Global Conversation

I have arrived in Mumbai and am overwhelmed in everyway possible. No way around culture shock I am afraid. I will include more detail of what I am up to and my impressions when I am not so jetlagged. But for now just a few tidbits: I took my first auto-rickshaw ride through some of the Northern suburbs of Mumbai and can feel Mumbai stick to my skin. The cold showers in the guesthouse where I am staying only remove the stickyness for about a minute before it reattaches, the opposite of a reluctant Peter Pan shadow. The residential suburban area where I am currently living is far from the American version of suburbia I grew up near and have experienced—no track houses and identically manicured lawns. The streets feel like the rest of Mumbai with street peddlers, little stalls, piles of rubble and trash, giant potholes and little streetside dwellings. Yet behind the average Mumbai street scene are apartment buildings that appear as if they were built in the 1960s and have not been touched since. They remind me a bit of the bombed out EUR, one of Rome’s suburbs, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. The rusted steel color of the buildings is stained from the years of monsoons and dogs wander around the legs of greying, security guards who sit around on plastic picnic chairs. At the entrance of the building there is a neon twinkly light-lit shrine for Ganesha, a stark contrast to the sign on the door of the guesthouse which says “Jesus Loves Me”(I have no idea what this is doing on the door since the guesthouse is operated by a very secular educational organization).