Last Stop: Mumbai

Since my flight home is leaving from Mumbai, I decided to stay in Colaba for a few days. I didn’t quite know what to expect so here are a few pictures from my adventures.

The architecture is quite diverse, from colonial to art deco to modern:

Fishers mural

I really liked the food, some really nice South Indian like fancy dosa, also great kebabs and especially the for of the Parsi Cafe’s. The Parsi are descendants of refugees from today’s Iran and maintain their own distinct culture. And of course street food is king! Sorry, not a lot of pictures, I’m not into taking pictures of my food. Unless it’s a super fancy special dosa with the sprinkles 🙂

Mumbai has a lot of distinct communities like the fishers (Kohlis), the laundry community (Dhoba), etc. They are essentially distinct castes that stay amongst themselves (settling disputes, marry).

Dhobi Ghat: They collect dirty laundry from private people and hotels and clean and iron them to return next day. They have a very intricate system so the clothes get returned to their original owners.

Dabawala: This group picks up home cooked lunch in the suburbs (by the housewives), brings the containers to a distribution place near the train station and then delivers the correct lunch boxes to their husbands for lunch in the office. Then they collect the empty containers and return them. They do this through a few codes written on the containers. Harvard has been studying their effective system but it’s still not quite clear how they do it.

I wasn’t planning on visiting a slum. It just didn’t feel right to walk in and look at poor people. But I met a guy who worked as a guide and he convinced me otherwise, to see the “real Mumbai”. It was a little weird but I’m also glad I went to see this side of India. People were quite nice and the guide understood that I wanted this to be as little intrusive as possible. My visit reminded me how fortunate I am being born to a middle class family in Germany with all the opportunities.

Dharavi is massive, divided in different work sections like recycling, pottery, leather etc. Each their own microcosm. I was particularly fascinated by the recycling “caste”. Everything in Mumbai that gets thrown away lands here where it either gets repaired or broken down for recycling. Remaining trash like plastic bags (which are technically banned) will go on a landfill. The movie slum dog millionaire was filmed here and people say it’s pretty accurate.