April 28, 29 - Mumbai, India. My third and final stop in India is in the metropolis of Mumbai, or as many still call it, Bombay. Around 20 million people live in Mumbai and 300 more families move here every day, seeking the opportunities of the big city. After much riding around on buses, visiting various sites, seeing and interacting with the people, I begin to appreciate India's complexity. I realize that I'm in no immediate danger of understanding this country.
Like virtually all nations in Asia, India is hopelessly corrupt. There is actually a website that provides a guideline of suggested amounts for everyday bribes - things like how much to bribe your way into college, how much to bribe your way to graduation, and so on. I learn that all of the street peddlers must pay graft to both the police and mafia. Politicians of course are assumed to be at the top of the corruption food chain.
My tour visits temples and museums and drives though many areas of the city. Amidst the poverty, pollution, decay and corruption are a few remarkable success stories. The first that we see is the famous laundry system - the dhobi ghat. Since washing machines are too expensive and labor costs are very low, many hotels and restaurants have their laundry done by hand. Businesses have their laundry picked up, sent to the outdoor laundry facility, washed, dried, folded, and returned to the them. Cost is very low - pennies per garment - and all work is done manually. No machines are involved. Items are beaten in water to clean them. The water is changed only once each day, so by the end of the day garments are being slapped against filthy water. It's very hard work and I witness men working 10 hour shifts in the hot summer day, slapping garments against the surface of the water in which they stand. There is a complex system of keeping track of each garment, and the claim is that after many years and many millions of garments, none have ever been lost or stolen. They are always returned clean and neatly folded to their rightful owner.
Next we see the equally remarkable lunch delivery system. Since Indian trains all carry several times their intended capacity, there is no extra space for passengers to carry things such as lunch boxes. So around 200,000 suburban commuters, people who take the train to office buildings every day, have a family member make their lunch at home, put it in a lunch box, then have it picked up by a delivery service. The service then delivers the lunch to the worker, right at his or her desk in their office. Around 2 pm, the service goes back to the office, picks up the empty lunch box, and delivers it back home. The delivery staff who perform this daily routine are mostly uneducated, illiterate workers. We stand outside the Church Gate train station at 11:30 am and watch as men leave the station carrying dozens of lunches on their heads, put them on the ground to sort them, then take them away for delivery to office buildings. An office worker pays $6/month for this service. The most remarkable thing about the system is its failure rate. On average, they make one mistake for every 16 million lunches. American business schools have studied the system trying to learn from it.
Not all in India works so efficiently. The nation seems to have a bizarre penchant for rubber stamps. I hear the story of two passengers (Scott and Judy) who offboarded in Chennai to make an overnight visit to an orphanage they had sponsored. Their process of getting off the ship was delayed by the authorities because Judy did not have the requisite customs form. She had wrongly assumed she did not need this because she was not carrying a camera or cellphone. So she had to get the form and declare that she did not have either gadget. Then officials had to apply their sacred rubber stamp to her form so she could get off the ship. Of course no one ever checked bags or in any way tried to verify whether or not she carried a camera. After several more officials verified that she did in fact have the correct form with the official stamp, the couple were allowed to leave the ship, and to pass several more checkpoints that would also verify that each had their customs form. The absurd part of this story is that at no time did anyone check their large suitcase. There were no metal detectors or any efforts made for security reasons. They could have been smuggling all sorts of contraband or dangerous items, yet the only concern of the authorities was that they carried a stamped piece of paper declaring the make and model of their camera. Go figure.
Visually, Mumbai is a crowded, decaying city. For a city of its size, there is very little new construction and most buildings, at least from the outside, appear filthy and in a state of decay. The apparent reason for the decay is a strict set of rent control rules. Landlords cannot raise rents, so some families live in apartments for a few dollars/month. There are vast slums and huge numbers of homeless people - some say as many as 57% of the population are homeless. From our bus we see men just lying on the sidewalks, all over the city. Yet new real estate is very expensive, comparable to other international capitals. Most of India's big companies, plus many international companies are here, so 34% of India's income tax revenue comes from Mumbai. It is the primary location for Bollywood, which produces 1,000 movies/year.
Driving in Mumbai does not seem any worse than other parts of Asia, though part of their driving culture requires continual use of the horn. Traffic is heavy and drivers honk their horns constantly. So to drive in Mumbai, you need three things: good brakes, a good horn, and good luck. Earplugs are also helpful.
Like everything else in India, laws take a back seat to custom. The ancient caste system is one such example. Outlawed by the constitution in 1950, in practice the system still thrives. There have been previous attempts to reject this system. The religions of Buddhism and Jainism were both offshoots of Hinduism around 600 B.C. Both rejected the caste system, though retained Hindu's primary goal, which is to attain nirvana. While Buddhism spread to China, Japan, and most of Asia, it never gained much of a following in its birthplace of India. Jainism has a still smaller following. So today India's caste system is alive and well, with 80% of the population claiming Hindu as their religion. Around 80% of marriages are arranged, and always within one's caste.
On tour we discover one surprising consequence of India's pollution. Parsees, descendants of the Zoroastrians from Persia, worship earth and fire. Around 60,000 Parsees live in Mumbai. Worshiping fire and earth, they do not cremate or bury their dead. Instead, they leave them out to get eaten by vultures. But recently Mumbai's population of vultures has perished, killed off by the concentrated toxins within the dead bodies they ate. So the Parsees now are trying to figure out different ways to deal with this issue. Like many complicated issues in India, there is a lack of good solutions. For many citizens of this nation, the chosen approach is to accept that life is suffering, and to quietly nurture the hope of attaining nirvana.
I leave Mumbai with my collection of impressions and stories, and despite the seeming chaos and filth, I have favorable feelings toward the Indian people. Next stop U.A.E.
Some images from Mumbai:
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