San Francisco to Hong Kong: fourteen hours. Hong Kong to Mumbai: six hours. Twenty hours on a plane with less than an hour between rides is enough to determine what I am made of as a man. Luckily, somehow or another we landed in Mumbai a little after midnight early this morning. India is twelve and a half hours ahead of California. My internal clock is all out of sync.
Immediately as I stepped outside the airport, I started sweating like crazy. The 90% humidity reminds you that you are in the middle of the jungle, urban as it may be. Mumbai has 20 some million people in and around its official boundaries, but luckily, most of them were sleeping as Kash drove us home over the now four year old, $270 million Bandra-Worli Sea Link bridge.
An image of the bridge from Wikipedia.
A view of the Bridge from Kash's house.
As he gave me a little tour of Worli, the neighborhood he grew up and currently lives in, it was a little bizarre to see a city so notoriously loud and busy so relatively dead. We zoomed through intersections where traffic lights were more street lamps at that time of night and if someone pulled in front of you, you could honk until they got over just enough for you to squeeze by.
Speaking of Kash's house, the guy didn't really tell us much about it when we were together in America. Sure, I knew he faced a body of water but I had no clue. What you see above is the Arabian Sea, Kash's 8'th story view making the sight that much more special. The only family that lives above the Ranka family is a governor of some Indian state, a man that gets a police convoy every time he returns home.
Kash's house. His younger uncle, his dad, and his older uncle live on the 7th, 8th, and 9th floors while his grandfather gets the 10th floor.
20 million people. What do you do with that many humans in one place? For a culture that is very much vegetarian, vegetables have to be frozen and shipped into the center of the city in ridiculous amounts. It seems like there may be between 15 and 20 licensed taxis in the entire city of San Francisco, while here it seems that there has to be one for every person. The streets, which are cleaned by the city on a fairly consistent basis, are still COVERED in trash (which was to be expected). The logistic nightmare which is Mumbai truly blows my mind. And the craziest part of the whole thing? It's rapidly growing.
Worli, Kash's neighborhood, and it's rapid development
Well, I have a few errands to run today. Only three days until I am off to Rajasthan, so if there are any amenities I will need up there, now is the time to get them. Right now is the tail end of the monsoon season here, and since it hasn't really rained on me yet the weather has been absolutely amazing: 70-some degrees with a super nice ocean breeze. Life is good. I will stay in touch!
BJ