanted to get home, so we started walking. We were about 7km (5 miles) from home, and, well, it took us five hours. The water reached our hips very quickly, and in some spots our chests. Now, of course, I am using the term water quite liberally - think sewage. Luckily, it was dark, so we couldn't really see what's floating by, but it wasn't pretty.

At one spot, the current was so strong that it kept pulling us back and I couldn't get a firm hold with my feet. Of course, I was still wearing my office shoes and, actually, my best suit pants, not to mention my tie. Anyways, somehow we managed to get cross that particular spot and kept wading through the floods. There were abandoned flooded cars and city busses everywhere. People were resting in the busses or waiting for God knows what, plus there was a good amount of thunder an lightening, so the whole scene had a bit of an apocalyptic touch.

The street lights were out, but the lightening then and again made them go on, which didn't really add to my general feeling of discomfort. Wading through hip deep sewage for a few kilometers is not exactly my idea of fun, especially when you know that it's quite possible that you make a wrong step and get stuck in a pothole, or worse, end up in a manhole. The people around us seemed to have a blast though. First of all, they had no problems touching the traffic light posts, thunder and lightening or not. But apart from that, they were generally laughing, a few were singing to the rain God, Ganesh, and they were all holding hands to help each other through the sewage, so that was nice.

Some overdid the fun part a little, I guess: Ksenia told me later that where she was, there were rats swimming around all over the place, trying to huddle up on top of the gas tank of a motor bike, which was just above water level - and if that's not enough, there were a bunch of teenage boys with sticks picking up the rats and throwing them towards the people passing by. Thankfully, no-one was hit, so the little pricks weren't very good at it, and I didn't see any of that - I just met a whole lot of people greeting me with "Hello foreigner, how do you like India?"

Eventually, Manish and I reached a higher spot in Juhu where there was no flooding, just by the JW Mariott Hotel, which was bizarrely lit up like a Christmas tree. I guess it pays to have your own generator. An hour or so later, I reached home. Our street also was not flooded, but I had to restrain myself not to strangle the woman who asked me, her cell phone in hand: "Excuse me, but why is there so much traffic on Linking Road?"

Poor Ksenia had gotten home quite a bit earlier, just to find our apartment flooded in two inch deep water. The drains on our terrace were clogged, so the water was overflowing into our apartment, despite all doors being shut. Of course, these drains are a joke to begin with - there's only two of them, each maybe an inch and a half in diameter, and our terrace is pretty large. Needless to say, our upstairs neighbors throwing plastic bags and newspapers onto our terrace on a regular basis didn't help.

So she and the driver spent hours getting rid of the water, and of course the driver had no place to go, so he slept in our second bedroom. Ksenia wouldn't have found her way home without him, so we were very lucky to have him. On the plus side, Ksenia was able to take a few shots with her camera.

We had no electricity and eventually also no water, nevermind no landline phone, so the next day and night were a bit of a challenge. Electricity and water came back Thursday morning, but of course still no phone. One would think that the telephone is a fairly proven technology, but not around here. Strangely, mobile phone service was working for the most part, except for a relatively short disruption for a few hours and heavy congestion.

Also quite striking was the complete lack of any police, fire department, ambulance or any other kind of public service. Rail and airport service were of course completely shut down for almost 40 hours, but people were generally completely left to their own devices. One would think that in an area where heavy rains are an annual fact of life, there would maybe exist some kind of emergency plan, maybe even inflatable boats, but I guess not, which maybe isn't surprising, given that the sewage system is such a joke, i.e. in large parts non-existent and otherwise completely useless.

So today everything is pretty much back to normal, except still no phone and conflicting reports on whether there's any flights going out of Mumbai. Ksenia was supposed to leave for NYC tonight, so we will see. We are still planning to go to a dance performance in the evening, and her flight is scheduled for 2am. At least I have now found a Barista cafe with WiFi access and it actually works, with a good speed to boot. But Ksenia is taking her laptop with her, so my fun was limited to today. On the bright site, on TV they said that I can now worry a bit about getting leprotosis from the rat piss that no doubt was plenty in the sewage that I had been walking around in - yummy!

After The Flood

2005-07-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

Well, we survived. 500 or so in Maharashtra, 80 or so in Mumbai did not. Three feet of rain within a few hours are no joke. As of this morning, we have water and electricity again, but of course no phone. I love my Blackberry though, which strangely seemed to work most of the time, and I am writing this from the Blackberry browser.

More on this little adventure in a few days, but it was quite something. I ended up walking home through 7km/5miles/5hours of knee to hip deep (and sometimes chest deep) sewage floods, at one spot with quite a strong current.

There were no street lights, it was dark evening, there were thousands of laughing people and hundreds of abandoned flooded cars and busses everywhere - and the intermittent thunder of lightening gave the whole scene a bizarrely apocalyptic touch.

When Ksenia reached home, a few hours before me, our apartment was in two inch deep waters from the overflowing terrace. The two miniature drains proved useless and our upstair neighbors having a penchant for throwing newspapers, plastic bags and sometimes even food from their balconies didn't help matters.

Anyways, so much for today. I might try getting to work tomorrow, provided our driver can come up with a new car, because the one he had he had got flooded. He ended up abandoning the car and walking Ksenia home - he really was priceless. Not to mention that this morning he thought it was necessary to come to our door after a one hour rikshah ride, just to apologize for not being able to drive me to work, because he doesn't have a new car yet...

Incredible India indeed.

Not Quite DSL Ready

2005-07-25T23:39:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like our apartment is not quite DSL ready. Why? Beacuse our phone lines don't work when it rains, or when it has rained, or maybe when it is about to rain. So, basically: never, with being monsoon season and all that, except, of course, when the landlord is over to convince himself that the phone is not working, so that he can call MTNL, who would then have to certify the line as being faulty, so that the landlord can ask an electrician to fix it. Needless to say, nothing has been fixed yet.

Too bad, because there's lot's of things to talk about, but for now, just this: We spent the weekend at the Osho Ashram in Pune, we fired our maid, and, oh, yes, our phone still isn't working. More on that when we are back online; it could take a while, or it could be tomorrow, noone can say for sure.

Shopping for Furniture and DSL

2005-07-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

Our apartment has nice modern furniture and a big terrace with a little roof to sit under in the rain, but no terrace furniture. But what better place than India to buy this sort of stuff? Mumbai is full of little woodcarving furniture shops, mostly owned by Muslims. There are also many shops that make furniture from bamboo cane, but the woodcarving stuff is really quite something. So last weekend we went from one to the next, trying to figure out the different types and prices. We are probably deluding ourselves, but we start thinking that we are getting a better idea about whether people are giving us a totally inflated tourist price or only a medium inflated price. But basically, we kind of go by what we like and, almost equally important, which of the sales guys we like. Eventually, we end up at one shop where the people are very relaxed and laid back and seem to have prices that are not obviously completely out of line.
Of course, even the outrageous quotes are probably a quarter or less of what this stuff would be anywhere in the West, but we don't really want to be taken for complete idiots either, and I am slowly beginning to take a liking in the bargaining and haggling game. Anyways, so we get a bunch of lounge type chairs and small tables, with carvings to Ksenia's specification, made of rosewood and with some inlays on the table tops. They supposedly will get made to order in 10 days. The people were really quite nice. We went back there three or four times, were forced to have a cold Pepsi, and apparently were a bit of a sensation in that neighborhood. We also got a rocking chair, at some other place, which just got delivered.

Also last weekend, we went out for drinks and dinner with another expat from work and some expat friends of his. Before we came here, we didn't really think about whether we'd make Indian friends or hang out with expats, but I guess we also have reached a point where we realize it's nice to have a bitch and moan and vent session with expats then and again, where you can just sit down and commiserate about the general insanity and craziness of this country. Indians might get defensive or offended by this sort of stuff, just like I have been asked on more than one occasion why the fuck I came to the US, if I have to bitch about this or that, so when Indians asks me how I like India, which they do very often, I don't particularly feel, tempting as it might be, to say exactly all the things that might be on my mind. It would take too much time anyways.

Apart from yet another elephant that we saw walking down the street today (with the guy riding it asking for money, of course), we also saw a Hindustan Motors Ambassador Avigo. Now, we had already given Rs15,000 to the Tata showroom to book a Tata Sumo, and we even had already a certified check for another Rs85,000 in our hands, ready to be turned over to Tata, but when I saw that HM Ambassador Avigo, I just couldn't help it and completely changed my mind. This car is an absolute beauty. I don't care what Indians tell me, which is usually that it's a shit piece of junk and that I should buy a Mahindra Scorpio or some such US style SUV, I think this car is absolutely gorgeous. I admit, the regular HM Ambassador Grand leaves a bit to be desired in terms of interior styling, but the Avigo looks great, is cheap for a car its size, and is made for Indian roads. So I reversed my Tata Sumo booking and ordered an HM Amby Avigo.

The only downside is that it'll probably take four or five weeks, and that the paperwork is not any less than for any other car. Apart from a copy of my passport, my permanent residency permit, my landlord's phone bill, they also want the original copy of my apartment lease agreement, and a letter from my employer on company letterhead, which confirms my status and confirms that I moved from the hotel to an apartment and basically begs the vehicle registration office to please register my car, Yours Faithfully etc. blah blah... Apparently, at least that was the HM car dealer's explanation, the vehicle registration office has a real problem with people faking their proof of residence documents, which, given the amount of paperwork these bureaucrats require doesn't really surprise me, especially since the permanent residence permit, for example, is basically printed on toilet paper, so easy to fake that my grandmother could do it, and she is dead.

At least when you go to the post and telegraph office, which we did to order a DSL broadband connection, you know to expect the worst, and our expectations were sort of satisfied. The PTO is now actually run by a semi-government entity called MTNL, and when you go there, it is a bit like entering the twighlight zone. The MTNL workers, many of them, none with much of anything to do, sit behind large schoolroom desks of plastic wood veneer, hand you an application form that we had to have our landlord signed, since our phone line is on his name. Fair enough. When we get back, they read the form very carefully, slam three official stamps on it with full gusto, rip off a little bit off it at the bottom and say "OK, two to four days". We couldn't quite believe what we heard, so then they clarified that in two to four days they will forward the application. "And then what?" our inquiring minds wanted to know. Then they clarified that the service guy will come to our apartment. But nobody knew what day exactly, let alone what time.

So when we argued that we'd like to know the day and, if possible, have a rough idea about the time, they said "I don't know". Well, honesty is always a good policy. But when we asked, what if we are not home, the woman taking our application gave a fantastic shy smile and just said "Oh." I am not sure exactly what that meant, but I can only assume that she assumed that we have a maid (which we now do, but only part-time). Or is it really possible that it never occurred to her that people might not be home?

Anyways, so she sent us to the second floor to talk to the field manager, I guess. The building is old, smelly, and from the looks on people's faces, no Westerner has ever set foot into the place, at least not onto the second floor. There's huge metal drawers on the walls, ca. 1930. The field manager now says one week. Then we kind of lie and say that downstairs they said two to three days. The brief answer: "No, impossible!" But then, I don't know what happened, her colleague started wiggling his head, and all of a sudden it was no problem and he promises Thursday, in three days. Exact time? "After 12." Well, looks like we are starting to figure stuff out here, so we are already very happy. For now. Who knows what will happen Thursday, but the poster of Mahatma Gandhi on the field office was promising. It had his portrait and underneath, the following, paraphrased from memory:

The customer is not an interruption of your work; he is your reason for being.
The customer should not be thankful that you serve him; you should be thankful for getting to serve him.

It went on a bit more in that vein, and I don't remember the exact words, but seeing this faded black and white poster in this five by five feet field office was truly worth getting the visitor's pass that we needed to go to the second floor. About as worthwhile as the hand-painted sign above the elevator: "This lift is not available for going down."

One thing we haven't quite figured out yet are our 70 or so switches. The other day, I accidentally switched off the power plug for the fridge and didn't notice for a good while, and we also had somehow managed to switch off the door bell, so the poor woman that came for an interview as a maid was waiting outside for half an hour, because we also didn't hear her knocking, as we were in the kitchen, and the ventilator, stove exhaust, and washing machine combined are a bit too noisy to hear much of anything. Not to mention our melodic water filter. The electrical outlets are also a bit of a challenge. They come in two different shapes, but each seems to be able to actually fit a variety of plug types, except of course our US types, and in any event, a few of our appliances require 120V, not the standard 220V in use in India (give or take 20V I guess, with the power supply being said to be a bit shaky here). I never understood the US system either, where it seems to be preferred to have poster size warning labels on every goddamned power cable, as opposed to manufacturing plugs that are actually safe and don't bend like straws at the slightest touch, but I guess that's where the German in me comes out, because there's something to be said for proper DIN norms.

Anyways, we had to make two trips to an electrical supplies shop, and the 13 year old kid there was fantastic. He seemed to know everything and anything about electrical supplies, Watts and Volts and amperes, and whipped out his calculator to figure out the power needs of all sorts of things. Try that at Radio Shack and you'll risk an unexpected death. Anyways, we hooked up our PC, and are now DSL ready, the MTNL and Gandhi willing.

Moving Day

2005-07-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

So our move sort of went smoothly. Deepak, our driver, had his day
off, the first in four weeks. I am not sure how that works, really,
but we had a different driver on the day of the move. Ksenia pretty
quickly stated the obvious: "I don't think he knows how to drive".
Well, he really didn't. He had no clue where he was going, when to
stop at the green light, or when to go at the red light, and, best of
all, he spent more time honking than I would have ever thought
possible. Deepak honks the horn quite often as well, but at least one
can sort of see the reasoning. This guy seemed to use the horn for no
reason whatsoever. I guess it's true, as it says on the back of every
truck in this country, and I am not making this up: "Horn OK Please".
Well, sometimes it says "Horn OK Pliese".

Anyways, we ended up being half an hour late for the handover of the
apartment, but it was OK. I had not noticed when I had looked at the
apartment, but of course, Ksenia noticed right away: Whenever the
elevator door is open, it plays an atrocious midi melody, kind of like
an ice cream truck in NYC. But that was not enough. The kitchen has a
water filter that also plays music. The filter is some mysterious
contraption with an electric switch, and whenever it's ready for use,
and in fact for the whole time thereafter, it plays an even more
annoying midi melody. Maybe it's designed to help scare off the germs
in the water, but in any event that's what we have in our kitchen.

The next thing we notice, because the owner of the apartment gives us
a tour of it, is that this 2 bedroom apartment must have about 70
light and other switches. It seems like each individual light bulb
and electric outlet has its own dedicated switch, and none of the
rooms has one main light, but instead a whole assortment of light
sources that one can switch on or off in endless variations. Of
course, since none of the light bulbs appears to be more than 10W,
it's nevertheless a little dark, or maybe let's say there is always a
nice ambience. Anyways, the sheer number of light switches is
dizzying. We had wondered about the TV commercials for Euroswitches,
which we had seen a few times, but whatever those really are, people
seem to have a real love for light switches here.

Unfortunately, Ksenia also developed a serious case of toothache, so
we took the opportunity to ask the apartment owner about a good
dentist. Back in the hotel, where we picked up our second load of
luggage, we also asked the front desk, but when we called the dentist
they recommended, we were told that he was already gone for the day.
That was at 11:00am. The apartment owner's dentist seemed to be a
better bet. He also had already gone, but he'd be back at 4:30pm, and
so we went there in the afternoon. We had the dental office give our
driver directions over the phone, but he still had to ask two people
on the street and call the dental office back some more. Maybe we
aren't the only ones who can't make much sense of addresses in this
town. The dental office, proudly going by the name "Only Smiles",
turned out to be a good find. There was hardly a wait, the prescribed
anti-biotica were $1.20, and the x-rays were done the next day.
Unfortunately, Ksenia needs a root-canal, so that's not so great, but
she's scheduled for next week, and on the plus side, we no longer have
the shits. We both had a mild to not so mild case of the shits, but
that's over for now.

Before we went to the dentist, we spent the afternoon hunting for
kitchen and cleaning supplies. But first we had yet another fantastic
meal at a restaurant. The waiter recommended to go to KNB or to
Shopper's Shop for kitchen and cleaning supplies. He must have been
confused, because both places featured women's dresses and a very
small selection of tea pots and such. Shopper's Shop is kind of a mall
and not exactly what we needed. When we asked a sales woman there
about kitchen and cleaning supplies, like mops and spunges etc., she
tried to steer us to her water boilers, apologized for not having any
mops for sale and recommended another store around the corner. Now,
that store was a little closer to what we needed, at least they sold
ashtrays, right next to the women's dresses and men's shoes. So we
bought an ashtray (with the usual ceremony of one guy selling, one guy
wrapping, one guy taking the money, and a fourth guy handing over the
ashtray), and walked out of there. Luckily, Ksenia then remembered a
store somewhere near a Barista (the Indian Starbucks), which should
have everything we wanted, so after a few futile inquiries about the
location of that Barista, we eventually found it. And, indeed, Rs2,200
later we were loaded up on spunges, a mop, toilet paper, and mosquito
repellent - just the sort of stuff one needs to get started.
Interestingly, toilet paper really does seem like a luxury item here.
At $5 for six measly rolls, I was tempted to look for the golden
prints and silk embroidery, but they were just plain white and
expensive.

Our moving day ended with the discovery of a very cute pink Lizard in
the living room, and of a less cute but thumb-sized cockroach in the
kitchen. There wasn't much in terms of pots or pans or anything in the
apartment, but a big can of anti-cockroach spray there was, and it
came very handy. Ksenia went after it with full gusto, and that was
the end of it. Our pots and pans etc. arrived the next day, yesterday.
Ksenia is still in pain with her teeth, and we have interviewed a
maid. Tomorrow, we'll go to a dance festival and continue the car
buying saga. We still need to get DSL, but at least there is something
called instant internet here. It's dead slow, but works from any phone
line on demand, so I am writing this via e-mail from Ksenia's G4,
since I haven't set up my computer yet either. The weather is quite
nice these days, and Ksenia sways back and forth from "If it weren't
for the food, I'd hate this country" to being quite taken with the
various fabrics she has found, as well as with her Indian dance and
the yoga classes she is taking. So, all in all, we are already on our
way to a normal life. And, still, I can't wait to get a car, so we can
get out of town, for a totally different India altogether, I am sure.

Kanheri Caves

2005-07-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

So today we went back to Sanjay Gandhi National Park, which was very nice. It's green, it's less than an hour from the city, and given that there are 16 million people in this town, there were surprisingly few people in the park. There were a bunch of rather loud teens in party mood (including beer and whiskey bottles), but most were families on a picnic. Even the trash was quite a bit less obvious, although we did see a monkey playing with an empty bag of junk food. Yes, there's monkeys there; they like to hang around people, who usually feed them, unless they are as scared as Ksenia, who was very much afraid that they'll jump onto her head and bite her.

We didn't really see much of the park though. There's a lion and tiger safari to see, but we went straight to the Kanheri Caves, which are over 2000 year old, and later became a center of Buddhist teaching and meditation. Most of the over 100 caves were quite simple, but a few were very impressive. There was a rather large church-like one with very high ceilings and huge statues. Even the simpler ones had some pretty interesting details, and were bigger and seemed more sophisticated than the Maya caves we had seen in Mexico.

Apart from the teens and families taking a plunge in the little river that ran through the area, we heard some people sing Hare Krishna. I was a bit surprised when we later saw them, because none of them had the Hare Krishna clothes I had expected, nor did they look like the Buddhists we had seen earlier. Instead, they were all dressed in regular clothes, and there were no women.

Strangely, there was also a temple in ruins that looked like it had been built with Soviet white marble. It didn't really make any sense to us, but there it was, with an odd little public bathroom size construction next to it, a statue that was cut off at its hips, and someone was kind enough to put some fresh red flowers on the steps.

Anyways, it was a nice little excursion. Good to know there's a place this close where one can actually breathe some fresh air (even though it was very humid). We didn't have time for the tiger or lion safari, but we'll definitely be back.

H2O

2005-07-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

So last night we went to H2O. It will be the closest lounge bar to our apartment when we move there next week. The place is Rs500 per person for drink/food tickets, and it's a bar/restaurant on two floors, with a terrace on the upper floor. When we got there, at around 9:00pm, we were about the only people, except for two Western women. The place has a whole army of neatly uniformed waiters, one of them jumping the very second I reached out to touch one of the movable A/C fans that they have on the terrace. Then there's a few head waiters, and everyone is very friendly and professional, and we don't even get stared at for a change. The cocktails are expensive, but way less than NYC, and the food is actually fantastic.

For some reason, the music is unfortunately quite atrocious 80s stuff, but ah well. I guess we've reached the point where we can do with a little escape from the noise and dirt and stares of the street, so we don't mind too much. By around 11:00pm, the place is quite crowded with the modern jeans and t-shirt crowd. I think Ksenia is the only woman wearing a saree. The CDs aren't skipping like they did at The Myst last weekend, and as the evening goes on, either the music got better or we got drunk. We waited in vain to see whether people are going to start dancing, but then again, we were too beat to wait around. Apparently, the place closes at 12:30am, maybe later, if there are no cops around, but we went home, thinking, ok, we can deal with a place like that in walking distance from our apartment.

On The Streets

2005-07-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that very large numbers of Indians are dirt poor, literally. While the middle class is growing in numbers by 10% or so per year, hundreds of millions are very poor. Most Indians still depend on a good Monsoon season - if it rains well, there will be food on the table, if it doesn't, then maybe not. So millions of them try to get out of the rural areas and migrate to the cities, where they will most likely live in shanty towns, under bridges, right next to sewage and traffic lines. As we get driven around in our car, we see these shanties everywhere. Many families seem to have absolutely nothing, except the dirty shoddy clothes that they are wearing. Many families have miniscule tents made up of plastic wrap and cardboard, with no protection whatsoever against the sometimes heavy rains. Many have slightly less improvised tents or shacks made of plywood or sheet metals. Finally, there's many families in miniscule brick housing, maybe 10 by 10 feet. As we drive by, these families live literally a few feet away from the traffic, and we can see them sitting on the floors of their homes, eating with their hands. Sometimes they wash outside on the street with a plastic bowl of brown water. There are no toilets anywhere it seems, so business is taken care of on the streets.

Kids are playing around everywhere. The dirt and garbage that makes up their playgrounds is often unbelievable. The kids don't seem to care, they just laugh and play. At other times, some of them run around between cars at intersections, begging for money, often with their parents sitting around at the corner. I had expected to find a lot more beggars in India, but while there are many, it is not quite as bad as I thought. Around The Gateway of India and other tourist spots, there's quite few, although most of them are actually hawkers, who can be quite persistent and aggressive. Road junctions and, even more so, churches are pretty much the only places where they will come to ask for money. Any Indian volunteer social services group tells people, especially foreigners, not to give any money, especially not to kids, and we never do, so when we saw some Western tourist hand a kid Rs5 without even stopping or looking much at the kid, we were quite pissed off.

On the other hand, I am also not sure it's such a great idea to take a picture of them, but I have somehow convinced myself that they probably think it's fun, so there's no harm done. Given all the constant staring and mostly very friendly, but still quite annoying, attention that we are receiving just walking around minding our own business, I very much doubt that the Western concept of privacy has a lot ov value here. Obviously, I would take a picture of a muslim woman, but I guess a kid is ok, begging or not.

More Car Shopping

2005-07-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

The car shopping saga continues. We started our day by driving around for over an hour trying to find the location of a 12 hour dance festival that was posted in TimeOut Mumbai. The listing had an address and a phone number, and the map promised a vague idea of where the venue might be. Well, either the map or the listing were wrong, most likely both. Even our driver laughed about it, he said the address doesn't make any sense, because it mentioned both Andheri and Oshiwara, which are quite far apart from each other. Of course, calling the phone number was equally useless, because no-one picked up, and not even the driver was able to understand the brief message one would hear upon calling the number.

So that was that. Next stop was a Bajaj/Tempo showroom in the Eastern outskirts of Mumbai, in Bhandup. Their sales guy had actually visited me in my hotel two weeks ago, to show me some brochures that were trying to be glossy. Back then, he said no problem, I can show you car Wednesday. He never called again. I called him last weekend, he said definitely, I can show car tomorrow. That didn't happen either. I called him again last Wednesday, he said Saturday, no problem, we have car in showroom. Ok, so we drive to Bhandup from the westside of the suburbs, and it turned out to be a fairly nice drive through the Sanjay Ghandi National Park, a real park with lots of birds, and trees and flowers, and, yes, real tigers. Because residential areas are shooting up everywhere around the park, it happens then and again that some little kids get in too close, and unpleasant, contact with the tigers.

Anyways, the park looks nice, it has two lakes, and we'll definitely come back here sometime. When we finally find the Bajaj/Tempo, there's a lot of commotion, we get tea and water and coffee offered, and the sales guy greets us very excitedly. But, of course, he has no car to show. He has a number of autorikshaws standing around, and the Tempo Traveller that he tried to interest me in, but that's a 15 or 20 seat bus. So now he says maybe Tuesday or Wednesday he can show me the car I was interested in, if not, he says, maybe I should go and buy a Mahindra, i.e. the competition. The Mahindra Scorpio appears to be the strongest Indian SUV in town, but at $19,000 or so, it's more than I want to spend, and I really don't need an SUV with 110 or so hp; I'd like a simple one that's safe in a potential crash, gets over the incredible potholes, lets us go into the rural areas on weekends, and can easily get repaired at every corner.

After that, we needed some lunch. We go to a place nearby, where we were immediately sent into the airconditioned room on the upper floor. That A/C is a bit too cold, so we go back to where we came from, and started ordering from the sticky menu. The whole place is staring at us, especially Ksenia, who generally gets stared at wherever she goes, it is sometimes getting a bit annoying. But the food is great, the chai is good, and we manage not to use our left hands. Behind us are two utterly drunk guys in their late teens, who eventually stumble out of the place. To our side is a few teenage boys shoveling in the food like it's going out of fashion. We are the only ones with a fork and spoon. The boys constantly look over to us and hardly even pretend they aren't looking.

Next stop is Chembur, back towards home. Rumor has it that there's a Tata showroom that actually has cars to show and that would accept credit cards for the initial deposit. When we get there, they do indeed have the Tata Sumo that I had in mind. It comes without any bells and whistles, but has an A/C, even in the base version. One version up has power steering. The top model also has central locking and electric windows, neither of which we need. At around $14,000 it's not exactly cheap in my book (who has never owned a car in his life), but it'll do. So then the commotions and negotiations begin. They didn't like my Indian government issued Foreigners Regional Registration Office ID. They had probably never seen one of those. They said it's only valid for a year, normally they'd require a passport, which would be valid for 15 years or so. We said, we are very sorry, but we will probably not stay for 15 years, and this is an official document, with an official stamp, issued by the Indian government. It even has our address in there. Unfortunately, it's the address of our hotel. Don't we have a phone bill, they ask. I wonder out loud how a phonebill could be more official that this Indian government issued document with my address and a bunch of stamps in it.

So, eventually, they give up. Ok, so what's next? They'd like a Rs100,000 deposit, and yes, they take credit cards for that. No problem. Well, I guess I should have known, but of course neither the American Express card, nor a regular Visa card is accepted. Indian bank issued Visa/MC cards only. So, after some back and forth, it turns out they will accept Rs15,000 in cash for now, and with that, they will get the car from the factory. Then, next week, I need to come back with the remaining Rs85,000 to give them the balance of the Rs100,000 deposit. Preferably as a DD, i.e. a certified check. Ok, from taht point on, it'll be another 10-12 business days to have them get the car registered. Finally, the car would be ready for me to pick up, if and when we pay the remaining balance of the Rs600,000 total. Needless to say, the last points took us over an hour to negotiate. The sales guy kept changing his story about what money is due when and for what item of the list of things that need to be done to have the car and keys in your hand. He kept going back to saying Sir, can you give me six lakhs now, by check (six lakhs = Rs600,000)? I kept saying, no I can't, besides, I won't give you the full amount untill I have the keys to the car in my hand.

So this went back and forth for a while, the General Manager of the place got involved (or, rather, we were summoned to his office), who tried to tell me that he's taking a big risk by letting me not give him the full amount now. As he was sort of insinuating that I should be very thankful for his service, he kept saying You know, Sir, I take one lakh now, but then you might change your mind and not want the car. I guess the logic escaped me and I tried asking him, wouldn't it be rather stupid of me to hand you one lakh ($2300), and then change my mind? So then he tried to explain to me the ways of doing business in India (well, in India, you see, Sir, we have certain rules and regulations...), and at that point I slowly started to sense that he was beginning to feel insulted by my arguing with him (after all, he was probably twice my age), so I left it at that. I think we have a deal, I guess we'll see next weekend, when I hand them the rest of the deposit.

High-Tech India

2005-07-07T09:12:00.000-07:00

My driver was an hour late this morning. He was very sorry, I was half an hour late to a meeting, but I think the reason was because he got us a new car. Well, it's not a new car, it's a different car. The same little Maruti (I think), about the size of a Mini Morris but not quite as sexy. At least the left backdoor is now working again. The A/C is just as crap as before; it's either below freezing or just as hot an humid as outside. I am rather annoyed that I have to pay $800 a month for this, just to get around and to work at all. That's when you start missing the $70 NYC subway monthly. Of course, this town doesn't have a subway. 16 million people, but only two suburbian train lines, and a big bus network, that's it. Everybody suggests to stay away from the trains and busses, way too crowded, way too unreliable, always late, and a little dangerous. Not to mention the fact that neither have any windows or any doors that would close, so if there's a nice monsoon shower, you are bound to get soaking wet. I have no idea what they will do in this town if and when in a few years half the population has its own car and they are all going to try to get to work in it. There's just no way anyone will have a commute of less than an hour or two, not to mention the pollution, which is already incredible. But a subway or a mono-rail in the largest and most important city in India? Not happening.

On the way to work we passed a huge crowd of people blocking the entire traffic on a two-lane street, because they had to take a very close look at the motorbike that was just being pulled out from under a big truck. No idea what happened to the guy on the bike (or maybe it was a guy and a woman, her sitting sideways behind him, as they usually do here), but, basically, anyone cruising around on a bike in this town has to be seriously suicidal. Not only are there regular speedbumps everywhere, but there's potholes everywhere, huge crowds of people left and right and crossing the streets without any notice whatsoever, plus the autorikshaws are always going zig zag, plenty of rich boys in SUVs driving like complete assholes, and of course busses and trucks literally do not stop for anything. Still, helmets are optional, and there's quite a few bikes with dad and mom and two kids scrambling not to fall off and onto the road. It is quite amazing.

Later today news came out that there was a terrorist attack in London. A couple of days ago, some militant muslims tried to bomb a Hindu temple in northern India, basically to take it back from the hindus, who a decade ago or so had destroyed a mosque that was located at the same place and replaced it with a hindu temple. That time, 2000 people died in the resulting riots. Of course, way back, the place had been hindu to start with, so when the muslims originally came into the area, they replaced the hindu temple with a mosque. And so I guess it'll go back and forth for the next 1500 years. What's strange is that some parts of the opposition party BJP called for a strike to protest the terrorist attack. The logic somehow escapes me, and I am trying to imagine the Democrats call for a strike after 9/11. Anyways, the BJP is apparently basically running under the banner of Hinduism and Nationalism, and they are always happy to use religion as a way to get votes, in quite the same appaling way as the Republicans. Not sure what platform the other main party is running on, but since they've ruled the country for almost the entire time since independence, with abrief exception, it's probably safe to assume that they are corrupt buerocrats to the bone.

Corruption is by the way pretty much a given. Students openly say that they got placed at prestigious colleges because they had some family friends. Doctors may refuse treatment unless there's some upfront cash (and, yes, people die). There's big signs in the airport telling travellers to report any airport staff who attempt to get a bribe. Not to mention the real estate market, which is full of illegal constructions, demolitions, etc., all courtesy of greased palms.

Closer to home, I am being told that the reason SMS isn't working on any of our two pre-paid SIM cards is that you have to actually call the mobile phone company to activate your SMS services. Except that the phone number you need to call is always busy, so a nice voice tells you to call later. Today I have actually received the post-paid, i.e. subscriber SIM card. No SMS either though. Now, in the case of a subscriber SIM card, one can actually call to activate SMS. Except, it takes a minimum of seven days untill that activation actually happens. Needless to say, voicemail does not come standard with mobile phone service, pre-paid or post-paid, and noone seems to have it. So much for high-tech India.

On a different front, it now looks like we will move to our apartment next Monday or Tuesday. So the last thing we'd still need around here would be a car. We are still waiting to be able to get some money wired over here, it's taken three weeks to get that Indian bank account fully setup, meaning: the netbanking password is still in the mail. The easiest thing of course would have been to pay with a credit card, but that's not an option. The car dealers don't seem to have credit card machines, or if they do, they insist that the customer pays the 2% extra that VISA/MC/AMEX gets out of every deal. So at this rate, we might have a car in three weeks or so.

Luckily, the weather is actually not so bad. It's very muggy and quite warm, but not too hot. It was quite a bit worse when I was here in April, and the smells in some of the crowded residential areas were dizzying. Anything from the wildest spices and incenses (often to be found on the little dashboards of cabs and autorikshaws), not to mention the thousands of street food vendors, and of course plenty of piss and shit and molding buildings and god knows what infested puddles of old water. Now I kind of miss them, although I do think of Central Park sometimes. Or maybe I've just gotten used to it already. I guess I'll have to go back to Crawford Market, and this time I should shoot some pictures.

A Downtown Stroll

2005-07-03T10:50:00.000-07:00

So today we actually got up at a decent time and took the car downtown at 11am. On weekends, traffic isn't all that bad really, so it only took 90 minutes or so. We've given up on trying to remind our driver to keep the A/C low, so we sit in the car with long sleeves or jacket. We let him drop us off where he had picked us up yesterday, which is right by The Prince of Wales Museum, now called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastusangrahalaya (just like the Churchgate and Victoria terminals, the airport, and all the roads have been renamed a few years ago, but everyone still seems to call them by their colonial names).

First we needed a coffee. Even though that's probably the most touristy area there is in Mumbai and even though (or maybe because) Ksenia is wearing a saree, she definitely gets stared at. Not in a hostile way, it's more like a big what the fuck? Some women seem to apreciate it and talk about her smilingly (or maybe they make fun of that stupid blonde Westerner trying to look Indian). Anyways, the coffee is great, as always. Walking from there along the Gateway of India is not so great. It's a bit of a circus there and the hawkers are a little overeager.

Somehow I imagined walking down to Cuffe Parade, which is an office/business area around the World Trade Center might be nice, but it turned out to be boring highrises. On the way back we saw a number of sadly deteriorating villas, which seem to have seen better days and would look fantastic, if they got renovated. Some of them are actually locked up and seem to real estate speculation objects. Still, there were a few quite nice ones as well. Then we hit Colaba Causeway, which is pretty lively, and since we had heard of the Leopold Cafe, we went there to get some lunch. I guess we weren't the only ones who had heard of it, because the place was packed with Westerners, and even the Indian looking people had an American accent. Besides, we waited 15 minuts without anyone coming to our table, and by that time we had read the menu up and down and sideways and were still unable to find much else other than Italian, Chinese, and only the odd Indian item.

Well, that was that then, so we just left and went to a place accross the street, which turned out to be the real deal and had great food and fantastic fruit juices. Our doctor had told us to keep our hands off any drinks with ice in them, but we figure in small doses it's got to be just like vaccination, so we didn't worry about it too much. It's late evening now, and it seems we were right. We are still trying to get the hang of eating the bread with just the right hand and apparently we are making progress, because our forks remained untouched. For all the apparent inequalities that women face around here, one thing appears to be no problem, which is breast-feeding your child in a restaurant. Try that in the United States, and you might get arrested, here it's thankfully all good.

Finally, we went to the museum, which was actually quite nice although sorely missing some benches and air conditioners. Foreigners pay 300Rs instead of the regular 50Rs, which seems fair enough and includes an audio tour. Unlike a lot of museums in say Germany, which appear to get no visitors whatsoever, this one was bustling with Indians. So bustling in fact that Ksenia got her legs grabbed by some guy, but he really was just trying to get hold of his little kid, and it was actually quite funny.

So after all that walking, we were ready for a drink. We had walked by The Sports Bar and T.G.I. Fridays, but those were pretty much the last places on earth we had in mind. The TimeOut Mumbai Nightlife section came up empty, but today's Times of India had a brief mention of a place called The Myst in the suburbs (they are really not suburbs, but just streched out extensions of the city). Finding that place was a bit of a challenge, but it turned out to be near the mall that Ksenia had spent most of Friday afternoon. It was a kind of lounge bar/restaurant, playing Eminem followed by Enigma. That would be ok, but the CD unfortunately kept skipping on both songs and noone seemed to notice or care, so we ended up having to listen to each one for about half an hour, which was a bit too much, even though the cocktails were quite good and sitting outside was almost pleasant.

Saturday in Mumbai

2005-07-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

Things are looking better. Of course, traffic is still an amazingly huge madness, and the two sports channels on television don't seem to tire of showing World Wide Wrestling or replays of last weeks Cricket, nor do the other channels seem to have anything better to offer than atrociously bad soap operas or American Idol style crap, but today was a good day nevertheless. We managed to find a very interesting store full of fantastic Indian designer clothes; we found a bunch of art galleries with a mixed bag of paintings and sculptures, some of them very nice; we had incredibly good dinner at some vegetarian place (at less than $2 for the two of us), and I got myself a long overdue haircut that wasn't any worse than anywhere else, except at a tenth of NYC prices. Well, ok, it was a little worse than usual. We also ordered two tailored shirts, and if they turn out well, I'll get some tailored suits. The choices and prices of fabrics are simply amazing and even though Ksenia insists that the fabrics aren't quite Italian quality, the tailors definitely seem to know what they are doing.

Ksenia definitely likes it here. Well, she keeps saying "Incredible India" is definitely the right choice of words. She already seems to have made up a long list of fabric and design stores that she wants to check out. We haven't even been to any museums yet, let alone ventured outside of the city, but next week there will be two fairly big dance festivals to go to, so we definitely won't be bored. The music scene seems to be very small, there's only about ten listings in all of TimeOut Mumbai (which covers two weeks) and five or seven of them appear to be Karaoke - not exactly our idea of live music. Also, clubs apparently close at 12:30am, unless they are in a hotel, in which case they close at 3am, but we really have no desire whatsoever to go to hotel bars or clubs. Lounge bars are also not really our thing, but Mumbai seems to have a lot of them, although they are not easy to find.

The other day, Ksenia ran into some Indian girls. One of them was an English teacher who told her that for a wife to call her husband by his first name would be rude; it should be the first name plus jaar or jah or something like that, i.e. the polite form. Ah well. In other news, a woman who got raped by her father-in-law got condemed by a fatwa to live separate from her husband, since her rapist would now be considered her husband, which would make her real husband her son. Also, a young couple that, elsewhere, dared to elope got condemend by their village to leave town. I guess the fact that these things are actually reported in the newspaper would mean that they are newsworthy and unusual or controversial, and in fact there is an organization of muslim women that very strongly condemned the fatwa as a gross misinterpretation of the Koran.

Still, the English teacher will have an arranged marriage and insists that every one of her friends that had an arranged marriage is very happy. The idea is that your parents would have only your best interests in mind and that they would pick someone with your culture, background, and caste. And maybe that's great, after all, people do want to marry someone that they have things in common with, but to have someone else, your parents, look for the commonalities and to have these commonalities be so narrowly defined by caste or clan or village seems rather ... well, a little difficult to comprehend, and to see the same girl be on a shopping spree at The Mall and running around in blue jeans listening to Indian hip-hop on her IPod, doesn't exactly make it easier.

Getting There

2005-06-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

So I think we are slowly getting there. Well, first of all Ksenia got here. Four and a half hours late, but she did. The various arrival monitors at the airport indicated her flight as having arrived, or being delayed by anything between 30 minutes and two hours, but eventually she made it. The next day she took off to Crawford Market and to a dance performance at the National Center of Performing Arts (no entrance fee, and the performance matched the price). We still don't have an apartment, but the process is moving along smoothly. While at Crawford Market, she had her ass grabbed only once, so it went relatively smoothly, even though she did call me at work at some point, because some guy had been following her for the last ten minutes.

On the plus side, we are spreading out in the hotel and in our hotel room, which is really more like a NYC size small one bedroom. Her cooking at home is definitely better than the Italian restaurant, which is good, but at $50 per person a bit too pricey for everyday use.

I am still not fully set up at work in terms of network connectivity and file access, and I am still on my prepaid SIM card as opposed to a regular mobile phone and data service subscription deal, but we are getting there, and I feel like I am actually having pretty normal work days while Ksenia is discovering every nook and cranny of Mumbai. I am not sure about it, but I would think that our driver is also happy that he gets to drive around a hot blonde all day, as opposed to sit on the parking lot waiting for me. Strangely enough, the left back door is still in the same shape it has been since it got crushed by the city bus, but I don't really care. It leaks a bit if we are driving through a strong rain, but other than that it's ok. Of course, our driver still hasn't gotten the concept of keeping the A/C at moderate temperatures, so the commute is still ice cold on a daily basis.

At least I am done with the "business center" in the hotel. Ksenia brought her G4, and we are connected via the hotel room's ethernet. Unfortunately, it's not cheap either, but still better than the business center. Maybe it's the rain or maybe it's something else, but neither Ksenia nor myself have taken any pictures yet. One of these days, we'll take some, but right now, we feel odd enough as it is, and running around taking pictues wouldn't exactly help. Besides, in April, I drove around in auto rikshahs, which are great for taking pictures from, because they don't have any windows. Now, I'd actually have to make an effort and, well, I haven't been in the mood yet.

Things I Have Learned So Far

2005-06-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

I can go the same distance, say an hour (i.e. 5 miles in this traffic), in a hotel cab for 2000Rs, or in an auto riksha for 100Rs (43Rs are 1$, so do the math). The hotel cab is nicer, but not 20 times as nice or fast as the rikshaw. In fact, the rikshaw is kind of more fun, and it might even run on compressed natural gas, like most of them do now. That's definitely a plus over the Toyota Camrys that the hotel has.

Yes, definitely may very well mean no, never. I heard that yes, definitely a couple of times now, either when calling a car showroom about whether I can see or maybe even test drive a car, or when calling the hotel reception to see whether there's a place anywhere in town where I could see a Federations Cup game (football, or soccer, for some people). In both cases, I was told that they'd call me back with an answer very very shortly, but that never happened.

The Indian head wiggle can mean yes, no, or maybe. It looks a bit like a regular head shaking, but it it comes with a slight rotating motion, which can look quite elegant and artistic, actually. In any event, it's fascinating, but I am usually not sure what it means. I think in most cases, it means yes. Now, whether that yes actually then turns out to mean no, or maybe, or I don't know, or why don't you just go fuck yourself, is a different matter.

It's a bad idea to ask a woman for directions. The first time I did, it was a young student in jeans and t-shirt and she looked at me like I was the dirtiest old bastard she's ever met. Ooops. The second time, I had forgotten about the fist time, and this time, also someone dressed in jeans and shirt, a little older, she just walked away. Hm, maybe I really should work on my German accent, but I think I better just ask men.

There's McDonald's, Subway, Domino's Pizza, Pizza Hut, and all kinds of other American atrocities one can consume here. US-style SUVs get high praise, US import cars even higher praise (despite an import tax/duty of over 100%). The celebrity pages in the Times Of India (there's about four of these pages every day) are full of color pictures of Bollywood celebrities' parties and breakups, and a dizzying array of relationship, shopping, and make-up advice. A whole lot of them sport the usual US casual wear, there's t-shirts with the Stars and Stripes, sunglasses (of course, they are called shades) here, I think Miami Vice must be still a hit. There's definitely CNN, CNBC, CNBC in Hindi, the Hallmark channel, and Friends on television. At least there's also BBC World News, but other than that, the US has clearly taken over from the Brits.

Nevertheless, the Times of India is now the largest English language newspaper in the world, with a circulation greater than that of USA Today or the WSJ. Obviously, the customer base for these products is the rapidly growing Indian middle class. Apparently, just as it is considered absolutely cool in Russia to go out and be seen at McDonald's, the biggest attraction and the thing to do for fun around here, seems to be to go to the mall. Crawford Market is out, The Mall is in. So here I am in India, determined to find the places that are modern and accessible, yet original and Indian. Well, not really all that determined. I am pretty sure Ksenia will find those very cool and original, very modern, yet very Indian stores and venues and restaurants, so I might leave that up to her.

One thing I haven't learned is a single Word of Hindi. That will have to change. Rumor has it that one can get by with just English in India and while that's true, it's only about as true as it is for say France or Italy. A lot of people don't speak or understand a word of it. A lot of people do speak English, but with an accent so strong that I have never any idea whether they are speaking English or Hindi right now. I read in the paper that in some province somewhere, people (or some political party) demanded that the teaching of English in school be banned. It's quite possible to find a restaurant with an English menu but noone speaks English. While trying to get a mobile phone subscription (as opposed to prepaid), I had to deal with a whole number of people from AirTel calling me and we could simply not communicate whatsoever. My driver speaks a little English, but it would be absolutely hopeless trying to explain to him, for example, that I am not sure yet when I'd like him to pick me up the next day and that maybe I could just call him an hour so in advance when I do know. So I always ask him to pick me up at a certain time, and I usually end up having to let him wait forever. Anyways, so the point is, just as much as speaking English is an absolute must for anyone growing up in India who would like to jump onto the middle-class bandwagon, learning a bit of Hindi will be an absolute must for me and Ksenia to get around a bit easier and to see and experience a few things outside of The Mall.

The Laptop

2005-06-19T08:43:00.000-07:00

So now I have a mobile phone (SMS somehow stopped working), a car and a driver (at $800 a month), and am slowly becoming functional. I am still missing a bank account, my own apartment (for the first month, I am staying in that posh hotel), my own car, a home computer, a regular bar,...

The bank account was surprisingly easy to setup. The passport picture would have been the most difficult part, so I am glad I had stocked up on those. It'll take a while to get an actual account number, debit card, ATM PIN, customer number, phone banking PIN, online banking PIN (yes, these are all separate, different, and distinct), but not more than two weeks or so. Hopefully, it will then be cheaper to wire some money once a month, as opposed to getting charged 3.5% every time I use an ATM.

The car and the driver also work out nicely. The driver isn't driving all that manical anymore since the other day, when he tried to pass a big red bus, only to find that bus making a wrong turn and putting a big red dent into the left back door. The bus driver didn't even get out of his bus, and the driver just looked at the door for a few seconds, visibly saddened, and then moved on. At $800 a month, I figure I'll be better off buying my own cheap car and selling it when we are done here. So I am driving from showroom to showroom, of which there are not too many, and none of which seem to have any cars whatsoever to show, let alone to test drive. Besides, untill I have registered with the FRRO and have an Indian bank account, I wouldn't even be able to order a car anyways. The service in the showrooms always comes with a glass of water, maybe even a coffee, and sales people ranging from very eager to make a deal to utterly desinterested in talking with me unless I can show some proper documentation - i.e. the FRRO document, or a phone bill, which would be of equal legal standing, I am told.

The apartment hunt is moving along as well. Most apartments within my budget are dark, small, with horrible furniture, on a loud street. But for some reason they all have two bathrooms. Eventually, I see a very nice apartment with usable furniture and even a terrace. The monsoon has started, the temperatures have dropped, and this apartment is on a relatively quiet side street, so I guess that terrace might actually be really useful.

Unfortunately, sending Ksenia some pictures of the apartment (and blogging), is proving a bit costly. My posh little hotel charges $10 for thirty minutes in their business centre. Dining there also comes at NYC prices, so I am thinking maybe I should rent a laptop untill Ksenia arrives with hers, because my room does have an ethernet connection. Well, that's another story. I found a laptop rental place online, and miraculously even find the adress somewhere in the depths of Irla, another part of the suburbs (forget about making a deal online), but as I get there, they want to see some purchase order from my company. Since this would be for private use, I refuse, and offer a cash deposit instead. After a lot of back and forth, they agree, except of course, I would like that cash deposit to come from my credit card, since I don't have an Indian bank account yet, nor do I even have 50,000Rs ($1200) in cash. Sure, no problem he says, except, he doesn't have a credit card swiper, which doesn't really surprise me, since we are in an industrial building in the back of a back road, with carpentry and tiles shops and god knows what else in the same building. The office suites are randomly numbered 31, 73, 52, etc. and contain equallly random businesses and as I walk along the floors, and it took a good while to even find this laptop rental place to begin with

So, I say, ah well, I guess I am out of luck then. I am also late already for an appointment to see an apartment. But not so easy, the guy was not about to let me go just yet. Instead, he makes a number of phone calls, talks frantically with the proprietor, and lets his servant hand me another coffee. When I tell him, I need to go, I am late, he insists that I wait a minute. 15 minutes later he says, ok, we'll come to your hotel with the laptop later tonight, no problem. Ok, no problem.

So later that day I am back in the hotel, and he asks whether I can come to his office in half an hour. Curious about what he might have in store, I get back there. He, laptop in hand, two guys with him, are already waiting for me and are jumping into my car, so off we go around and around various sidestreets. The traffic, as usual, is of course unbelievable madness. Eventually, we stop at a little Indian incarnation of NY deli, Radio Shack, and Canal Street backpack and umbrella store all rolled in one; a store of about 5 by 5 feet. Lots of commotion, but apparently, the owner is willing, ready and able to swipe my card for the deposit. Well, untill he sees my card and apologizes profusely, because his little credit card swiping machine only handles Visa/MC cards issued by an Indian bank. The disappointment all around is heartbreaking. Can't we just call my company again, it's just a formality, that purchase order, the laptop guy says. Some more phone calls, and this time some tea. Finally, someone has the brilliant idea to ask me whether I have American Express. I can only assume they've seen some American Express commercials where some stranded traveller was magically rescued by his AMEX Gold Card. Well, I do and since I've always been wondering about that commercial myself, I actually call them. But I guess the magic of my AMEX card isn't all that powerful, because I am told that I would have to go to their office (which is two hours away downtown), and in any event they would charge me a fortune for their rescue services.

So that was that. No company stamp, no Indian bank, no laptop rental. I guess I will be feeding that business center like a slot machine for the time being.

Must Have Passport Pictures

2005-06-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

The other thing I decided to do was get an Indian prepaid SIM card. The hotel has those, very conveniently. Except they need a passport picture, otherwise no SMS card. Plus copies of my passport. I guess an SIM card could easily be used for subversive acts. Luckily, I still have a whole bunch of passport pictures, because I needed four or five to register with the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO). I had to spend lunchtime getting driven around in the hunt for a place that makes such pictures. We found one (well, the driver did, I wouldn't have recognized the little shack as a place for Kodak moments), took off our shoes, as it is the custom in many small stores, and walked off with 10 passport pictures with a gorgeous red background and a bit of redeye to match.

Not that I am actually already registered at the FRRO yet. There's a lot of work that goes into that, mainly paperwork. And rumor has it that foreigners are well advised to go with an agent, so as to not having to deal with disgruntled government employees themselves. Fair enough. So my appointment is scheduled for next week. As usual, my father's name was a required piece of information for registration with the FRRO. So when I bought my SIM card and again was aksed to fill out my father's name, I didn't really flinch anymore. They didn't care too much at all about my mother's or my wife's name - unlike Ksenia, who as my wife will be asked for her father's name, or her husband's name as an alternative, or maybe as a backup.

That SIM card was then handed to me right away. Not that I could make or receive any phone calls with it. Of course, it needs to get loaded with some Rupees, but needless to say, you can't do that in the hotel. For that, I go to some little place along the road and there I am, a proud owner of an Indian mobile phone number!

A Commute From Hell

2005-06-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

So it took a quick 20mins to get from work back to my posh hotel yesterday, but today it took a good 2.5 hours to get to work. In the morning, the usually desperate attempt to explain to either anyone from the hotel's car pool management army and/or the cab driver where I want to get to. This morning, everybody seemed to be in clear agreement: Yes, Sir, no problem. So I guess I can read the Times of India and relax. Unfortunately, when I look out of the window, we are in a huge traffic jam at the end of the Western Express Highway, going into the opposite direction of where we need to go (i.e. south instead of north). 40mins later we finally get off the so-called highway and I am trying to explain to my driver that he needs to turn around and get back onto the highway going north. It turns out that the driver doesn't understand a single word of what I am saying and my body language also appears to mystify him completely. Well, the sentiment is mutual, so eventually I just make him stop somewhere in the middle of traffic.

Stop he actually understood, but he wasn't one to give up easily. As I try to hire a different cab going into the opposite direction, he catches up with me and literally begs me to get back in with him. He is a very very old man with a very bad cough. Luckily, I find a translator, so, surrounded by a whole collection of spectators, I try again to point out where I want to go. She translates and after many gestures, laughs and smiles, she confirms: Don't worry, Sir, he got it now.

Happily, we are back on the highway. The Western Express Highway is literally a race track that is in pretty bad shape, has no markings whatsoever, is filled with two-, three-, four- and more-wheelers passing left right and in zig zag. There's the odd traffic light then and again (it seems these are one of the few traffic lights anyone actually pays attention to in this town), and here and there you get pedestrians on the side of it, and of course, a number of seriously suicidal ones who will either sprint, or, equally frequently, who will extremely slowly, entirely unfazed by anything at all, walk to cross the highway. It is serious madness.

Even better, 20mins or so later, I realize that I am not recognizing the landscape. There's a few hills in the distance, but they are on the left of the road, when they should be on the right. Then again, I might be wrong and not remember correctly, but I get the sneaking feeling that we are totally wrong and I make the driver pull over, right next to a long line of auto rickshaw drivers on their second breakfast break (on the highway). Ooops, it turns out we are on the Eastern Express Highway, not the Western. Well, that's just entirely wrong. I think I need a cigarette.

So, I guess we'll need to cut through the suburbs of Powai to get over to the west side. We pass an impressive roadbridge construction site where an army of women carry cement from one corner of the site to the other. They carry big buckets of that stuff on their heads, wearing incredibly shoddy clothes and flip flips, in the middle of dust and dirt and traffic at 36 degrees celsius. All of the construction workers are wearing flip-flops, actually. Forget about hard hats, gloves, or anything like that. It's quite unreal.

Eventually I get to work and decide that I better get a car plus driver on a daily basis, at least untill I have bought my own car, which I am planning to do. By the evening, I got that sorted out, and get driven back to my hotel in a fridge of a car. The driver sort of understands me and I sort of understand him, but he insists on having the AC turned to subzero temperatures. He also drives like a complete maniac, but I guess that's the way it goes.

Leningrad - Moscow - Delhi - Mumbai

2005-06-13T07:15:00.000-07:00

Well, I made it. All the way from NYC to Nice, Paris, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Delhi, and Mumbai. We carried three suitcases and three carry-ons each, which turned out to get a little pricey. From the US to France, they charged us only $90 each for the extra two suitcases, but from Nice to St. Petersburg it was the criminal amount of 12Euros per kilo above 20kg each. So that turned out to be 1300Euros. Ooops. Of course that price tag came with a puffed up attitude on the part of the Air France employees and three different ones of them telling us off for bringing three carry-ons. Nevermind they were all small ones (the carry-ons that is), and there was plenty of space on the planes. They all had to give us a good lecture. But the food on Air France is excellent, so there: you win some you lose some.

Of course going from St. Petersburg to Delhi was another $11 per kilo above 20kg, but luckily we left a lot of stuff with Ksenia's best friend in St. Petersburg, so my bill was only $300 and I guess we'll see how much Ksenia's bill will be when she gets here in two weeks.

Russian and Indian airports seem to be in competition on who can be the most ludicrously inefficient and annoying (then again, on the way into St. Petersburg, one Russian customs guy helped us quite a bit, when one of our suitcases didn't arrive and he didn't make us go through customs again when we finally picked it up the next day). NYC airport gets the first prize for having a complete bitch of a security woman not even flinching a millisecond and simply continuing her blank fuck you all stare as she drops my passport and waits for me to pick it up while my hands are full. Anyways, for some reason, you pass five or six security stations in both St. Petersburg and Moscow. Not that anyone really seems to look at anything and it's not like anybody at all couldn't just walk around from the street straight to the aircrafts in St. Petersburg without much hassle. But for some reason, in St. Petersburg, the boarding cards get ripped off the tickets on the stairways to the aircraft, in wind and rain, by a single Aeroflot employee with a broken umbrella.

Aeroflot food was predictably crap compared to Air France, but the aircraft had an unbelievably high ceiling and the seats weren't numbered at all. Or so I thought untill I found them above the trays on the back of the seats. Except those seat numbers indicated the seat whose back they were on, not the seat from which you could actually see the number. Luckily I was not the only one who was confused; half the people on the plane, most of them Russian, had no clue, so there was a lot of moving about to get into the right seats going on before everyone was happily settled. It was all very amusing.

The security procedures repeated in Moscow. In fact, I had thought the three hour layover would be plenty of time to have some food and a beer for bedtime, but they were barely enough to make it to the next plane. Different terminal, incredible security checks, ludicrous customs/passport controls, and of course three different lines to pay my $300 for excess baggage. Needless to say, noone knew, let alone gave the slightest fuck whether I'd get charged again in Delhi or even whether my baggage would actually go all the way to Delhi.

Yes, the story repeated itself in Delhi, except at higher temparatures, with more humidity and in the middle of the night. Some more papers to fill out, very important passport checks, the usual drill for the potential terrorists, smugglers, and tax evaders that we all are, and of course I had to schlepp my entire luggage around yet again. For some reason, in Delhi it seemed like one had to get out of the airport all the way to the hot and humid street just to get back into a different door in the exact same building to make the connecting flight. On the street, an army of cab drivers tried to convince me that my flight in fact leaves from an entirely different airport. Maybe I should have taken my cigarette break elsewhere, but it was 3:30am or so and I didn't really mind, but was rather impressed that they seem to know all flight numbers and times by heart, so they actually backed off when I could give them my exact connection to their satisfaction.

The last leg was rather uneventful, if you don't count my seat neighbor, who was belching, farting, and scratching his balls with gusto. After landing semi-safely in Delhi, the whole passenger cabin was clapping their hands, but no such entertainment now. To make up for that, the luggage arrived on the wrong conveyor belts, but they did arrive. The air wasn't quite as bad as it had been in April, since it had rained a bit that night. My hotel pickup driver found me right away, carried me off to the Grand Hyatt (nice pad! yes, slums right next door!), quick shower and off to work. Well, not so easy, nobody in the army of drivers and hotel car pool managers seemed to understand where the hell my office was. So this was the first of what I expect will be endless encounters whereby I am waving a map and giving street names, but it never seems to matter, as not too many people understand my German accent I suppose, know how to read a map, or give a damn about street names in this town. Well, somehow, eventually, my cab driver and I get there. Luckily, I recognized the last stretch from April, so it turned out to be easy. The first day at work can begin.

Premature Puking

2005-06-10T17:13:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess this is good preparation, maybe even a good omen. I am in Novosokolniki at Ksenia's cousins' and I am heading out for Mumbai, India in a few days. Ksenia will follow two weeks later. I've been assigned to work in Mumbai for a year, so we said good bye to NYC (Long Island City that is) and on our way to Mumbai we made stopovers at my parents in Italy and at Ksenia's mother in St. Petersburg. So, in preparation for all sorts of stomach flues that we are fully expecting to get in India, I had some of Ksenia's cousin's sour cream for breakfast. Maybe it was the 8 hour train ride to Novosokolniki from St. Petersburg, maybe it was the vodka that I should have drunken but didn't, in any event my head is over the toilet bowl and I am puking to my heart's content.

It will be a fun ride back on the night train and probably a great flight to Mumbai via Moscow and Delhi. Novosokolniki has a fantastically blue painted big Lenin statue on its main square and, at least here, one is tempted to believe it when people say (which they do) that since Perestroika everything is in ruins. Who knows? What I am noticing the most in my few days in Russia, both here and in St. Petersburg, that people are actually seriously proud of being alcoholics. A 10:00am can of beer and an afternoon bottle of vodka seems to be nothing to write home about.

People are extremely friendly around here and St. Petersburg looks beautiful, especially with the sun not going down untill 11:30pm or so. Still, I am pretty anxious to get on that Aeroflot to India, especially now that my stomach has received a blessing of sorts.