After about a month in Hyderabad and a week in Delhi I have found my way to Mumbai; the most exciting city in India. I'm staying with my cousin Amor, his wife Nell and their new baby Coco. They just moved into a new flat 2 days before I arrived so apart from a couple of mattresses it's still pretty bare. We are on the 6th floor of a building with a great view of the ocean in one of the interior suburbs of Mumbai.
As different as Delhi and Hyderabad were, Mumbai is even further removed from both. Although I was aware that Bollywood was here like Hollywood is in L.A. I didn't anticipate how similar the two cities would be. Mumbai is Los Angeles in so many ways. The size, the beaches, the weather, the smog, the long workdays made longer by the traffic, the media and movie industries and the people. Perhaps most of all the fact that the disparity between rich and poor is as evident as the sun in the sky and simply a part of everyday life, but this is true to an extent in every Indian city.
My first night in town Amor and I went to a nearby restaurant/bar in the early evening. Outside was of course the street which has cars, auto-rickshaws, small shops, food stands, apartment complexes, security guards, homeless and regular folks. Funny thing, apart from the auto-rickshaws the scene bore a striking resemblance to a certain Sunset Boulevard 8,000 miles away. But this truth didn't dawn on me until after we went inside.
The place was very new and aptly called "wtf!" The music was fresh and trendy as was the decor and the crowd. I felt like I had walked into a different world, more specifically a bar in West Hollywood. Amor told me that a lot of media people were around (this I had gathered for myself) but he also told me how to spot them: They are the loud ones that are looking around the room for people looking at them. That last sentence is paraphrased because I don't think anyone could put it much better than that. The environment was a lot of fun but probably very similar to the scene Amor and his friends had been consumed with all week. After enough friends arrived we shifted to a more hole-in-the-wall spot that was a lot less chic and a lot more relaxed. Felt like the ideal place to unwind and enjoy the company of friends without the chance of awkwardly running into "that obnoxious guy" from work on your hard earned Friday night. Most of the people I have met so far are creative, unique, lively and long time subscribers to the work-hard, play-hard philosophy. I have yet to meet an engineer which is strange considering that I've met them in swarms everywhere else that I've been in India.
That section of restaurants and clubs is to the south of our place so today I decided to go for a walk in the other direction and found an entirely different city. Just north of our apartment building along the beach is a fishing village. After about 100 yards of pavement I ran into narrow cobblestone alleyways that snaked through a labyrinth of storefronts and shacks. The buildings were all painted in very bright colors and the beach air mixed with a throng of pungent smells.
This area of town couldn't be more different than what is just a few miles south along the same road, which made me again think of L.A. At Occidental I was walking distance from the largest collection of Armenians outside of Armenia in Glendale, an entirely Latino community with storefronts covered in Spanish along York Blvd. and an artsy/yuppie community in Eagle Rock.
That kind of racial diversity isn't so evident here, but the income differences from one block to the next are greater than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Ocean-view highrises line the street with many residents driving BMW's, rocking designer jeans and spending 500 Rupees on dinner at Dominos. Directly below them on the beach are shacks of corrugated metal piled on top of one another where residents likely spend less than 500 Rupees on food in a month.
As different as Delhi and Hyderabad were, Mumbai is even further removed from both. Although I was aware that Bollywood was here like Hollywood is in L.A. I didn't anticipate how similar the two cities would be. Mumbai is Los Angeles in so many ways. The size, the beaches, the weather, the smog, the long workdays made longer by the traffic, the media and movie industries and the people. Perhaps most of all the fact that the disparity between rich and poor is as evident as the sun in the sky and simply a part of everyday life, but this is true to an extent in every Indian city.
My first night in town Amor and I went to a nearby restaurant/bar in the early evening. Outside was of course the street which has cars, auto-rickshaws, small shops, food stands, apartment complexes, security guards, homeless and regular folks. Funny thing, apart from the auto-rickshaws the scene bore a striking resemblance to a certain Sunset Boulevard 8,000 miles away. But this truth didn't dawn on me until after we went inside.
The place was very new and aptly called "wtf!" The music was fresh and trendy as was the decor and the crowd. I felt like I had walked into a different world, more specifically a bar in West Hollywood. Amor told me that a lot of media people were around (this I had gathered for myself) but he also told me how to spot them: They are the loud ones that are looking around the room for people looking at them. That last sentence is paraphrased because I don't think anyone could put it much better than that. The environment was a lot of fun but probably very similar to the scene Amor and his friends had been consumed with all week. After enough friends arrived we shifted to a more hole-in-the-wall spot that was a lot less chic and a lot more relaxed. Felt like the ideal place to unwind and enjoy the company of friends without the chance of awkwardly running into "that obnoxious guy" from work on your hard earned Friday night. Most of the people I have met so far are creative, unique, lively and long time subscribers to the work-hard, play-hard philosophy. I have yet to meet an engineer which is strange considering that I've met them in swarms everywhere else that I've been in India.
That section of restaurants and clubs is to the south of our place so today I decided to go for a walk in the other direction and found an entirely different city. Just north of our apartment building along the beach is a fishing village. After about 100 yards of pavement I ran into narrow cobblestone alleyways that snaked through a labyrinth of storefronts and shacks. The buildings were all painted in very bright colors and the beach air mixed with a throng of pungent smells.
This area of town couldn't be more different than what is just a few miles south along the same road, which made me again think of L.A. At Occidental I was walking distance from the largest collection of Armenians outside of Armenia in Glendale, an entirely Latino community with storefronts covered in Spanish along York Blvd. and an artsy/yuppie community in Eagle Rock.
That kind of racial diversity isn't so evident here, but the income differences from one block to the next are greater than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Ocean-view highrises line the street with many residents driving BMW's, rocking designer jeans and spending 500 Rupees on dinner at Dominos. Directly below them on the beach are shacks of corrugated metal piled on top of one another where residents likely spend less than 500 Rupees on food in a month.
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