Day 1

Reporting from Mumbai...

From TimeOut: Mumbai "...Mumbai is India on steroids: 168 square miles bursting at the seams with the hopes and dreams, cultures and cuisines, languages and races, petty quarrels and disgruntled compromises of a billion people. Appropriately, Mumbai is the economic engine that drives India's growth; home to the country's central bank, two stock exchanges, the commodities market and the headquarters of thousands of companies... The city's infrastructure is crumbling, property prices are too high for the lower- and middle-class to afford proper housing, the roads are too narrow and battered to handle the exploding traffic, clean water is scarce and the electric supply is dwindling." Fun place!

My roommate, Alfred, and I hit the ground running today and managed to get completely lost. That's part of the fun though, right? Without an agenda we managed to walk through most of the neighborhoods of South Mumbai, from Marine Drive to Colaba. If that doesn't mean anything to you, let me just say it's a lot of walking.

A few days ago, I read an interesting article about India and how the financial crisis will affect its development (one of the reasons that we're here). It was incredibly timely and I was thinking about it a lot as we wandered around today. The article discussed the concept of "leapfrogging" or skipping basic technologies for already developed advanced technologies to reap the benefits of those technologies without having to pay the infrastructure costs. A frequently used example of this is cell phone technology, which can be spread much more cheaply than telephones because there is no need to lay cable, build towers, etc.

In walking around though, it was clear that Mumbai has paid a price for leapfrogging with its own crumbling infrastructure. The city certainly has a great deal of potential: Alfred and I agreed that beneath a layer of filth there's a great deal of potential. Looking beyond the exterior though, it was easy to find a friendly and industrious people working hard to make a good life. The city has beautiful tree lined avenues filled with shoppers and merchants. Sometimes the trees are falling onto the buildings, or vice versa, but that gives it some of its charm.

Packed onto the bus, it didn't stop - they just ran up to it as it moved.

An old colonial building in need of some repair.

Two boys that asked me to take their picture and speak some english. This was in a nicer part of town... check out the sidewalks!