From A to B, to the sea

Mathematically, the shortest and most efficient distance between A and B is a straight line. 

Leisure-wise, the longer, quirkier, and more circuitous the line, especially if it happens to go through some interesting places, is the most fun. Like this round-trip... starting and ending at the same place, the Gateway of India... but going in a large, crazy circle around Mumbai Harbour. In a brand-new, state-of-the-art, racing-grade French sailboat. 

Some photos follow. 

It begins with the Gateway

And it's riotous carnival atmosphere

From where the intrepid sailors step forth.

Every class of technology coexists from this - 

to this...

to this. (Mukesbhai ni navi navdi it is)

Our ride - the Storm Rider, a 25-foot Beneteau sailboat

we outboard out of the crazy floating traffic jam

and it's time to race the wind!

easily outpacing our competition, 

we glide, whisper-silent, over the arabian sea

relaxing in the sun

under the able guidance of Abhishek, our captain

sky-watching

and taking control of the boat. 

we also learnt a bit about how modern sailing happens by watching R almost get whacked into the sea with the boom.

Ropes - the most critical part of the boat

then, as the evening wore on,

the sun dipped,

and the sky softened into evening colors

it was time to head home

back to the shore...

winding up with a Kasab's-eye-view of Mumbai.

The End.

More Monsoon Madness

Have you ever felt like putting on your shorts, taking your umbrella and a bucket of water, and going out into the pouring rain to wash your car?

Yeah, me too. I can barely stop myself, every time.

parel reservoir

hah! Bet you didn't know there even was one.

I didn't either, until I looked out of the window from the pantry earlier... HR has issued instructions that owing to the expensiveness of the carpets, potentially drip-able coffee cups are not allowed to be taken into the cubicle area.

Actually dripping employees walking in are not subject to the same restrictions, unfortunately.

Anyway, here it is, in glorious cinemascopic panavision 3-d whateveryoucallit.

A Monsoon Blogging

They've started, and baby, they have started wee-ith ishtyle! This will be the first of a series of Rains in the City posts... Bombay becomes a world apart in wet weather.

I am already keeping a change in the office and wading to work in sandals. The AC, as always, remains intractable; here's how it would behave in summer. What it does when the temperature drops, and people are damp or wet and already sniffling... your guess, as good as mine.



Floods, storms, and awesome landscapes and images I never get elsewhere. Life is good and getting better.

the heat is on

summer's here.

The sky's turning this vivid blue you get only peak summers - in Lucknow and Allahabad. Or an airplane window. What happened to the smog? I need some sun cover, man.
Even the clouds have this slightly dreamlike hard blazing whiteness - haven't seen this color for a while. It's going to be a tough summer. Already too hot to even sleep in the trains.

Scenes and the City, Episode IV

A Recharge Station with a difference. Not for your phone, but you - Mumbai's world-famous cutting chai, being completely honest to itself.

Ahhh... nothing like a hot shot of superstrong, superhot, made-all-day tea to perk you up.

Scenes and the City, Episode Two

The train.

Ubiquitous, inescapable, inevitable, essential, infamous, embracing, pervasive... Mumbai is the local. The local is Mumbai. Books have been written on them, movies made, songs sung... as long as you're in Mumbai, you're in the train. One way or another. You'll travel in them, close deals, make plans, dream, sleep, make friends, meet that one person you've been searching for all your life, come face-to-face with your worst enemy, risk your life hanging literally by your fingertips, experience that sublime relaxation of the corner window facing direction in the shade... you'll go for treks, you'll make friends, cut vegetables, pray, sing, play music, listen to music, read, sleep, dream, sometimes even take a dump, argue, chat... you won't escape. Not them, never. They're as much your life as the clothes you wear.

It begins like a wildebeest migration on the Serengeti, when over a million bodies pass through one narrow pass every hour, not seeing, not thinking, just one giant mindless swarm, a herd, moving forward, upward, all conscious thought suspended in the great hivemind awareness of simple movement... Mumbai gets up and goes to it's trains.

Squeezed in like... like commuters in a Mumbai local (there really is no analogy that doesn't fall short of reality, except maybe neutron-star matter), you realize that the only difference between first and second class is that in first class, the sweat lets you identify the soap used in the morning. In second, you identify how many days ago any soap had been used.

The art of reading a newspaper in the crowd - how precisely to fold the broadsheet so that pages can be turned, quickly, efficiently, with minimal movement, minimal space occupation and minimal pokes in the eyes of fellow passengers. It's an art, it's the Local Origami that's far more challenging than it's namesake.

Time and place has no meaning in a local - all laws are suspended. So what if a few minutes a go, you had an air-conditioned office, a desk, everything. Now is when you have the Idea; and now is when you close the deal.


The ancient signboards have developed a code all of their own, one that baffles - hopelessly - the first time traveler. or even one who may have been on it for years. A code that changes with time and place, with train and direction. Green stripes or red stripes? After 7:30 or after 9? Am I carrying a large suitcase? How large is too large and has to go into th Luggage? Where is the Luggage? What is C - Churchgate, Kalyan, or Karjat? What's the difference between Neral and Nerul? Why do I see new stations every few months? What is 'return'? What is a 'starting' train, and why does it pull in pre-loaded with passengers already in the best seats? What is AD, A, K, C, T, TI, VA, V, B, and BY? How does a person balance 70 kgs on 4 fingers for 45 minutes?

Quoted from Local, by Amitava Ghosh, I think - Mumbai is the only city where you have three classes of friends - work, home, and train. People you meet only by a shared coincidence of time and destination, that grows into lifelong friendships - in the train only. Biggest example, the card clubs. 3-4 packs combined into one giant deck, a briefcase balanced carefully on 4 independent knees, and staying rock-solid despite crowds, the push and the shove, the sway and the jerk... one industrial-strength rubber band holding the loose cards down, one scorekeeper with a tiny notebook / scratchpad / ancient scroll keeping score of games that may have lasted for years, in 45-minute intervals each.

And in the late nights, when the last train leaves, and the coaches are empty, and the train is an oasis of light, silence and stability in the middle of roaring, windy, heaving darkness outside, the train is the witness to some of life's greatest aspirations - and also expressions of shattered dreams, broken hearts, dashed hopes, and the heart's last lonely cry in the end, poured out through a sketchpen onto the walls on the one thing that's remained constant through ll the upheavals. You'll find, scrawled on the walls - poetry, obscenity, cries for help, suicide notes, come-hither messages...

'I said... I will always love you, S... till the end of the world...'

Scenes and The City, Episode 1

Midnight coffee

If you're driving around late at night, especially if you're dog-tired, sleep-deprived, drunk, depressed, nicotine-starved, and/or all of the above, look out for these bikes close to the junctions in the suburbs - a late-night pick-me-up system that's so Mumbai. A cycle, with a steel canister of hot milk strapped to it, a packet of plastic cups, a bag of assorted cigarettes, and one enterprising enterpreneur.

It's quiet, apart from the occasional post-party car roaring past in high spirits; everything's the black and orange of the sodium lights, except for the blues and greens of backlit signboards standing out in stark relief from this silent, sepia world; and a small group of people, usually lone bikers, auto drivers on their last ride home for the night, and sometimes post-party teens crammed into an Alto like Fryums.

The whisk of Nescafe & sugar into the cup, milk bubbling into another, and the quick cup-to-cup pour that's a cooler, mixer, and foamer all rolled into one... then lean back against your vehicle, and have that first taste of a piping hot coffee or Boost, take a cig from this one source when all the paanwaalas are closed, light, drag, savour.

Watch out for cost cuts, though. This guy tonight flicked out a Milds from the pack with awesome elan, spun it over his fingers with a flourish, and promptly dropped it into the muck at his feet. Not missing a beat, with complete customer-centric focused businessman repeated the gesture with a fresh cig; and immediately after the dropped cig was retrieved and shoved right back into the pack in front of your horrified eyes, without as much as a wipe or dust-off.

Caveat emptor.

Let the buyer beware.

taste of rain

What's the name for that kind of rain that comes as a fine drizzle, so fine it's weightless, a fog in the air but still dense enough that if you breathe it, it's like the smell of drowning?

I experienced that today, finally.

With due deference and credit to Mr. Gump -

Stinging rain, scrunching your face into hard little knots.

Sheets of gusting rain, knocking you sideways off the bike.

Fat drops from the trees.

Fine spray from the vehicles in front of you.

Flat horizontal sloshes from those around you.

Coldness that trickles into your belly when the jacket finally gives up and lets the water through.

That wet tang running off your lip, onto your tongue.

Vertical opaque sheets of white.

Hissing, drumming, roaring, gusting, splashing, dripping, pattering, tinkling, white noise.

Forearms aching from the deathgrip on the clutch and brake, knuckles numb.

Suddenly growing wings like a water-angel every time you pass through a puddle.

Smeary red glows on black asphalt.

Glittering double columns of silver needles, swishing by in the adjacent lane. Cars don't exist anymore. They're invisible, seen only by their signature on the rain-radar.

I like biking in the rain.

Borivili National Park

First of the season, starting small. Borivali National Park. Everyone's backyard. But it's surprising how few people have the time to even visit their own backyards... BNP had always been a kind of ya, it's right there, I'll just drive over and drop in one day, kind of feeling... until six long years have passed by, and all I know of BNP is the sight of the hills rising above the buildings every morning when I'm crossing the overbridge to get to the train, or the green expanse when I'm looking down as the plane enters the final glide down to the runway... It's 104 square km of parkland, right inside the city. At any time, you're never more than 5 km away from the busiest stations - Borivali on the west, Mulund on the east. All around, the city, crawling, teeming with humanity like ants, the Great Unwashed Masses of India, hurrying, scurrying, worrying. Cross a gate, pay 15 bucks, and suddenly you're in a different universe.

We start at 7:30 am, collecting at the entrance. There's already two groups getting ready to go in that look like organized tours - thirty children in one (I'm pretty sure that's not a family outing, not even if the dad was the minister for railways) and a normal trekker-type group.
22 of us pile into 4 cars and reach the parking spot at Kanheri inside, where we reassemble and get ready. D takes the opportunity to market the new ponchos acquired by Nature Knights - hooded rubber / plastic sheets that button under your arms to make an effective shield against windblown rain. I liked it because it's as effective, and definitely a lot easier on your conscience than a 2,999 jacket from Westside, which should ideally be used only to impress women. Subjecting it - or, for that matter, anything - to a full-blown Mumbai monsoon tends to, um, reduce it's lifespan significantly.


Kanheri's a complex of old Buddhist caves; the place used to be a settlement, and served as an inn for travellers visiting the ancient twin ports of Sopara and Kalyan. Kanheri is a derivation from Krishnagiri, or 'Black Mountain'. And black it is - the same dark volcanic rock that's spread across the whole of the Sahyadris thrusts itself up in a 400-m hillock over here, and Kanheri caves are the part of the exposed outcropping that's been shaped and carved into a rock village of 109 spartan stone cells, and elaborate chaityas and viharas.


I'd like to spend some more time here - preferably on a weekday when it won't be so crowded - just trying to reconstruct how it must have been like, back then, living here. Under the Maurya and Kushan empires, this place was a full-scale Buddhist University.


Now you have another essential and unavoidable part of any modern Indian university, large groups of noisy, boisterous and rowdy students of another kind - a troop of rhesus monkeys has taken over the spot, and lives happily off the tourists.

Does this guy have my ears? Everyone keeps saying that

They gave us the once-over when we walked in, and pretty much then ignored us - we must have been looking not worth the trouble. Or maybe just impoverished of food, compared to the chips-packet-carrying and fruit-laden tourists who come normally. All that changed when we bought some cut cucumber for breakfast. Unerringly, the monkeys picked out the youngest member of the group - S, who stood not much larger than a full-grown monkey himself - and headed straight for him, producing alarmed cries of help and Mummy! from the intended victim before they were chased off.

Blessed by the Buddha with the Gift of Bright Sunshine, we started walking up, and almost immediately found the first wildlife of the day - a Russel viper that N almost stepped on.

Next was a group of giant bullfrogs in a small stagnant pool, each almost the size of my foot and twice as fat. I remember we used to have the same frogs in the pond at home back in Gorakhpur... so extraordinarily ugly, they're beautiful. Check out this one. Full redeye effect in the flash, which makes it look like an ancient dragon where the fire within it is flickering in it's eyes. Or some hellbeast out of Spawn 2.


Stopped for a second breakfast at a ruined building called Gaumukh, from the carved cow's head inside from where drinkable water is filtered through. Found a couple of perfectly-preserved husks of the skins shed by dragonfly larvae when they hatch. Dragonfly nymphs are voracious predators in ponds, killing and eating insects and fish many times larger than themselves. These must have been monsters when they were around - over an inch and a half each.

The rest of the trek was fairly peaceful; some relaxation, some walking, and finally we reached Bombay's highest point, called simply 'Radar' after the military radar there. Don't go walking in without permission; because it's a military installation, if caught, you can chucked into jail on a non-bailable charge before you know what's hit you. Actually, the highest point is the top of the radar; but if you climb up there just to prove that you're the highest in Bombay, the military has every right to shoot you down there and then, on principle.

We also acquired our mascot of the day, Ronnie. Ronnie is an adolescent Indian peacock, he lives in Borivali National Park, has an affectionate and companiable nature, and will love to keep you company the next time you visit. He's also an insufferable ham, and loves having his photos taken, often posing and giving you the full supermodel-to-the-paparazzi treatment. By next year, he should have his full tail grown out, too.

Anyway, we met Ronnie at the radar and he became and instant, inseparable, non-paying member of Nature Knights, accompanying us all over the park from there onwards, sharing food, curling up and going to sleep when we rested, and generally being more domestic murgi than peacock.

Radar's also got one unique feature apart from being the highest point of Bombay - from here, you can look out and see the 3 lakes of Powai in one line, the only place in Bombay where this is visible. I feel sorry for the People of Powai; no human being trying to live his life should have to deal with the kind of terrors that are faced daily by the average Powai resident. Domestic help and children get rudely assaulted and eaten by panthers and leopards coming out of the lake; vehicular traffic gets regularly stopped by crocodiles emerging from the lakes; the BMC digs up the JV Link road catastrophically just before each monsoon and puts up boards asking you to bear with them today for a happier tomorrow; Bollywood shoots action sequences and love songs in your only market; and to top it all, you have IIT students roaming around freely. If Hell were designed by Hiranandani builders, it would probably be a lot like this.

Spent the afternoon putting up and practicing on a Burma Bridge, which is two ropes about 5 feet apart (vertically) which you're supposed to walk across.

Found a giant land crab that swore horribly at us in crustacean and waved it's claws around threateningly when we picked it up, and some species of gecko that emerged from under our sheet. Ate poha, shira, mutton sandwiches, idlis, chapattis, laddoos, puri, veg, fried rice, vada, boiled eggs, and biscuits. I don't think we carry enough food on these treks... need more variety.


Walked back to Kanheri by evening, and spent some time there watching the effect that Ronnie had on the monkeys and a small psychotic spitz pup that looked like Albert Einstein.

The monkeys pretty much ignored him, and went back to picking stuff out of each other's butts; Einstein went hysterical, though, and viciously attacked a plastic bottle, a packet of chicken feet that he scattered everywhere amidst shrieks of disgust, and finally chased Ronnie way up on the side of the mountain. Finally Ronnie gave a long-suffering sigh, and flew off the cliff face onto a quieter location, and watched the pup, who now had the extremely embarrassed expression of someone who not only can't fly, but has also lost his nerve and doesn't know how to climb down either.

The evening ended with my bike getting towed for illegal parking. I had accidentally parked it in front of the traffic police chowki... that must have been the easiest two hundred bucks the Mumbai Traffic Police ever made.

---

See the Photos here.

---

Very Important Update - It appears that, in the light of recently released top-secret photographs, Ronnie was after all a peahen, not a peacock. The author apologizes for any misinformation and hurting the sentiments of the PeaPerson Gender Identity Preservation Society.