Sidenote: A little bit on drinking in India... Unfortunately, India seems to be very keen on having "dry days" where no alcohol is served even at bars. These often occur on celebratory days like Ghandi's birthday or the start of festivals. The caveat to this policy, however, is that four and five star places will serve alcohol. That being said, it was a dry day when we arrived in Mumbai but we luckily found Poly Ester's...a dance club right above our dinner spot.
Yes, I think for the very first time...I went clubbing. It was quite the experience. We talked our way into not paying the cover (so the entire group of us got in for free). Oh, and I haven't mentioned the best part of this experience: our professor accompanied us. Yes, this certainly means that our professor danced with us. It was fantastic.
The next day, far too early in the morning, we headed to an architecture school where we learned all about the development of Mumbai. The commercial capital of the country, the city is home to around 18 million (the world's second largest city according to Wikipedia). To give you reference, New York City ranks at 14 on this list. The city started as a Portuguese settlement north of where the city currently stands. A Portuguese princess married a Brit and the dowry was the seven island archipelago that now makes up the city of Mumbai. The islands now form a peninsula as the swamp land separating them has be reclaimed (like Lake Shore Drive in Chicago!). The center of this metropolis started at the base of the peninsula and seems to forever press northward.
I also learned a good deal about "slums." When someone says the word slum, I think blue tarp and cardboard--I think of very temporary shelters erected for the purposes of housing extremely impoverished people. I was very wrong. A slum in India has a good deal of infrastructure. It's a place where people live and work, where life and culture center around the streets. Slums are home to nearly fifty percent of Bombay's residents but they only constitute five percent of the land in the city. Needless to say, they are extremely dense in terms of population.
We visited Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Asia. It stretches over less than a square mile, yet estimates of its population reach as high as one million people. It's also home to around 15,000 one-room factories. Seeing the slum I was completely astonished that I could have had such a narrow view of the term "slum" and what it could encompass. People were definitely all on the streets; there were stalls where men cut up animals for food, stores selling jeans and men's shirts, and little children running around playing. Some stay in slums, according to our lecturer, simply for cultural or family reasons. We saw pictures of slum housing with flat screen TVs or a Mercedes-Benz parked outside. So much for blue tarp and cardboard.
Sunday we saw quite another side of Mumbai. We visited what once was a mill (perhaps a textile mill), which is now a huge mall--and a very fancy mall at that. And I've been to many, many malls in my day (too many, I'm sure). I don't think even the Indians are used to this intense luxury--we watched one woman have some serious trouble getting on the escalator until she finally gave up and walked away.
I should also mention that poverty seemed much more obvious and tragic in Mumbai. I was walking around holding a pair of shoes for a friend (he needed closed-toed shoes for whatever reason) and a little girl walked up to me. She tugged on the shoes then pointed to her bare feet. It was awful. In reality, she'll never fit his shoes so she clearly didn't want them for herself but I felt really guilty....how many pairs of shoes do I own? I was wearing TOMS shoes so I felt slightly better about myself (this is my shoutout to TOMS, which are the greatest shoes and they support a fantastic cause: http://www.toms.com/international), but I still felt badly. The problem is how helpless I feel; I know I can't help everyone and it frustrates me that there are things like "Paw Spas" in America and these people are literally sleeping on the sidewalk. I've even seen people sleeping on the median--as in in between lanes of traffic on the highway.
On a brighter note, yesterday was Happy Thoughts for World Peace Day and the Dalai Lama gave opened up the celebration here in Pune. Unfortunately we didn't get to see him but I did think lots of happy thoughts for world peace. We got back into Pune last night after what seemed like an eternal bus ride (time does not fly when one has a fever). Our hotel has become our home away from home and the staff part of our study abroad family, so we were very grateful to come back and have a delicious dinner in the dinning room. Paneer masala never tasted so good--and, of course, masala chai (everyone's favorite).
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