Final stretch! and all about food

SHIRA: 

Jordan and I spent our last weekend (ok, Sunday) in Mumbai and now it's down to the nitty gritty business of readying ourselves to travel for a month.  This includes killing all proximate bugs (inside and out).  And calling hotels and seeing if prices in all of India have increased by about 500% as they have in Mumbai.  And last minute shopping.  And, of course, saying goodbye to the friends we've made here.  We're also hoping to squeeze in a showing of Harry Potter 7pt2 in 3D -- but (I Guess) it's not a huge priority.

Yesterday we splurged on a fancy shmancy brunch because, hey, we deserve it.  It was an almost 5 hour affair that was all you can eat delicious delicious food that was ordered off of a menu rather than buffet-ed.  There was live music and games.  I rocked Uno but Jordan had me beat at Jenga.  All in all a good time.  After that, shopping!  We saw our very first mall in India and it was pandemonium!  While Jordan nursed a hot tea I walked around a bit and was disappointed to find that, even in India, the mall looked pretty much like all other malls I've seen everywhere (maybe especially in NYC).  It even included a California Pizza Kitchen!

A couple notes about the food in India:
One of the things that I think we both miss the most is having a kitchen and the ability to cook for ourselves.  We've eaten out every single meal (except three Chabad meals) for two months.   During this time we have made a couple of discoveries:

DO NOT ORDER THE VEG AMERICAN CHOW MEIN.  I really hate to over use capital letters, but seriously.  Don't do it.  We made that mistake exactly once and received a plate of perfectly good noodles covered in an Indian ketchup-like sauce.  Terrible.

Similarly, milkshakes here are no good.  Even from nice places the consistency and thickness maybe approaches chocolate milk.
On the other hand, mango lassis have become a staple.  More common are plain lassis (a yogurt drink that comes either sweetened or salted at your request) but mango ones are the best and are always made with fresh squeezed juice.
And on that note, salted (or salty) drinks are not uncommon whereas bitter ones (like unsweetened tea or coffee) are very difficult to find.

Mumbai has a strange mix of cuisines -- on almost every menu you'll find southern Indian specialties like dosas, thalis (meals that come with rice or bread and several small vegetable dishes), and idlis (fermented rice flour balls).  But they'll also have north Indian food, which is what's mostly served in Indian restaurants in the US.  Nearly all also have Chinese options.  Who knows why.

Most people eat all meals with their fingers and hands, and we're still feeling out food etiquette.  For example, I only recently learned that it's bad form to lick your fingers.  (But what else are you supposed to do when there are no napkins?)

Thankfully being vegetarian is super easy here as restaurants will visibly advertise themselves as being "veg" or "pure veg."  I would say that about half of the restaurants we see are vegetarian. 

In general we've been solidly warned against fresh fruits and vegetables (this will probably be the one time in our life when this is true) and so the majority of what we eat is carb-centric and heavily (and sometimes overly) spiced.  Almost everything is swimming in grease.

Even so, I am (and I think we both are) looking forward to sampling the cuisine of the rest of the country (including taking better advantage of street food).

A short note about service:
We have yet to see a waitress.  We have not had a woman taxi driver.  No women work in our hotel.  In fact, we have yet to see any women working except for the secretary, lawyers, and social activists we work with at HRLN, one woman at the State Human Rights Commission, and a few shop owners. 
In restaurants waiters hover over you until you order, bring your food, and then disappear so that you have to put on a show and dance to get the bill.  When they bring the food, they often dole it out to you on your plate which is strange for us.  We can serve ourselves the food, thankyouverymuch.

JORDAN: I'm just batting clean-up here, so I'll stick to pictures:

This is more common than book-stores here: piles and piles of books on street corners under tarps or wrapped in plastic.

Across from the train station: there are some damn pretty building here; I think this might be the police station. Police stations tend to be among the most beautifully maintained buildings.

These guys under the tarps are a big family that lives around the corner from our hotel. The cars in the shot are because I really loathe to take pictures of people's poverty unless I can do it without them seeing me. Their house happens to be on the sidewalk. Imagine somebody walked into your house and began making a scene over how squalorous your living condition was.

The coast of Mumbai at night.

These cows JUST GOT OFF THE MOTORCYCLE! It was so cool! I wish you had scene them riding down the road, like, Moo Beep Moo! and such

This was the big Buddhist pagoda we went to see. We're on a ferry at this point. The only other things on this island are two theme parks, which you can't even see over the tree line, so I think they must've been pretty shabby theme parks (we did not go, as I was pretty sick).

Well, this is at least a sideways version of the Buddha statue. Subtitle: Buddha - the Super Scientist of Spirituality!

All hail the Super Scientist of Spirituality!

Some pagoda prettiness.

Apparently there was actual little bits of Buddha tucked up in the top of the spire. Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures inside the pagoda, but there was tons of pictures depicting the Buddha's life in one hall, and the main hall was just a giant stone dome in which people meditated and said "Ohm" alot, while we watched them behind glass so they would not be disrupted by our breathing.

This is one of the theme park mascots that they put on the path to the pagoda, trying to lure you away from an ascetic, spiritual experience in favor of plastic cartoon deer.

This is a purple rhino.

So, we did happen to find the one skating rink in Mumbai, and maybe India, which was advertised with this poster showcasing Indian folks skating on double bladed skates (for balance). So naturally, we felt smugly superior and took pictures.

A few pictures of the strings of shanties that line the way to the theme parks.

Some family lives in each of these little separate units.

I got these by perfecting the art of holding the camera casually in my hand at waist height and keeping my thumb on the shutter button. Notice the satellite dish. Oddly, you'll notice a ton of slums and shanties with satellite dishes hanging off them.

Here we go

07/08/11

JORDAN: We finally went to a doctor last night, who might have been the sweetest man we've met in India, refused to charge us a penny for a half hour appointment and some prescriptions - although it's true we did not get to see him until after being swindled by an X-ray tech next door who claimed to work for the man and had to give me a mandatory screening (payment requested at moment of service). No relation to the doctor we kept asking to see. Now I have some souvenir head X-rays (my head looks cool). But after we finally saw the doctor, I think we feel much better about our health prognosis, and generally more optimistic about the status of Indian hospitality. He was a very sweet man who seemed to know all of our symptoms as soon as we sat down and was very encouraging and reassuring about how to treat ourselves.

Uploaded are some pics from Tarapur, where I went a couple weeks back for a comparative study relating to the planned Jaitapur nuclear power park. Jaitapur, if you recall, is where they're trying to build the world's largest nuclear power park, in a high earthquake risk zone, beside agricultural and fishing villages, in an ecological hotspot, without any legitimate studies for their environmental impact assessment. Tarapur is the site of India's first atomic plant, a few hours away, where radiation has leaked semi-regularly, there are cancer clusters surrounding the plant, and the fishing industry has died with all the local fish. The pics don't do the work of the interviews we took, but they give you a sense of the atmosphere.

The beach at Tarapur.

Crows on sticks.

The village

Another shot of the beach, but you can clearly see the nuclear plant on the opposite curve of the shore. It's real close.

I didn't conduct most of the interviews we took there that day, because they had to be in Marathi, but I got chunks of them translated and helped guide the questions based off what research we had gathered before coming. Here, I'm checking audio as we get a backup feed on my mic. I only include this picture because you can see the posse of villagers that just gathered around us as soon as we showed up. They came and waited in line to give testimonies about the impact of the nuclear plant. Apparently, there's a lot of cancer and radiation related health effects. We didn't even get to all of them.

This is the radiation level detector/siren the plant installed for the villagers. It hasn't worked in years.

Fun facts:

- Indian models are really, really fair-skinned compared to the man on the street - I want to say fairer skinned than 99% of the folks you actually see. They alternate between white European models and really fair Indian models. This observation was compounded when we went to the Buddhist pagoda and saw that all the paintings of the Buddha and his followers (there was a hall of paintings depicting Buddha's life) were also incredibly pale-skinned. Much paler than anyone who actually came to look at them. Not sure why this is.

- It is a sign of affection to take food in your hand and insert it into someone's mouth - not like romantically, but seemingly in the context of any affectionate relationship. This is weird for us, obviously, so we're thankful nobody has taken to us quite that fondly.

4 July 2011

JORDAN:

Male crossdressers in India are traditionally considered witches who would curse you if you did not give them money. Somebody explained this to me after I met one on the train (and they presumably cursed me). Most people actually seemed to be giving this guy money, which is very unusual for beggars, so I take it this belief is relatively thriving. What's even funnier is that the local friend who explained this to me lamented that now folks who weren't even real witches were taking advantage of this and doing it just for the money.

On the subject of trains, you should know two things: on average, 3500 people die every year (or ~10/day) riding the Mumbai train system (which is even more ridiculous because there's basically 2 lines). This is probably because of gross overcrowding and the fact that the doors on the train don't shut. During peak hours, you'll see as many as 7 people hanging out of a typical train door with one foot in the train and one hand grasping the door frame. The culture is to run and jump on and off trains as they're still moving.

Second thing: trains are split up by gender, so there are special cars just for women. Despite that these are a minority of the cars, they're still much less crowded, forcing the overcrowding on the rest of the trains to be even more severe. I understand that women risk more assault on a train car here than in the States, but for what it's worth, I think somebody ought to consider how the policy of gender-separated cars is helping contribute to the body count.

Chabad has been a lovely refuge to eat and just hang out with friendly people each Friday. One of the kids we met there has been doing an internship with an NGO for a year focusing on rehabilitating drug addicts. We'd been told by folks in the office that drug addiction wasn't really a problem, but this guy argued that most folks don't even recognize it who don't work with it. He described addictions to certain substances that make you lose your limbs or fingers in certain, distinguishable ways. When he described this, it clicked for me, because we've seen a ton of folks like this, mostly beggars, and never really known what to attribute it to. The  number of folks here with some sort of strange physical deformity is much higher here than in the States. 

This is a shot of a woman I'm guessing had the kind of drug addiction our Chabad friend told us about. Notice the fingers. Sorry for that really depressing picture. We'll have pictures of temples and amusement park animals up soon.

SHIRA: 

Happy 4^th of July!  We’re missing our favorite fireworks displays and (vegetarian) barbeques right now and instead celebrating by getting sick again.  We’re going to have to work on this.

Yesterday we went to Gorai Island which is a small island about an hour north of city center.  It contains two things.  One: a Buddhist temple which includes the largest unsupported dome in the world.  Two: a combination amusement park and water park.  This to us seemed like a strange combination, but we were originally going to go for it!  In order to get to the island you have to take a ferry off of a tiny dock surrounded by what is probably the stinkiest water in the world.  From there you take a small ferry that blasts Indian music at you until you reach the island 20 minutes or so later.  We went to the temple first, and I’m glad we did because this is when Jordan first told me he wasn’t feeling so hot.  We saw a little paintings gallery that showed the life and times of Buddha and skipped over the movie that wasn’t in English.  We got to go inside the dome briefly and see the meditation that was happening there.  All together a pretty fun excursion. 

We only have one more weekend in Mumbai!  This is pretty crazy to me.  I can hardly believe that we’ve already lived here as long as we have and there’s still quite a bit we’d like to see! 

1 July 2011

Happy Canada Day everyone! 

Life in India has come to a bit of a plateau.  We have a schedule that we pretty much follow every day and we have settled into a pattern of living here.  There haven’t been too many developments here in India.  We have a project due on Friday that both Jordan and I have put a lot of working into, and I think we’ll both feel relief once it is presented and approved. 

On the bed bugs front we have arrived at a sort of a fake success.  Having visited several chemists (pharmacies) who look at us like we’re speaking a Martian language or as if we’re raging alcoholics when all we want is rubbing alcohol to kill bed bugs, we have abandoned this strategy.  [We even looked rubbing alcohol up by several different names, but one chemist who spoke especially good English told us that it is not a product that we’ll find here.]  We spoke to our hotel staff who immediately transferred us to a new room and are supposedly cleaning our old room in case we want to return.  Tonight we’re sending off all of our clothes to be laundered.  Again.  Perhaps I shall buy some cheap spirits and spray the room (and especially our luggage), but if we can avoid having everything smell like vodka this would be preferable!

With two weeks left until our out-of-Mumbai travels commence, I think we’re just trying to make the best of what is now a short stay.  We’re finishing up our internship projects and hopefully cementing some new friendships.  Of course, during this time we’re also going to have to finalize our travel plans as well as cram in all the Bombay experiences that we haven’t yet had.  Tomorrow we’re going shopping with Nida and exploring Bandra, a northern suburb of Mumbai.  Sunday we’ll probably visit an Island in Mumbai with temples and other fun things.

We are constantly amused and interested by romancing in India.  We were talking to one of our new co-interns who was pulled over after kissing her boyfriend in the car!  (Neither she nor the boyfriend was driving).  What’s more is that we learned that male Indian police are not allowed to speak to women.

Tonight is Friday which means Chabad.  I think both Jordan and I are looking forward to a home-cooked meal and some good company.

Mangoes and Monsoons

JORDAN:
Just a couple quick observations as we wrap up Sick Week (we officially went out for the nice dinner we wanted to celebrate its end last night):

Many folks gave us interesting health advice: eat fruit, but not mangoes. Apparently, mangoes are a "hot" fruit. They generate heat in your digestive system, which is bad for tender 'testines. The practice here is to submerge the mango is water for half an hour to take away the "heat." When we tried to ask about how this works scientifically, we couldn't quite get an answer, because nobody seems to know how to describe it that way. Anyways, apples are supposed to be "cold" fruit, and when we ate them, we noticed they sat much better with us, so I think this might have truth to it.

Also, we've been missing the monsoon for most of the last week - only scattered little showers every couple days. Folks tell us that the heat and the air quality in monsoon season when the rains don't come tend to make a ton of folks sick. Finally, the rains came about the same time our symptoms began to alleviate. Everything is much more comfortable here when the rains are coming. They clear the air and drop the temperature drastically.

Finally, a somewhat sad note about our prison questionnaire work: the students from the State Human Rights Commission (again, a government office, not the one we work for directly) refused to go out and administer it at the lockups (in case you haven't read, we prepared a survey for Maharashtra's lockups to find out what the conditions are there, since they are under no legal authority, and routine human rights violations are suspected). Apparently, this has nothing to do with us, being Shira and I, or the work we did, but has to do with an argument that broke out between our supervisors and their students during training last weekend. The argument centered around whether our supervisors could criticize the judiciary en masse for failing to enforce certain human rights laws. The students felt that this put our organization in "contempt of court" - which in the States only applies if you're literally violating a judge's order. The cultural need to be good soldiers here is apparently much higher. Criticizing the judiciary, especially when you're in any sort of official position, is too far out of line for some folks to stomach. So the students literally refused to work with our organization. I, personally, blame the students, who didn't seem to be gems themselves on a number of other issues (see "Women and Romance Ain't the Same" below) for being oversensitive and quick to persecute what would be routine free speech in the US. Nevertheless, the study has now been pushed back until after we leave and the SHRC gets a new batch of interns who can administer it. Hopefully, we'll keep in touch after we leave and find out what happens, because we put a lot of work into preparing that questionnaire against the relevant law.

SICK!

has been the word of the week. Shira came down with it on Wednesday. Jordan came down with in on Thursday. Everybody (being Jordan and Shira) spent a day or two lying in bed and moaning loud enough to alert the hotel staff. Everybody is almost better, although the stomach cramps haven't quite left.

So there's not much to write about this week other than the finer qualities of Indian toilets and how fast one can lose water by as many different, exciting channels as possible (we'll spare you the details).

But for coming by, we'd like to share some more pictures from throughout our time!

For starters, this is one I've wanted to post since we took it. Nobody's life is complete until they see this MonkeyBaby. (See post below: "Life is just one long downhill after MonkeyBaby")

This is a sample of some of the ruins we went to Elephanta Island to see. Very cool, especially for a guy who's never been to a country old enough to have "ruins" before.

This is still us at the ruins. You'll notice our friend is one of the many, MANY people who will stop us and ask to have their picture taken with white people. I am not joking. We finally got a sense of humor about it and asked them to also take pictures for us as well. You'll notice this guy doesn't seem to find this joke enormously funny. We might not ask this again. You'll also notice that he's a bit smaller than us - we're generally big people here. I hit my head on door frames a TON.

The view of THE NICEST PART of Mumbai. I want to be clear in stressing that. We are in Beverly Hills Mumbai right now. But still, the coast is lovely, and it's a nice place to take walks in the evening, if you have the time to get there. We went to a sweet blue concert here.
 
This is what most of Mumbai looks like. Helpful hint: if you see a structure, even if its just a tarp suspended on sticks, there are probably 7-10 people living under it.

More standard housing.

A view from the tracks.

 You get the idea.

The fruit market where we bought more mangoes than we could eat in our whole lives.

Crow city is full of crows (they're like pigeons here, but more). Forgive my artsy self-indulgence.

This guy was hawking us for sandwiches. Monkeys are kind of like squirrels to these folks here, so we have to apologize every time we see a monkey and fall all over ourselves spitting with excitement. When we tell folks monkeys don't live anywhere wild in North America, we get a blank stare like, what?--

Matheran is lovely. They don't allow cars up there, which is exactly why it's still lovely. (See: "DRIVING" from previous post). While there, I got to do a little thing where they sling you across a huge gorge on something like a zip line.

Lots of clay in the hills.

More fun facts: in certain areas, religious law exists parallel to, or even trumps, secular law. So, for example, if the Muslim religious board passes laws about the conditions of marriage and divorce, the state legislature basically has to rubber stamp it. Thereupon, if a challenge comes up in court, the religious board can overturn even the national supreme court's ruling on questions of that religious law. This has happened. So there will be myriad different sets of marriage law for different religious subcultures.

Also, on the subject of subcultures, there is no "Indian" accent. There are a litany of minor languages spoken around the country, and even among folks who all speak Hindi, Hindi will most likely not be all of their mother tongues. Hence, the accent they bring to English will be completely different. In Maharashtra, where we are, for example, the mother tongue is mostly Marathi. People raised in a different state have very pronouncedly different accents.

Computers don't like us

SHIRA:

Last night I took out my laptop for the first time (I've been using Jordan's) and discovered that many of my keys were not working. [Update: now they are working on-and-off.  Weird!]  Now, this morning Jordan's charger decided not to work!  What's the deal-io!

We originally intended today's post to be picture heavy, but most of the pictures are on Jordan's computer so pictures will be coming tomorrow when we are replacing the charger.

Marauding monkeys maliciously mugged me of my MANGO

20 June 2011: Marauding monkeys, and Mumbai life


SHIRA:

Sorry folks for taking so long to update! 

So much has happened in these past two weeks.  Last week, Jordan and two of our workmates traveled to a nearby Indian nuclear plant in Tarapur and spoke to some people about how the nuclear plant has affected them.  It sounds like a fascinating trip and I’m a little bummed that I didn’t get to go, although instead I had lunch with a new friend, Neha, which was really nice.  We work 6 days a week and have been trying to take day trips on the Sundays.  Last week I had planned on us going to Matheran, but Jordan got sick in Tarapur with a fever and general bad feelings, so instead we slept in and generally took it easy.  It also may have been Sunday that we discovered a French-style bakery that offers real coffee and half-off baked goods after 9pm.  The real coffee is significant because most restaurants only have a heavily milked and sugared variety. 

On the apartment front, we’ve all but given up.  Several people at work have asked around for us, but what we’re asking seems simply not to be offered.  Luckily, we’ve settled into a pretty nice hotel that doesn’t have a problem with long term stays.  It’s not a terrific situation, and we’re not going to have a kitchen in India like I’d hoped (or even a private bathroom!) – but it feels safe and it’s close to where we work.  [Jordan: the thing that seems the biggest dealbreaker for us is being a couple. Numerous folks who know us personally have asked us why we don’t just live in different places, because they don’t get the culture of live-in-relationships (more on that later). We try to explain that it’s not a cultural option for us to travel halfway around the world together and go home different places. They don't get us; we don't get them. C'est la vie.]

Last week we presented the prisoner / lockup questionnaire that we drafted to a group of 20-some interns as part of their training.  (The interns will eventually administer the questionnaire to actual inmates and police officers).  It’s strange, I think, for both of us to have been given so much responsibility within the organization so quickly, but it’s also really nice.  

After the training, we went to the fruit market with one of the lawyers from HRLN.  He had been offering since we first arrived to get us the best mangoes at the best price.  Well.  We went to the market which was quite a sight to see!  It was so hectic and the smells were quite strong.  The lawyer, went ahead of us to ask for the real price as opposed to the “white person price.”  He came back about five minutes later and informed us that the smallest quantity of mangoes that we could buy was two dozen and the price was 260 INR (about $6).  We got inside, let our friend handle the transaction and AfterTheFact found out that the price was jacked anyway to more than double what we thought we were going to pay.  This is really annoying and not something we’ll miss about India.

Today we brought in some of the mangoes that we bought (there’s small chance that the two of us can finish 24 mangoes before they all go bad).  This started an office conversation in which it was impressed upon us that we bought way too many mangoes for way too high a price.  Oh well.  At least the mangoes are every bit as delicious as they’re supposed to be.

The Indian train (everything here is covered in fans) 

Last thing before I hand this off to Jordan.  Yesterday we went to Matheran which is a hill station near to Mumbai.  We woke up early and took the 7 o’clock train which was pleasant enough and not too crowded.  From the train station, there’s supposed to be a connecting toy train that brings you to the top of the mountain / hill where the hill station is but (probably because of the monsoons) it was not running.  Instead we took the most cramped taxi ride of my life.  We shared with three other people and Jordan and I sat in the front seat with the driver.  Every time the driver shifted gears he had to reach in between Jordan’s legs.  People keep on bringing up this idea of Americans needing “elbow room” in a way that other nationalities don’t, but this seemed a bit excessive…

THIS MONKEY STOLE OUR MANGO

Matheran was very beautiful.  We spent all day wandering the foot paths and taking pictures of the really stunning views.  At some point we took out a mango to eat and out of nowhere a monkey comes ambling out of the forest and runs directly up to us.  I was a little freaked out and instinctually threw away the mango.  I learned later that monkeys are aggressive pests, but highly unlikely to actually attack.  Later in the day we saw a monkey snatch a bag of chips away from a snacking couple.  It’s pretty cool to see so many monkeys! 

From the lion and tiger "safari" -- really more like a bus ride through the zoo

JORDAN:

A few tidbits about Mumbai:

JAITAPUR: Jaitapur is a little coastal region with a half dozen villages nearby, where people are poor, agriculture and fishing is the only economy, and earthquakes are frequent (India’s geologic service put them in Zone 4 for “High Earthquake Risk” on a five Zone scale). India has entered into a multinational agreement with the US and France to drastically increase its nuclear power production. They’ve picked Jaitapur to become the site of the largest nuclear reactor in the world. There has been no legitimate scientific study of the earthquake vulnerability of the site, or the effect of the plant on the fisheries and agriculture, and there will not be, if all goes according to plan. The cooling water from the reactors is expected to warm the sea enough to kill the fish. There is no plan in place for how to deal with the waste. And on top of it all, Jaitapur is considered an ecological hotspot – the kind of place where new species are discovered whenever scientists drop by.

The villagers have been persistently protesting the plant for years. All five local village governments have passed unanimous resolutions against the plants, but the government has blithely credited their resistance to “foreigners with powerpoints” coming in and misleading them about the project. There have been hundreds of preventative arrests and the police have fired on protestors on at least one occasion, killing one. I met some of these guys a few days ago at the office. They pointed out one of their compatriots who was shot in the head by police and survived.

This kinda shit don’t happen in America (okay, maybe Appalachia).

I went to Tarapur, site of India’s first nuclear power plant, a couple weeks ago for a comparative study. Here, radiation has been leaking persistently for years. The cooling water used in the reactors has warmed the sea so much that it has killed the local fishing industry. The water of the neighboring villages passes through the exclusion zone, and on occasion, it has killed cattle en masse. After years of no waste plan, they’re now trying to bury the accumulating waste right next to the site, directly beneath the villages.

So this is one of our projects.

DRIVING: is a whole different animal. People walk in and out of lanes of traffic – at some intersections, stepping between and in front of oncoming cars is the only way to cross – and cars do not follow traffic laws with any consistency. On my trip to Tarapur, we got caught in a bad stretch of highway traffic – so to speed things up, our side of the road chose to thump over the meridian and begin driving in the oncoming lane of traffic. So here we go, weaving between oncoming cars, until somebody a couple miles down the road in the opposite lane gets peeved and parks his truck across the lanes we’re in and pulls out a whistle and begins waving us back over the meridian, but meanwhile, hundreds of cars are driving on the wrong side of the road and have to get rerouted. Nayantara, a friend of ours, tells us that India has the highest rate of accidents per vehicle on the road, and that seems about right.

POVERTY: is everywhere and it’s everything to this city. You can’t live here for too long before you begin to feel shell-shocked by it, and then you start to think, and then you’re overwhelmed by the depth of privilege you have enjoyed since before you were old enough to understand it. Two blocks from city center, where there is a half second of lovely statues, court houses and offices, there is a family of seven that sleep on slabs of styrofoam beneath the awning, half-dressed or naked children and all. Because of the monsoons, most buildings are built with covered passageways outside them. Most of these passageways are strewn with folks sleeping on strips of cardboard. So are the waiting areas in all the train terminals.

We don’t live very near a slum, but as soon as you take the trains north, they’re everywhere. Everywhere. You look outside the train and you see naked kids playing stickball along the tracks, and roosters waddling in and out of the street, and folks sleeping beneath strips of aluminum, and people whose houses abut more wealthy establishments using the barbed wire for clothesline, and they’re rows and rows deep. Do you know that shot from “Slumdog Millionaire” where they back the camera up to get the really wide shot of the slums? I couldn’t tell you which part of town it was shot in, but I could wager at least a few would work. A half block out the door of our hotel is a family that sleeps under a makeshift little thing that you can’t even call a shanty – just a few sticks holding up tarp high enough for folks to crawl under and sleep on something mattress-like. There’s one street a few blocks away from us that just one family sleeping under tarps after another. The people who run the roadside food stands don’t pack up their shacks at night – they keep a plastic bag of essentials tied to a tree branch and then bring it down at night while they sleep on the sidewalk in front of their spot.

ECONOMICS: The guidebook says that the average salary in Mumbai is $1000, or three times the national average. That’s $3 a day. And even then, almost all of that money has to be concentrated at the top. There are pockets of insane wealth here. We went by a 27-floor, 400 servant mansion built for one family to live in. There’s a “resort hospital” by the sea that lights up like Disneyland at night. There’s a first world populace here that lives in first world comfort, and they have the money to match it.

See, if you want a first world experience, you’re going to pay first world prices. Or close. Subway makes a $4 footlong, for example. Apartments are so pricey we can’t afford one – or we could afford the cheap ones if it was worth people’s bother to talk folks out of their cultural hang-up against foreigner and couples. The thing is that the poor 95% of the populace lives in that first-world price structure, and so they simply create a marketplace of such inferior goods that they can afford it. So you have restaurants where everyone tells you don’t eat the sauce or drink the water. You have the slums.

Now here’s my problem with Mumbai and its efforts to become first world: they’re never going to do it while there’s this persistent, overwhelming underclass here. In one of my conversations with friends, I was told that the government used to put out public trash receptacles and have trash collection, but the poor folks simply stole them all, so that was the end of that. Now, outside of your beautiful, first world style restaurant, you have piles of burning garbage. Doesn’t quite hold up against the West, does it?

To compete with the first world, these folks either have to solve their inequality problem, or they have to gentrify the hell out of this place. My bet is that the latter will happen before the former. My bet is, unfortunately, that they’ll simply cure the poverty out of this city by forcing them out.

WOMEN AND ROMANCE AIN’T THE SAME: At the orientation that we conducted with other law students about administering a prison survey, there was a portion of the program dedicated to talking about India’s domestic violence bill. India’s DVB protects against all the usual things, like rape and beatings. But it’s also alarmingly broad. Apparently, it’s a crime to divorce your wife and thereafter ever not completely financially support her (in most cases where the wife doesn’t have a career, which is almost always). It’s also a crime to have a child out of wedlock and not thereafter keep them both under your roof. 

Now, first this is a little troubling, because it basically treats women as children. But before you get hung up on that, you have to get your head around how necessary this is, because women who are divorced or who have children out of wedlock more often than not have nothing – no career options, no other romantic options, they either are cared for by a man or they….well, what? Fall on relatives? Starve? You figure it out. That’s the policy decision India’s government had to solve.

Now, here’s the shocker. The domestic violence portion of this program with the government interns is followed by a group discussion, wherein most of the men complain that they need a domestic violence bill to protect them, and that women will abuse the existing DVB, and then they justify their points by arguing things like, hey, women in live-in relationships deserve to get beaten sometimes because they asked for it by getting into a relationship without the sanctity of marriage. Seriously. [Shira's note: this was shocking to us both.  One man's exact words were "Well, sometimes the man needs to beat his wife to get things done..." and this was a Lawyer for the StateHUMAN.RIGHTS.Commission.  Jordan is about to write this, but it bears repeating].  And these aren’t poor backwards farmers – these are wealthy, comparatively well cultured law students who decided to volunteer at a human rights organization (not ours, thankfully – we were doing the teach-in for a government office’s interns). We are left only to imagine how prevalent this view is in the country.

ARE WE HAVING FUN?: This is a tough question. Ask yourself if you’d rather live in the first world or the third. Because there’s plenty of the third here. Ask yourself if you’d rather be able to drink the water. Ask yourself if you’d rather live where women aren’t chattel, the majority of marriages are still arranged by caste and dowries haven’t died out. 

Are we glad to be here and having this experience, coming to understand how the vast majority of the world lives, and be exposed to at least most of the world’s cultural problems, and have our sense of our place in the world changed? Yes. Yeah, we’re extremely grateful for that. Is there going to be some relief and more than a few “luxuries” we’re looking forward to? Yeah, that too. So here we are. I think we’re getting more out of this than either of us anticipated. I think we’re having spectacular fun in short bursts when we can plan it on a Sunday. And then we go home and feel strange for it while walking by the family sleeping on the styrofoam slabs.

Woo hoo!

Some pictures from Matheran:

Matheran

Us! and one of the many beautiful views at Matheran

Matheran monkeys

Matheran monkeys

Matheran babymonkey and mamamonkey -- see how close they get!

At one of the major train stations