Bombay to Burgh

This blog now contains: 20% timely and relevant entries, 50% factoids, 30% excuses for blowing off updates.  But seriously… I started this entry a full week before the tragic July 26 blasts in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and Bangalore, Karnataka.  I want to take a moment to acknowledge the tense situation in India right now, amid all of the glassy-eyed wonder of my prior dispatches.  My thoughts go out to the people affected by these events, and I ask that yours do too.  It’s a strange sensation to move from the relative safety of the U.S. to a country that has had to deal with acts of terrorism.  Since the blasts I have ridden public transportation several times and just traveled by rail from Mumbai to Calcutta, where I type this in my room at the Mandira Guest House, a cozy, air-conditioned little pink concrete bunker of a room with a view of the backyard.  It never feels as if I am tempting fate outright. Though the first trip to an outlying station with Abhilash to see Hancock (the English version - Will Smith is a big enough star in India that his latest has been dubbed in Hindi) with our co-worker Latika was a small exercise in faith. Touch wood (as they say here) myself and the rest of Bombay have been spared any mayhem to date, though the dailies are keen to speculate whether the capital of the BJP-ruled Maharashtra state is next.  Bharatiya Janata Party is a conservative group that evidently doesn’t have the best reputation among some of the hardline Muslim factions.  They are not as extreme as Shiv Sena, who would eject any non-Maharashtrian Hindu from Maharashtra state, and are infamous for stunts like setting card shops on fire during the decadent western holiday of Valentine’s Day (I was once so cynical that I could get behind such a display) and threatening to release poisonous snakes in theaters where films offensive to the public good are screened.  But that the threat has been traced back to a laptop in a flat in Navi Mumbai (rented by two foreigners employed by the Campbell-White firm) adds to the intrigue and confusion surrounding the whole tragedy.   As it turned out the laptop appeared to be hacked (again, now picking up three days after I started THIS entry), and the hapless guys renting that Navi Mumbai flat have been questioned and released.  However, Navi Mumbai, where several of my colleagues and co-workers live, has now been dubbed a “terror hub” by the local press.  Since it’s the newest suburb of Mumbai, rents are still relatively cheap and flats are plentiful.  In addition, landlrds don’t feel the need to perform the rigorous background checks that they would with a Mumbai proper rental, since the demand is relaxed for the time being. 

OK, take a deep breath as the events of the past two and a half weeks come crawling back… Imagine a smoky, tiki-lounge style bar (somewhat like Irwin, PA’s Conley Inn for all you Pittsburgh suburbanites) plucked up and transplanted 8,000 miles away in the chic Bandra neighborhood of Mumbai.  Imported brews like Budweiser and Corona command US prices, and save for a bizarre house remix of Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’, the DJ’s playlist is frozen in 1986 (check my Twitter feed http://twitter.com/Adam_MacGregor for a rundown of highlights).  Now add a bunch of Mumbaites who know how to send off two of their own with a mammoth party the likes of which we used to see in cellars of South Oakland.  And now don’t forget one gora would-be designated driver (if I had a prayer of a chance of being able to in Mumbai traffic) who felt right at home, despite the incongruous headrush of 5^th-grade memories triggered by the oldies. This, dear reader, was the scene which introduced me to the gleefully westernized world of Bombay pub culture.  This actually happened two Thursdays ago, on the 17^th of July.  After work on Thursday, we went to a club called the Hawaiian Shack, located in Bandra.  This was meant to be a send-off for Shwetta and Shilpa, who worked in CRY’s Resource Generation department until the following day.  There had been a celebration of some sort that was taking place outside of the CRY office that afternoon.  I heard what sounded like a wedding band, and ran outside to investigate with my digital recorder armed and ready to capture it for repeat listening.  I expected some multi-piece brass band, but parked at the end of our street was a truck-sized float with a seated effigy of Sai Baba, animated so that his arms waved in approximate time with the music.  I could not see what kind of ensemble, if any, was producing the sound, but the tangle of pipes, wires, and loudspeakers suggested a cross between an old-time calliope and a Jamaican sound system.  There were live drummers playing dhol as far as I could tell, though a crowd amassed around the float made it difficult to see.  By the next evening, it had turned into a full-blown devotional festival, complete with colorful rangolis decorating the asphalt outside of the Sai Baba temple at the end of the alleyway, and more giant standing effigies in place of the float. Sangeeta drove me, Steshia, Bidisha (who is a damn fine classical singer, as she demonstrated during the ride) and Arun to the place, a trip which took us via flyover past the unbelievable construction happening in Midtown (I think) Bombay.  Entire skyscrapers that were not here during my last trip  were either complete or nearly so, with bamboo scaffolding buttressing the work crews on all sides.  Bombay construction workers work in conditions that are spectacularly unsafe.  Rarely have I seen hardhats in use.  Last trip I recall seeing a bunch of guys lollygagging on a billboard frame, some 70 feet above the street.  Y’know, there should be a law…and actually, there is!  But the construction worker’s act of 1996 meant to provide for better working conditions for unorganized construction workers was one of those open secrets of the Government.  Passed, but not implemented with any efficacy.  Raising awareness of this act among those who could potentially avail of safer work is one of the many irons in the fire of the NGOs that CRY supports. 

Bollywood item number girl Rekha Sawant, who is India’s entry into the “famous for being famous” canon, looks like the antithesis of the “nice Indian girl” with her labret piercing and (recently removed, I am informed) breast implants.  I bring her up because on the way to the club we passed at least 20 billboards advertising her new interview show.  Each one carried the same suggestive image of her reclining in a bathtubfileld with red chillies, with her name done up in a garish 70s Bollywood script.  Everyone in the car swore up and down that despite her presentation she was actually a postmodern media manipulator, extraordinarily subversive in her interview style and outspoken views and not just some kind of a Paris Hilton-type airhead.  I have no idea if this is true since  missed the interview show (it kicked off with an exclusive Aamir Khan, poster boy for the Times of India’s “Teach India” campaign – more on that one later – and producer of the wildly popular “Taara Zameen Paar”  and his nephew Imran’s Jaane Tu… ).  The red chillies on the billboard looked more enticing to me than she herself. 

So we got to the club and the night stretched into the early a.m. in no time.  I was glad to have danced with everyone to not one but three Michael Jackson songs – only fitting for India – and two Queen songs.  After all, Freddie Mercury being a Bombay homeboy.  The DJ served up five minutes of meta reality when he spun aforementioned club remix of Baker Street and the Alan Parsons Project, some song I’d heard very rarely which everyone seemed to know and love.  Points off for “Achy Breaky Heart” and the block of Bryan Adams that really bummed me out.  Everyone had a total blast, me included.  I had nothing to drink as usual but I had my first French fries in India and drank my weight in lime sodas.  They even asked me to read the special announcements for Shilpa and Shwetta - joke titles for them that I hoped I didn’t butcher in Hindi.  I went upstairs at one point to the lounge that Steshia said was more her speed.  They played hip-hop rather than the downstairs bar’s time-capsule finds, but it was full of dudes frontin’ and the Eminem poster on the wall made me have to leave shortly afterward.  Our waitress was an impossibly tiny Southeast Asian woman who somehow struck me as oddly out-of-place in India, even though she was from probably right next door, fourth-dimensionally speaking.  She was cool enough to continually bring me small shots of sugar water to add to the weaker sodas that I kept quaffing to keep me on a sugar high.  The late nights came so much easier 10 years ago, I keep telling everyone,  After we closed up shop – literally closing up the bar sometime after 2 a.m. – Irwin paid off the tab and everyone split via cab or rickshaw.  Abhilash, Sanjay and I ricked it home and turned in immediately.  Next day at work brought more festivities related to Shilpa and Shwetta’s dperature in the form of two enormous tubs of veg and chicken biryani.  This is the food of the gods, laden with raisins and pine nuts and loaded with what is probably pure, heart-halting clarified butter.  Would I that were able to submit a sample of that for Big Ol’ Schleep’s gourmand stamp of approval.

After a late day of work, I had plans to leave for Panchgani with Jeevan and her family for the weekend.  These plans were scrubbed at the last minute due to some issue, so I went with Steshia, Sharmila, and Sangeeta of the comm. department to eat my first Italian food in India.  Yep, you read it right.  It was…OK.  We went to a restaurant located in one of the malls that was so serious about its food they prohibited children for a while until it impacted their business enough to allow them, provided the parents keep them quiet and under close watch.  I had proscuitto, which I believe is some kind of white sauce with rice.  It was a bit bland and by the time I finished I felt like I had swallowed a pillow - exactly not the sensation that I was looking to take to bed.  Stesh  and I had fun recollecting the more memorably funny parts of the CRY America US publicity tour.  Trying to shield our honored guest from conservative Jharkhand from the well-within-eyeshot decadence of the gay porn shops and the trashy Bikini Bar across the street from where we were staying in Chelsea when we were in NYC will always be a standout moment.  After a drive along the Queen’s Necklace, thorugh Worli and picking up an autorickshaw in Andheri where Stesh stays, I reached home around 11.   I had by that time received word that the trip to Panchgani was back on for the following morning, so some packing was in order before I hit the sack. 

Panchgani, literally “five hills”, is an incredibly magical place about four hours away from Bombay.  I had been there last trip to see the sights and meet some of Jeevan’s family who stay there, her aunt, cousins, and other aunt and uncle.  The mountainous region is located in the Western Ghats, into which the clouds from the ocean slam into during normal monsoon seasons (not a dry one like this year) to produce torrential rains.  Panchgani is known for its cooler climate during the summer and rainy seasons, and hence was an important Hill Station, so designated by the Britishers who even went so far as to establish it as the summer capital of Maharashtra state.  Poor pale little gora sahib couldn’t take the heat, so he ran to the hills.  For me, Panchgani is not only a place of natural splendor in its lush peaks and plunging valleys and tablelands (basically, flat-topped buttes, some of the largest in the world) that offer panaoramic views of the region: it’s also the childhood home of a rock legend.  Freddie Mercury, AKA Farrokh Bulsara, spent his school years at St. Peter’s Boys’ School in Panchi sometime back in the mid 1960s.  I am not sure if I was aware of this during last trip, or it would have taken on far more of a pilgrimage cast than it did.  A few months back, I caught a documentary on Freddie (full disclosure: I was watching the LOGO network), which shocked me off my living room couch when they cut to scenes of Panchgani that I easily recognized from just a few months before.  I knew that as a Parsi, Freddie had some ties to India but to be right in the man’s old hood was too cool of a coincidence.  Of course, I had to visit this time around and get some snaps, if not get a chance to go inside and see the piano he used to play for school functions myself. We left Bombay around 11 a.m., Jeevan’s brother’s cucumber-cool driver Sandeep at the wheel of his SUV.  Everyone who can afford it has a driver here, and luckily Vivek’s business savvy has paid off such that he need not deal with the nerve-rending Bombay traffic.  Vivek took us to a roadside equivalent of a U.S. greasy spoon called Sunny’s Dhaba, where we had some of the most scrumptious parathas on the market.  The place resembled a drive-in restaurant, though the patio was immense enough to allow for outdoor dining for at least a hundred.  On the way off, I snapped some pictures candidly of some more “Switchblade Sisters” scooter riders, dressed in an eastern fashionista mode against the road dust.  You be the judge.  We reached Panchi in time for a hike over the tableland with Jeevan’s aunt and cousins, but not before I scored aforementioned cricket injury, defending a steel chair-cum-wicket on her aunt’s patio.  The dusk hike was sublime enough to just let pictures tell the tale – here are a few key memories: The next morning, Jeevan at I walked her cousing Anuja to school.  School on a Sunday during American summer vacation is rough, but the campus she attends is pretty amazing.  New Era School was immoratilized in that Aamir Khan production, “Taare Zameen Paar”, with its multicolored amphitheater that overlooks the Krishna river valley serving as a prominent setting.  It’s a private Baha’i school, which is in itself interesting, but even more so for me were the monkeys we spied lounging around the building tops.  After parting, we walked back down the gravel roads of Panchgani past guest houses and even an abandoned estate that Jeevan said had been so since her youth (and was haunted, according to the local kids).  We had breakfast then left with Jeevan’s parents for nearby Mahabaleshwar, a neighboring village with a degree of significance to Hindus, as two temples to Shankar (Shiva) house respectively, the Siva Lingam and the mountain spring sources of the five rivers that flow into the valley below. The drive to the Siva temple was astounding.  After stopping in front of St. Peter’s School to fulfill my personal Freddie Bulsara pilgrimage (and though I could not get in past the gate this time, I sang ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ top myself as I snapped these pictures) – we passed over rough, barely two-lane country roads, with the valley to the left of the car for most of the way.  A waterfall plunging hundreds of meters was visible on the far side of the valley at one site.  We would not have the time to visit it, but Jeevan said it’s worth a return trip.  Once we got to the Siva site we were greeted in the parking area by a few loose (and calm, Hindu cows that wandered freely, waiting for handouts from devotees.  I shot a short film with my camera of the walk to the temple, where we removed our shoes to enter into the inner sanctum.  The place smelled strongly of incense.  It was damp and somewhat crowded with other worshipers, who lined up to touch the statue of the Brahmin cow that seemed to guard the entry to the chamber that housed the Siva Lingam.  The Lingam itself was floor-level, hewn from living rock pitted with evidence of eons-old volcanic activity, and damp with condensation.  Small lamps, various colored powders and offerings of money and sweets were placed on its surface, lending it an otherworldly appearance.  Near the entrance of the chamber was a strange looking contraption fitting with a pair of flywheels and bells, which inexplicably reminded me of Jeff Gretz’ story about the bubble machine from the Lawrence Welk show being housed at the Westin William Penn in Pittsburgh.  I knelt before the stone, paying obeisance to the God of my understanding, then walked out the way I came to join Jeevan and her mother.  They presented me with a small bag of coarse-grain sugar meant to be taken as a blessing after the experience.  Outside, I put my shoes back on while I talked with Jeevan’s father about Hinduism – as a philosophy, rather than a religion in the typical western sense.  Then it was time for some type of devotion, and I got to hear the weird bell device in action.  I didn’t head back inside to see, but Jeevan did.  It produced a hypnotic, whirring clang of a sound (to my obsessive ears, it sounded like a skipping copy of the first Einstuerzende Neubauten record) that echoed throughout the premises. After we left the Siva temple, we walked up a small footpath between some shops to the other temple on the ground where the springs were sheltered.  We entered again, barefoot, taking care not to slip on the slick stone floor.  The interior of this temple was lined with stone blocks, which created two immersion pools filled with clear, pure water from the spring.  Jeevan’s mother led us behind the first, rearmost pool, pointing out the sources, which bore letterings for each river – even though the spring water fed into a common trough before cascading into the pool.  Devotees bathed in the water and queued up on the black, wet stone to drink form the fountain.  After little prodding, I went up to drink from the spring, figuring that it was no more harmful than those I’d drank from before at Linn Run State park in Ligonier.  I will admit to trying to reassure myself that Lyme disease was some kind of a hoax, though, but to date no ill effects have ensued.  The water was indeed pure and cold, with a distinctive taste that can only come from having flown forth through natural minerals. We left the temple and headed back out to the parking lot, where a friendly cow followed me along to the car.  Jeevan said that it might have thought my green kurta was something good to eat, and she instead fed it with some of the carrot greens from the carrots we had purchased along with coal-roasted ears of corn on the cob.  As is customary, I touched its hindquarters for a blessing, and we were again off back to our accommodations.

That evening, Jeevan and I joined her friend Harish and his wife Payal for a drive up to one of the other points in Panchgani.  Payal is an aspiring fashion designer with a really cool name: It’s a Hindi word for the anklets worn by classical dancers, meant to convey a festive mood during performance.  She told us, as we dined again at Sunny’s on the way back, that her folks chose the name because she was such a happy baby.  The views on our drive up and down the sometimes treacherous track were breathtaking – have a look see for yourself. We reached Bombay after a long drive at close to 3 a.m. – making it the fourth such late night in a row for me and strenuously testing my faculties as a 34 year old ex-party destroyer.

Sleep came early, and the next week was spent getting down to business writing up an article on my last site visit in November, as I had been transcribing the recordings that I made of the trip to the RSGVP project in central Maharashtra state over the past week.  The monsoons finally kicked in regularly over this week too, which made for treacherous driving conditions and soggy butts for autorickshaw passengers too stubborn to tie down the side flaps at the first sign of rain (me). My celebrity encounter for this trip came at mid-week, when I attnended a birthday party for little Smera, held at Pappu and Rishita’s place.  Here I met Chin2 Bhosle – himself a singer and musician for India’s first boy band - Band of Boys.  His grandmother happens to be an absolute legend, a mega star, a national icon – Asha Bhosle, India’s siren of filmsongs for nearly 50 years.  If you’ve heard any Indian film music, you’ve very likely heard Asha Bhosle’s swooping voice.  And if you are like many newcomers to Indian film music, you likely either love it or can’t stand it.  Though Ashaji is possessed of a mellifluous lower register, the higher-register head voice that she and other female playback singers have traditionally used in this style of singing falls on some western ears as too shrill.  My esteemed colleague Dave from  (((microwaves))), himself a huge fan of Indian film music, once jokingly referred to Ashaji’s sister Lata Mangeshkar as “the icepick”.  And this is a from a guy known for making his guitar sound like an episode of Dr. Who.  So it’s indeed somewhat less of an acquired taste.  I’ve written about this lady’s work before and to meet her lineage, talented in his won right, was a righteous mindblow. So I was supposed to get together with these guys for a cookout/jam session on the following Saturday, but due to an unexpected bus trip to Pune, I had to pass.  The rest of the week, as I recall, was somewhat sedate.

As I’d mentioned above, we saw Hancock on Friday evening, following a nerve-wracking train ride in the wake of the blasts and a rickshaw ride through a torrential monsoon washout.  The movie was playing at yet another one of Mumbai’s new malls – this one was the most over-the-top in its opulence yet.  At the center of an amphitheater-like area, one of a grove of palm trees stretched up to nearly touch the ceiling of a glass-clad geodesic dome.  Three levels of stores fronted around this central area.  Same boring US products for same outrageous prices.  The most Indian thing about the place were the samosas that I got from the theater counter – and the fact that I had to go through a metal detector/bag inspection on the way in to the mall itself.  The theater held my camera under lock-and-key, even after I offered to surrender the batteries.  Odd.  I don’t think that the bootlegger market would be eager for crap-quality .avi footage of “Hancock.”

So I’ve just realized the criminal neglect inherent in the act of writing about malls and movies from my hotel room here in Cuttack, Orissa, by far one of the most lush, tropical paradise-like places I have visited in my life.  I will catch up on details of this visits soon.  The weekend that I was about to cover was spent in Pune and details shall be embargoed until a later date.  The subsequent week until my departure for Calcutta via the Howrah Mail Express was marked with some running around to prepare for my trip, lunch with a friend in Powai, a trip to a Planet M record store where I saw the unbelievable (again – Possessed’s “Seven Churches” and “Beyond the Gates” deluxe editions in the new- and hot-release section.  Someone tell these guys to get on a bill with Parikrama or even better yet, Kryptos or Rudra).  Sonic Youth’s “EVOL” was also a surprise sighting in their “Rock” bin.

The last-minute illness covered in my last missive came a day or two – if I can recall correctly – after a late-night incident at a Subway location in the Hirnandani complex that stands as the one and only time I have ever felt threatened in India.  I was standing in line, about to order a veg sub, when the heavier guy in front of me who had been mumbling to the guy behind the counter in slurred Hindi started becoming more and more abusive in his tone.  His buddy (one of four in the joint) came up for the door to placate him, but the guy wasn’t having it.  As Jeevan and I were the only other customers in the store, I began rushing thorugh the possibilities – would these goons, in their intoxication, turn on me as a foreigner, or on her as a female?  The dreadful potential of violence was beginning to coalesce, and I started getting really tense.  It got tenser.  After I’d ordered and was in line, the other guy rushed up to the counter and started on another drunk hindi/English tirade, asking the guy if he knew who his father was (???) and calling the guy a “stupid fuck.”   Finally, he swatted a stack of trays that was sitting on the counter, hurling them at the hapless sandwich artists.  Right about now I began to wonder what a night in an Indian jail would be like if I had to act swiftly with some extremely dirty fighting.  Luckily the guy finished my sandwich before anything was to happen, so I paid quickly and headed to the door.  The drunk kids paid us no mind.  “Assholes of the first order!” declared Jeevan, saying that they were probably just showing off because she was in the place.  Whether this was some show of Indian machismo or a similar manifestation of cultural dynamic was a mystery.  What was disturbing mostly is that it was in the context of a western-style restaurant.  All the more, it resembled the worst behavior possible from a bunch of idiotic American mall rats on a Friday night.  Fortunately, the goodwill of the majority is not spoiled by the frontin’ of a few.

I complain about Nescafe ruling the roost here in India. But a far greater ill doth lurk.

Café Coffee Day is an India-based chain of coffeeshops.  Its Vile Parle location is a landmark that Jeevan and I use when I meet her near her office.  We’ve been to CCD once, but to a different location.  I found the drinks OK, about the same quality I’d expect at a Sheetz back home.  They’d be popular in Pittsburgh if only because the sugar content is off the charts.
The peculiar thing about CCD and the other coffeeshops I’ve seen in India is that they aim to emulate chain coffee shops in the US, which themselves are aping the independently owned coffeehouses and coffeeshops where regulars congregated for more than just coffee, of course.  India had nothing like one of these western-style establishments, or even a neighborhood diner in the sense that Americans would recognize.  The closest analogy to an independently owned corner coffeeshop might be the roadside tea stall, usually open-air and not conducive to the kind of relaxation one might indulge in a western coffeeshop.  Again, I’m talking the locally owned, neighborhood shop with a loyal customer base.  Your Kiva Han or Beehive - not Starbucks or Caribou.
So these Café Coffee Days, Costas and Baristas are here in Mumbai, as disembodied phantoms of a sort; imperfect, mediated carbon copies of places and social phenomena that India had never known.  CCD publishes a magazine that celebrates the new coffee culture.  It includes profiles of actual CCD baristas, interviews with up-and-coming musicians, and other sundry trivia mostly touting its own product line.  The zeal with which it strives to identify coffee as India’s new elixir of hipsterdom is unsettling.  The big sell here is the image of coffee drinkers as somehow infinitely cooler and more cosmopolitan than the bhayyias slinging chai on the corners.  The tagline on all of CCD’s restaurant signs reads “A Lot can Happen over Coffee.”  With one of these joints in just about every Mumbai neighborhood – packed most of the time during business hours - it appears that a lot can happen under a relentless branding campaign, too. 
Sometimes it feels like metropolitan India is in such a tightly coiled state of cultural cringe that it will seize hold of any bit of ephemera from the west, no matter how tacky or throwaway.  I wish that instead, more would realize, celebrate and develop the richness of culture that is already here.