Unchiki mali-mali-ti – hoy, hoy – unchiki mali-mali ti – har hari

Ain’t going to Jo’burg no more.

Phuck.

Ah, well. Life had been getting a wee bit too pleasant, after all.

India, India, India, India.

The place where finally some long-wished for hand reached out of my bowels and pulled my heart out of my throat and pulled it back to where it belongs.

Where I finally danced the way you’re so-phucking-posed to.

Where everyone’s so busy hating the abstract idea of those around them that when it comes to actually interfacing with “them” all they can be bothered to do is cooperate in the most efficient manner imaginable.

Where criticism of a Bollywood star’s choice of charity is enough to cause riots, but a deadly explosion in a factory prompts little more than resigned shrugs of the shoulders and wry grins.

Where my friend Chris is having a mini-temple built in his honour in the shirt shop across the road from his house and where Catholics drape the inside of their taxis like Hindu shrines.

So hear ye: Bombay is now Mumbai. This change was wrought by a low-rent, localised version of the Nazi party that occasionally grabs control of the city and regional government.

Not sure of the spelling but they’re called ‘Shriv Senna’ and are – hilariously – run by a family – I schit you not – called the Thackerays.

In essence, Mumbai is in a province/state called Maharathstra. Maharathstrans are predominantly Hindu, working class and ignorant. They are also (max) 50% of the population of Mumbai.

And – thanks to the range of talents and abilities that they are able to call upon when faced with the challenge of the modern job market – they tend to be amongst the poorest, dirtiest and most desperate of the city’s people.

This is not their fault. Local politicians in India tend act to as local fiefs, with a massive say over the how social services to address long-term problems amongst their electorate are delivered and designed.

It is not in the interest of people such as the Messer’s Thackeray to prioritise long-term educational goals, so they instead focus on picking fights with whatever threat – real or imagined – happens to be on the horizon at any given time.

Happily, the threat in question never really changes: it’s always them foreigners coming over here taking our jobs and getting all the best housing. So they foment the odd riot, encourage the odd beating and change the odd name.

So, yes: “Mumbai”.

When the Britishers got to Mumbai sometime around the 18th century, the locals called it something like ‘Bumbai’. But now the Britishers are gone and the city is a vibrant mix of Sikhs, Muslims, the once–dominant-but-now-almo

st-gone Jains, Parsis (see Jains) and Hindus.

When the Shriv Senna was allied to the BJP – a neo Nazi party that ran India for a few years (and strikingly well, too) – it changed the name to Mumbai because
a) Bombay was not ‘native’
b) They’re not big fans of the “immoral” Bollywood
c) “Bombay” had long been associated with successful non-Hindu minorities
d) Mumbai is the name of some Hindu goddess

So it’s an entirely ahistorical and silly name change, the product of a nasty bunch of rich people finding ever more creative ways to appease their electorate without actually helping them.

So the choice is Bombay or Mumbai.

If you were a principled sort of chap you might insists on Bombay but
a) it’s not your country and
b) Indians are a rather accommodating bunch and so once something‘s done they tend to work with it, so why don’t you?

Chennai (Madras) is apparently more historic but I’m infinitely more ignorant about it and so will say no more.

Mumbai? By the sea, a lot of it. A dirty sea, but by no means a filthy one. Every nook and cranny of the city is filled with some kind of enterprise or activity. There are people wherever you look. It’s like they’re constantly multiplying around you; appearing and then somehow finding a space within the city to live and breathe.

40% of the city’s police live in slums.

Many of the slums I saw are reasonably kept. You wander through them and the first thing that strikes you is that they seem rather like particularly well organised festival campsites.

Only people live there for decades and raise kids there and shit.

There’s a brilliant article in the Economist from a few weeks ago about spending a week in one of them, if you want t read it.

I lived mostly in Bandra which is meant to be the rich area but on the surface is only slightly less crowded and smoky than everywhere else. It does, however, feel patently nicer. It’s hilly, there’s a constant lovely breeze and there are more trees.

Being there has the sensation of living on a cliff top at the end of a happy world. Take Winchelsea in Kent, expand it by 50 million times, make it Indian and add rickshaws and smog.

There’s no concept of “off-limits” for foreigners in Mumbai because everyone’s a foreigner and none of them are quite sure how they’re meant to react to you, anyway.

In brief, a chaotic, jumbled, happy, busy mess. With THE WORST taxi drivers I have ever come across. The rare good ones will happily and forcibly insist that the bad ‘uns are all UP people.

UP is Uttar Pradesh and, to listen to many Indians, it appears to be the equivalent of Bradford, the shite parts of Glasgow and Wigan mixed together, only all the jobs have gone, the water’s contaminated and the government is being run by a warthog with diarrhoea who was last seen three months ago.

Spent a few days in New Delhi: grand, cold and magisterial.

The words “fuck you” seem to echo off every street corner, only not directed at just you but at everybody there.

That’s until you hit Old Delhi.

Old Delhi looks like just like you would expect it to from childhood images of India: people all round you, poverty, bustle, shit, yelling, colours, business, activity, lights, alley ways, smells, bustle, broken-down shacks converted to restaurants with clothes shop being run out one side and a guy selling phone cards and light bulbs out another, though he can also do you key copies if you give him five minutes.

Throw yourself is into this human effluvium and be bustled about from one side to the other; when hungry, allow yourself to be pushed to that street-side kitchen-cum-restaurant where you can eat delicious curry for less than 50p sat at a “table” with a rickshaw wallah, a Muslim garment trader and some dude dressed like a lumber jack. Eat with your hands, have a pointless broken English conversation about Delhi, then wander through the streets smoking cigarettes and not looking at the heaving open air dormitories all around you, but instead at what remains of the great Mughal city around you, destroyed not by industrialisation, central planning or capitalism but by 24 months of concerted cultural genocide by the British following an 1857 mutiny which was entirely their fault.

I won’t go into it, but we should hang our heads and cry tears of shame with every step through Delhi for what was carried out by people who read the same books that we were reared on and spoke the same language we speak now.

So yes, Delhi.

I wondered up to the MoD of a Sunday and asked the guard if I could come in. He said you need a pass, sir. I then explained that I’d been there as a child to watch the trooping of the coulour and dropped a couple of Hindi phrases. He smiled widly and said “sir, I show you quickly because you are Delhi man” and ushered me through to a back garden that looked onto the side of the Presidential Palace – take the Capitol building in Washington and give it a spiff – on one side and on the other the Parliament – get St. Peters pregnant by the Forum and shoot that baby full of the most hardcore steroids you can find.

Brief but excellent.

And the tourists around you are Indian, guys. And they use English because it’s the closest thing to a lingua franca for a country that is a planet in miniature.

But it’s not proper English – ah! – it’s Inglish.

I have this fabulous memory of interviewing this lovely CEO who’d been raised in Finsbury of all place and gone to UCL and who had a voice just like my uncles when he was talking to me, but when he picked up the phone to talk to an Indian colleague suddenly went all Peter Sellers.

Though Hyderabad was far and away the best for that sort of experience. They SPEAK English there, but understand not a jot when it comes from the mouth of Westerner.

Example:
My Partner: Are the pineapple sticks good?
Hyderabad Waiter: No, Madam, only for main course
MP: No, I get that, but is the flavour good?
HW: I think that if one were to have rice, Madam, then you would be more content at the end of the day, yes.
MP: No, I understand: I want it as a starter, I’ll get much more food afterwards.
HW: I will ask the chef, Madam, but sometimes Western palate is a little delicate.

Hyderabad, though. Jeeeeesus what a hole.

More of a hole because there are no ladies. Feels very ‘poor Muslim’.

The air is solid, the noise unrelenting and people can’t afford cars, so every other vehicle is a loud and careering motorbike.

That said, there is a gorgeous white mosque built on a MASSIVE boulder that rises out of the centre of the city – they way you might imagine something out of Tolkein. There is also a large lake in the middle of the city with a Buddha in the centre which our taxi driver amusingly insisted was Indhira Ghandi, despite my arguments to the contrary.

Incidentally, Hyderabad is named after a dancing girl that the heir and eventually lord of the area fell in love with and married.

He was forbidden from being with her by his father, who felt that such a common (and non-Muslim) woman would bring shame upon his house. But the prince, risking his life, escaped from the fort/palace of Golconda and went to pledge his troth regardless. Then, in one of the few historical incidences of a reasoned parental response to youthful love and rebellion, his dad reckoned that this meant his son really did properly love her after all and agreed that they should be allowed to be together. And they all lived happily ever after

Amusingly, the story also creates the possibility of insulting any particularly obnoxious and/or conservative Hyderabadian by reminding him that he comes from a city founded in honour of a Hindu whore.

The line the prince came from, incidentally, was a line of scholar-warriors who were able to run their affairs separate from those of the Delhi-based Mughal emperor for a few generations until eventually being overcome by – by all accounts – the total bastard Emperor Arungzabad.

It appears they ran a mini-kingdom of tolerance, artistry and effective agriculture. What they have left behind is Golconda, far and away the most awe-inspiring monument I saw in India and really, honestly, up there with Angkor Watt and the Aztec Pyramids in terms of pure aesthetic and monolithic ‘wow’ factor.

I’m tired. I’m not there anymore. I’m not going to South Africa. I’m in phucking Turkey for at least a wee while. God give me strength and easy access to soft drugs.

Go to Goa.

M

~ by julian2000 on 16 February, 2008.