Phase 1: Confronting the stereotypes
Trying to get on a train on peak hour
In my first confrontation with the everyday outdoor life of Mumbai I was pretty shocked, mainly by 4 things: the skin color, their clothes, the amount of auto-rickshaws and the value for money.
It is a bizarre feeling to look around you in a restaurant, bar, mall or any open place and notice: I’m the whitest person in this whole place. And let me tell you, in spite of what Eliazar might say, I’m not really white! But I’ve never seen so many brown people and only brown in one same place.
Even after 1 month I still got shocked from time to time, 1 month is enough to do sightseeing and enjoy a place but it is not enough for freeing you from your own paradigms and especially not for being able to understand India- they’re just too different.
There are so many Indians and they live in such a big territory that they have been able to isolate their own world. If it wasn’t for Partition…
They are different from the West but the complicated part is that they are also so different between each other, between all types of Indians; each region seems to be like a separate country. They are divided by religions, by languages, by castes, by social level, education level and so on!
The next shock is how cheap you can get some things here that are considered luxuries in other countries, like renting a car WITH driver included for 8 hours and 80 km for less than 30 dollars!! I guess that covers up for some deficient basic services like enough trains for the amount of people using them or Starbucks (hehehe well, it’s basic for me!).
About auto-rickshaws I’ll talk another day, they are one of the funniest items in this country.
Loved the peak hour traffic picture, which reminds me that Monday I will be part that traffic
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