India February 2000
Mumbai, India
February 2000
Numusta,
India is still here. So am I. For the traveler, I have decided to give Foders a run for his rupee and write a series of traveler guides for the Indian tourist. A lot is the same here as many countries I have visited. For example: they have curb-side drop-off for trash, but unfortunately, they are years away from curb side pick-up.
The first thing to know about staying in Mumbai, is that a lot of the native workers do not have alarm clocks. Or watches. Or beds. Or homes. As a result, the way they are notified to go to work in the morning is that a work whistle is sounded. Now, this concept is not unknown in the US. However, in the US, it usually sounds exactly like the work whistle on the Flinstones when Fred yells "Yabba Dabba Doo" and slides down the quarry dinosaur and lands neatly in his car. I found out after being scared out of my wits on my first morning in Mumbai that the city doesn't have a factory whistle to blow, so they sound the air raid horns. For weeks, I've been hearing about tension with Pakistan, especially since the hijacking, and at 9:00 sharp, the air raid alarm sounds across the city. I rushed to the window expecting to see armed Bedouins on camels charging down the street, or boats representing the Pakistani Navy's finest in the harbor shelling the buildings. Of course if they couldn't find shells, I figured they would be throwing driftwood or dead fish.
Driving in India really isn't that much different than other places I have been. It is easy to determine the Indian-manufactured automobiles: they don't have side-view mirrors. "Why don't they have mirrors?" you ask. Well, if you look at the American, and European cars, you'll have your answer. The holes in the top-forward locations on each front door carefully mark where the mirrors were before they were scrapped off in traffic. The only American and European cars with mirrors remaining are those that fold in. And, some of those are scrapped pretty bad on the flat side. Our assigned driver didn't show up one day while in Mumbai, so we grabbed a cab. The 30 minute ride to the central business district cost $1.39. Oops, I may have accidently moved a decimal on my expense report. If you put this in terms of thrills, breathtaking movements, gravity ignoring and the general taunting of death to just try and catch you, Six Flags over Texas would have to charge $1,500-$2,000 for a day pass just to finance a ride that could match it. I've always thought it appropriate everywhere that you pay the cabbie at the end of the ride. I like to think I am paying for him to stop driving, rather than the ride. That way, I usually feel like I got a great bargain.
Horns grant unlimited empowerment in India. Once you have honked at a pedestrian or car pulling out in front of you, you can legally hit them. In addition, all commercial vehicles (cabs, vans, all refinery-owned vehicles, etc.) have back-up horns. Now, a lot of larger vehicles have back-up horns in the US that do the BEEP-BEEP-BEEP horn when backing up. Here, more vehicles have back-up horns and these horns are all the programmable ones like at home you can order from JC Whitney Auto parts that plan 176 different tunes. I can't tell you the humor when I see an exec at the refinery pull up and when his driver starts backing into the assigned spot the vehicle starts plaing "Jingle Bells" at about 100 decibels. Other lively choices I've recognized are "Silent Night", "Happy Birthday", "La Cucaracha" (my personal favorite), and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star".
We learned when headed to a meeting the other day that when a woman's middrift is modestly exposed in a traditional Indian dress, a saree, it is considered formal. One of the directors on the project with a physic and humor both similar to mine, yanked out the shirttail of his golf shirt and started rolling it up exposing a well fed belly. (This was not a pretty site.) The lead director looked over and asked what in the blankety-blank the other director was doing, he replied back that he was going formal for our meeting with the president of the refinery. I asked if I just mooned the president once we were there if it would be considered business casual.
I hope all is well with you. I hope to see you soon!
-Keith