Mumbai revisited...

Hmm...

I dunno whether I'm bored right now and so, actively looking for topics to write about; or whether the recent visit from my cousin and his friends has me looking at how India is different yet interesting...call it idiosyncratic if you will...but...
Love it or Hate it, don't claim to understand it!
That's Ind-yeah!

I was just out for a short shopping trip with mum and well...even 15 minutes outside can give you so many perspectives on people's lives...what you get out of these episodes, depends on whether you take the time to reflect on them...


Mumbai city - is almost definitely a place *most* outsiders would love to hate.
It is a milieu of people from across the entire country and a medley of sights, sounds, smells, flavours and feelings that might only be found comparable in the other "great" cities of the world - a lá New York, Toronto, Shanghai, Hong Kong or Tokyo...
The city is burgeoning at its seams and while I'm not *nearly* as rabid as certain other elements, with regard to the people living in Mumbai, I think it would be useful to give the land here a break.
Set up immigration posts, identity cards and refuse entry to anyone new intending to settle here.
Of course that would go against the freedom of movement and expression that the Constitution affords us...yet, without it...somehow...the order in the chaos might be lost.
But enough of hypothetical situations...

What makes Mumbai different is its people. You cannot sift through the various denizens of Mumbai and delineate them into categories. Of course, there are criteria which you could attempt to use - origin, religion, language etc etc. - yet, you'd fail to get to the essence of the typical Mumbaikar.
If you want to make it here, you need to be willing to work hard, go that extra little bit for the payout and, if possible, have some sort of USP that will make you recognisable (at whatever small level) from the teeming masses.

And that is what Mumbaikars do...

We went shopping for some staples ... wheat and the like.
The first thing the guy mentioned was that the mill was closed today.
This was a grocery store...yet...if you required it...they would have the wheat ground into flour and send it off to you...home delivery...for only the cost of the mill work...

We went across to a couple of vegetable vendors.
One lady was operating with standard weights on her scale, plus a stone or two....balancing the stones (whatever weight they were...we didn't ask) on one or the other side, while calculating how much we owed her...
It was surreal...nobody seemed to care. Nobody asked her either...how much exactly that stone weighed...and how she was calculating what she was doing...

Next to her...a guy who specialised in greens...there was a mouse on his cart...mum saw it; I didn't. He was matter of fact about it. The vendor said: the little fellow comes about to quickly run off with any stray grains of pulses that might fall out of these packages here.
Again...ask...tell....yet...don't ask, don't tell, don't think too much...

One of our fellow shoppers was interesting.
Now, Mumbai is interesting in its cosmopolitan nature as well...Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and a myriad of others live together.
Other than being able to tell (most) people apart by their last names, there are also certain physical characteristics still present among people and can mark their religious origin/background. Subsequently, most Christians in Mumbai converse only in English, with broken Hindi and no Marathi. Most Marathi people get by with a local dialect of Hindi and broken English. Muslims...speak a mixture of Hindi and Urdu...rare Marathi and broken English...
The basic point is...people get by...
Today, a lady buying veggies...had to bed to be told what twenty four in Hindi was. The vendor counted in Hindi. The lady completed her order and transactions in Hindi but did not understand the final amount. Hmm...

Finally, we went to get some fruit. As we went up to the stall...another lady had just finished. She tried to hail an autorickshaw but the driver didn't hear her. A boy at the stall volunteered to go get her one, asking what her destination was.

Why did he need to do that?
No reason, other than...
If you want to make it here, you need to be willing to work hard, go that extra little bit for the payout and, if possible, have some sort of USP that will make you recognisable (at whatever small level) from the teeming masses.