This is my second day in Mumbai, but I feel that it has been quite a bit longer. Had a very full day of seeing a full range of daily life from communal laundry washing in the slums to a very tony Jain temple ceremony in Malabar.
There is a T-shirt that I have seen being sold and worn here, which reads "Being Human." I could not think of a better slogan for what I have seen in Mumbai in the past 48 hours. This city literally embodies the entire range of the human experience within it's physical boundaries.
Here, you will find nearly all of the world's major religions represented in some way or another, and most of them both on a casual, quotidian basis, but also on a full-blown extremist level. Poverty levels that defy explanation, but it also the city from which the richest and most glamorous Indian upper crust hails. The streets are teeming and swarming with people, animals, vehicles, and trash everywhere. Next to an extremely expensive luxury-item boutique you will find an abandoned building with people sleeping on muddy heaps of refuge, or a cobbler's hut the size of a phone booth, with the cobbler inside, hammering away at homemade shoes. Shacks and lean-to's butt up against the Bentley showroom floor. Bankers are buying a Pani Puri's from men who return to the slums in the evenings.
I have tried to keep a small stash of 10 rupee bills handy as one is approached on a regular basis, one who looks like me that is. The experience of begging and alms giving is always difficult. On the one hand, you want to help everyone, but then, after several approaches to just me and avoiding all of the Indians for hand-outs, you begin to feel some very uncomfortable feelings. Uncomfortable because they begin to challenge yourself about how you feel about yourself.
The encounters I have had with begging and alms, both before and especially now, runs the gamut of sadness, despair, to hope and self-righteousness to guilty and shame to downright resentment and nearly anger. That is a pretty broad spectrum, but if you have been in the position as this, you may know what I mean. With some cases you feel an overwhelming sense of urgency, that you must help this person, but that feeling is replaced with despair at times because you know that tomorrow will be the same story, and the next day, and so on, with literally billions of people in that situation. Other times, I feel a sense of hope that, yes, I am making a difference, which can easily lead to smugness and false piety. But, other times, when I have just spent 10 dollars to go see the rock carvings at Elephanta, supposedly enriching my soul, and then I don't give every person I see just 10 rupees, I feel guilty or ashamed.
Finally, when at dinner, I was sitting outside, and a man "walked" by on all fours as his back legs were bandied out of commission, he caught my eye and proceeded to sit outside the railings of the restaurant, continuously asking for my attention while dozens of wealthy Indians passed by unflinchingly as well as two parking attendants sitting right next to him on their cell phones. But, I seemed to be the only one who was supposed to react and I had a feeling of resentment and even approximate anger, and yet I was spending a veritable fortune on this meal compared to what he and millions of others were asking for. It is a paralyzing feeling, and no poorly intended pun meant there, but it does leave you bewildered rather quickly.
I have tried to reach a happy medium by carrying the change around with me, but it never fails to prick, whether in a good way, or negatively. In addition, as I have walked a couple streets around the hotel, I recognize some of the "locals" on their beat and you seem the do the same spiel over and over, with apparent sincerity, until the mark's head is turned, and it just feels absurd at times.
But, it is the human drama and the human comedy all at once. Mumbai wraps that up and places that so-called "gift" of the present squarely in your face, wrapped in garbage and tied with a diamond-laced ribbon.
From what I have already seen, and I will be moving on southwards to my home-base of Madurai tomorrow morning, there is no place I have ever been where it is this impossible to ignore what it means "being human."
There is a T-shirt that I have seen being sold and worn here, which reads "Being Human." I could not think of a better slogan for what I have seen in Mumbai in the past 48 hours. This city literally embodies the entire range of the human experience within it's physical boundaries.
Here, you will find nearly all of the world's major religions represented in some way or another, and most of them both on a casual, quotidian basis, but also on a full-blown extremist level. Poverty levels that defy explanation, but it also the city from which the richest and most glamorous Indian upper crust hails. The streets are teeming and swarming with people, animals, vehicles, and trash everywhere. Next to an extremely expensive luxury-item boutique you will find an abandoned building with people sleeping on muddy heaps of refuge, or a cobbler's hut the size of a phone booth, with the cobbler inside, hammering away at homemade shoes. Shacks and lean-to's butt up against the Bentley showroom floor. Bankers are buying a Pani Puri's from men who return to the slums in the evenings.
I have tried to keep a small stash of 10 rupee bills handy as one is approached on a regular basis, one who looks like me that is. The experience of begging and alms giving is always difficult. On the one hand, you want to help everyone, but then, after several approaches to just me and avoiding all of the Indians for hand-outs, you begin to feel some very uncomfortable feelings. Uncomfortable because they begin to challenge yourself about how you feel about yourself.
The encounters I have had with begging and alms, both before and especially now, runs the gamut of sadness, despair, to hope and self-righteousness to guilty and shame to downright resentment and nearly anger. That is a pretty broad spectrum, but if you have been in the position as this, you may know what I mean. With some cases you feel an overwhelming sense of urgency, that you must help this person, but that feeling is replaced with despair at times because you know that tomorrow will be the same story, and the next day, and so on, with literally billions of people in that situation. Other times, I feel a sense of hope that, yes, I am making a difference, which can easily lead to smugness and false piety. But, other times, when I have just spent 10 dollars to go see the rock carvings at Elephanta, supposedly enriching my soul, and then I don't give every person I see just 10 rupees, I feel guilty or ashamed.
Finally, when at dinner, I was sitting outside, and a man "walked" by on all fours as his back legs were bandied out of commission, he caught my eye and proceeded to sit outside the railings of the restaurant, continuously asking for my attention while dozens of wealthy Indians passed by unflinchingly as well as two parking attendants sitting right next to him on their cell phones. But, I seemed to be the only one who was supposed to react and I had a feeling of resentment and even approximate anger, and yet I was spending a veritable fortune on this meal compared to what he and millions of others were asking for. It is a paralyzing feeling, and no poorly intended pun meant there, but it does leave you bewildered rather quickly.
I have tried to reach a happy medium by carrying the change around with me, but it never fails to prick, whether in a good way, or negatively. In addition, as I have walked a couple streets around the hotel, I recognize some of the "locals" on their beat and you seem the do the same spiel over and over, with apparent sincerity, until the mark's head is turned, and it just feels absurd at times.
But, it is the human drama and the human comedy all at once. Mumbai wraps that up and places that so-called "gift" of the present squarely in your face, wrapped in garbage and tied with a diamond-laced ribbon.
From what I have already seen, and I will be moving on southwards to my home-base of Madurai tomorrow morning, there is no place I have ever been where it is this impossible to ignore what it means "being human."
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