Day one, in Mumbai

My good friend Krish Krishnan, in response to my quoting the Sami sisters song of the '60s, Come to Bombay, added these lines from the song:

"If you want to marry me darling, do not come at one!
For Pappa will be waiting with his dabal barrell gun!

Bum, bum, bum, bum... Hey! Bumbye meri hai!
Come, come, come, come... Hey! Bumbye meri hai!"

And so, I spent day one in Mumbai yesterday. Waiting for the traffic lights to change at one busy intersection, sitting in a non air-conditioned taxi (again) I watched the medley of humans, old Premier Padminis, the occasional Ambassador, the trucks and the more modern Japanese Hondas and Toyotas trying to make it across the intersection before the lights changed to red. They were all in a mad rush like a bunch of MBAs at placement time. In the midst of all this crazy crunch was a bullock cart pulling a cart of kerosene and ambling along with no care for the mad rush all around it. That is the beauty of apna Bharat Mahan, you can either be in the crazy race or amble along in a bullock cart without a care for all the rush.

Mumbai's infra structure crashed about two decades ago, and, the traffic snarls of Mumbai are no different from those of the other bigger cities of the world caught up in all the growth, human and otherwise...Sitting in the black and yellow cab sweating away waiting for the lights to change maybe preferable in some ways to stomping in the minus 20 Centigrade cold waiting for yet another delayed GO Train at Oakville, Ontario...

There is much economic booming and one hears it in the theatres as people read text messages and take calls during a film...yet, the nagging thought, how long will it all take to seep down to the people still on below subsistence wages, if that at all...everything is so frightfully costly, and, even with the Canadian dollar supreme I am a bit wary of paying those prices...and, much to the contrary from the reports, I am not sure that much of India has the money to pay those prices, either...

Made me almost feel guilty as I came out of Mani's Lunch Home in Matunga which, my elder brother says, is the only place where you can get food cooked the way our mother did...in Palghat Iyer style, for Rs30 a plate and Rs13 for the mandatory Bisleri water...lovely avial, koottu, kari and pappadam...

Topped off the evening watching the new blockbuster movie, Akbar-Jodhaa, the story of the supposed romance between the Moghul Emperor Akbar and Jodha-bai, his Queen, or, more precisely, the mother of his son, Prince Salim, who went on to be known as Jehangir. The movie is a good mix of history, half-fact, legend and more than anything else, Aishwarya Rai...There are some good scenes in the movie, and, more than anything else the movie reminds you that love is beyond thought and beliefs...I had the benefit of my historian brother who helped me sort my way through the tangle of history and myth...our verdict, Akbar had a woman in his life, one of the many Rajput princesses he married...she gave him his heir, Prince Salim...and the rest is the fantasy of Akbar-Jodhaa....Watch it, but, don't kill yourself if you don't get to...

The movie was interesting sedgue into today's trip out to Jodhpur where there will be more of the Rajputana that I saw in Akbar-Jodhaa...

To sign off, a little footnote that I credit to my Hindi teacher from University days...no way of verifying its veracity...the word 'sala' in Hindi is a derivative of the Sanskrit 'syala' which means the groom of one's sister, a brother-in-law, in modern day English...as everyone who has rudimentary acquaintance with Hindi knows, the word 'sala' is one of the most commonly used abuses in Hindi, almost as common as the f*** word in English...the roots of this abusive usage come from the days when Rajput kings gave their daughters in marriage to Akbar for whatever reasons, political or otherwise...and those who did not used to refer to those who had, as 'sala' that useless, degenerate who gave his sister in marriage to Akbar and became a 'sala', brother-in-law of the Mughal emperor...

Onward and upwards, on to Jodhpur