India: Arriving in Mumbai

Excuse my Hindi, but India is ****ing incredible!!

After a hectic 15 hour plane ride from Hong Kong, I finally arrived in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) -- the capital of the Maharashtra State and India's economic powerhouse. This city's film industry produces more movies per year than anywhere else on Earth (Bombay + Hollywood = Bollywood), which accounts for around 40% of India's total GDP. And it is also known as the most Western city in the country (.. and it's not Western at all, which says a lot...) It's dirty, it's SMELLY, it's real, and it might just be the first city in the most incredible country I have ever visited.

After my flight landed at 3AM, I went through customs at the crowded and poorly organized international airport before hopping in a decrepit 1950s fiat-style taxi for the hour long ride into the Colaba district where I was supposed to meet Cameron. A little after 5AM, I found his hotel and snuck in to avoid paying for two people (the room was already ridiculously expensive by Indian standards, but Mumbai is a hard city to find a decent place to stay.) After sleeping till noon, we got up and set out to find a cheaper, more centrally located hotel. I had no idea what to expect because there was little to see from the taxi at night, but what I saw in daylight that morning blew my mind. It was more like "India" than I could have ever imagined it to be.

I think that before traveling, most people have romantic preconceptions of the exotic places on the other side of the globe - images inspired by movies, books, or fantastical stories of jungles, tigers, monkeys, painted faces, fragrant markets, rhythmic dances, barbaric rituals, and singsong languages. Most of the time after actually visiting these places, the romantic notions are brought back to reality and seen in the light of a fairly normal overall context. --- The postcard-perfect beaches of Thailand suffer from serious pollution and are covered in fat Europeans, watching an "authentic" martial arts performance at China's Shaolin Temple (the birthplace of Kung Fu) involves waiting in a long line and entering a theater to watch a staged tourist show, the famous Masada mountain fortress on the edge of the Dead Sea has a cable car to get to the top, and the actors performing the ancient Dragon Dance for Chinese New Year in Hong Kong pull out their $300 cell phone after the performance to call their girlfriends to meet them for a movie. Culture is a relative thing, and more often than not what we imagine about those far off exotic lands exists only in pockets for tourist enjoyment. In this globalized and modernizing world, it is very rare that a traveler comes across a true cultural gem that has authentic roots and plays an actual role in the lives of modern people - an elaborate wedding ceremony in a Mongolian yurt, a tribal fertility ritual in an Indonesian jungle, or a devout Uighur in a western Chinese desert town responding faithfully to the muezzin's call to prayer.

In India, despite an undeniable tourist presence, these cultural gems are abundant. I have never experienced such profound cultural richness before -- in the smells, the smiles, and the colors of the saris - the air, the food, and the music from the continuous celebration. With such a diverse conglomerate of religions, languages, and rituals - India has been able to maintain a unique culture that expresses itself in everything from cuisine to cinema to clothing fashion.

The first thing I did in Mumbai was order some chicken tikka masala, saag paneer, a sweet lassi, fresh sweetened lime juice, and tons of chapati bread at some whole-in-the-wall restaurant near the hotel. After lighting incense and offering a prayer to Ganesh at the alter above the cash register, the waiter filled our table with the most delicious Indian food I have ever tasted. I practiced eating "Indian style" for the first time -- all hands, no utensils. Best of all, the entire meal came to about $1 per person. Incredible! (Forget what I said about China being cheap... India wins..)

We continued our walk to find a new place to stay, and along the route we passed a fascinating cross section of India: Raj style architecture - legacy of the British Empire, holy cows and unmilked goats napping in the middle of busy intersections, kids of all ages playing cricket in the street, snack wallahs, fresh juice wallahs, book wallahs, belt wallahs, and people selling everything else you can imagine, beggars, and trident-carrying face-painted ascetics, women of all ages wearing the most colorful and intricately decorated saris imaginable, clean cut men in business suits, and abandoned naked infants crying at the feet of hordes of pedestrians. We passed ornate Hindu temples, smoky Jain pagodas, towering minarettes, and Mesopotamian-style Zoroastrian Parsi centers.

After dropping off our bags in a cheaper hotel, we continued the next few days of our exploration wandering through a few street bazaars where we got to do some people-watching and culture-absorbing. We strolled down aisles of stacked pineapples, toiletries, puppies, parakeets, saffron, peppers, and masala mixes. We explored the city's hanging gardens on a seaside hilltop and joined Mumbai's masses for a crowded sunset picnic at the mosquito and hawker covered Chowpatty beach. We observed the complex laundry system of the dobi ghats where the entire city sends its soiled clothing to be pounded and pummeled in a series of cement tanks and eventually sent back clean and crisply ironed. We went on a lion and tiger safari north of the city in Indias only national nature reserve within an urban postal code. We rode urban trains around the city and hung out of the doorless cars with all of the locals to feel the wind whip past our faces. And we attended a series of never-ending and hilariously overdone Bollywood flicks (only in Hindi, but the entertainment transcended language barriers).

After one of the best introductions to a country I could have imagined, we hopped on an overnight train to Agra to see India's great world wonder: the Taj Mahal.