India, Part III

So, wow, I’m very far behind in my India Chronicles. Last time I wrote, I believe I had just ended Day 1. Leaping back in…
Other highlights from Mumbai (I’ll be more than happy to write more about any of these, if you ask, but right now am just trying to churn it all out):
- Welcome: Marry or Die, Mafia Style. This would be the title of the Bollywood movie we saw in a theater in Mumbai. Most Americans think that Hollywood is the center of the global movie-making industry; they are wrong – it’s Mumbai. Hundreds of films are churned out of Bollywood every year, most of them raucous romps featuring lots of singing and dancing and some sort of wildly twisting plotline. And the film we saw was no exception – 3 glorious hours of boy-meets-girl, boy-tries-to-win-girl, boy-succeeds-but-soon-discovers-that-girl-is-not-what-she-appeared-to-be-because-her-brother-is-a-mafia-don-with-whom-the-boy’s-uncle/caretaker-becomes-accidentally-but-dangerously-involved. It was something of a mix between My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Rush Hour, Goodfellas, Analyze This, and West Side Story. I’m so not kidding. The film was in Hindi, so we didn’t really understand everything that was going on…but enjoyed what might best be termed an exercise in the outrageous nonetheless.
- The Walking Tour. Since our guidebooks were bulky and heavy, we decided not to take them with us when we set out on a walking tour of the city. This was a mistake. After a successful hour or so, we accidentally took a wrong turn and found ourselves in a small slum. This ended up not being that big a deal since, as Volunteers, we’re pretty used to being surrounded by small children shouting out various random English phrases and wanting us to play with them. We got nervous, though, when we could no longer read anything that was posted and so started following the only English signs, which pointed toward something called “Baranga.” After walking through twisting, cobbled streets and down a large flight of stairs, we found ourselves at a large glistening pool. Not until we made it back to our hotel did we learn that we’d “discovered” one of the holiest (but hardest to find) sites in the city – the place where Rama (one of the incarnations of Vishnu, the Preserver) shot an arrow and water welled up, thus creating the world. Tolkien was right when he wrote that “all who wander are not lost.”
- In a dive bar we went into one afternoon, we noticed an interesting sign: “All castes welcome.”
- The Walking Tour, Take 2. The next day, we decided to bite the bullet and take a taxi to the Haji Ali Mosque (the destination of our first attempt at the walking tour), the major place of worship for Muslims in the city. It is constructed on an island off the city’s coastline; during high tide, the causeway disappears and it looks like a mysterious, floating building. Pretty cool. What makes the site even more interesting (and decidedly Indian), though, is that it is within site of the major Hindu temple in Mumbai. The day that we arrived at the site, there appeared to be some sort of Hindu holiday underway, as literally thousands and thousands of people were lined up along the road, waiting for admittance into the temple. Add to this the people trying to get to the mosque, and you have one hell of a crowd. There were maybe ten or fifteen thousand people milling about the narrow sidewalks in the hot sun. For the first time, I began to get a sense of how big India’s population really is; “a billion people” began to become less of an abstraction. (Here’s some food for thought: we all know about India’s booming economy…but did you know that it has only affected about 200 million people? That’s a lot, certainly…but only a fifth of the country’s total population.)