Month: March 2018

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Mumbai’s Rhythms, Human and Bovine

Mumbai, or Bombay for old timers, is India’s version of the Big Apple, heir to a still visible Victorian legacy juxtaposed with eternal Indian ingenuity. One can almost touch the pulsating energy in its air, thick with ambition and enterprise. This is a city that never sleeps, with Bollywood for a glittering dream machine. The city is also synonymous with big Indian business, having played home to the legendary Jamshedji Tata, whose vision bequeathed to India its very first modern industrial empire.

I’ve often wondered what makes Mumbai tick, the city’s secret sauce, so to speak, that sustains all of its tremendous bustle and activity. The city bucks the stereotype of the average Indian metropolis, and is perhaps, in many ways, a closer cousin to Tokyo. Just as Japan is culturally the most Westernized of all Asian countries, Mumbai is the most Westernized among India’s cities. There’s a clockwork precision to Tokyo that Mumbai tries to emulate, and fairly successfully at that. For Mumbai, far more than the rest of India’s cities, thrives on a remarkable orderliness.

Take queuing for instance, something one might take for granted in the West. Most of India would prefer a non-linear approach to get ahead with life in general. The Indian mindset is smartly endowed to figure out the shortest path through any and every situation. Mumbai, by contrast, queues up for just about everything.

The lifeline of Mumbai is its suburban rail network, which like Tokyo’s, is one of the world’s busiest, transporting millions of people day in and out with relentless efficiency. Mumbai’s rail network, with all of the feeder systems that support it, does a stellar job of keeping the whole city on the move with a palpable rhythm.

The exception to orderly queueing, curiously, is for the actual suburban train ride itself, which can demand an act of genuine acrobatic dexterity to board and exit. Rest assured, however, that this is for good reason, and there is a still a certain knack to the process, which requires positioning oneself strategically to ride with the crowd’s momentum. Embarking and exit is then simply a matter of being swept in and swept out with the tidal surge of humanity. For coaches with crowds packed like sardines, this system works far superior to queueing.

Once on board though, you will find that that order settles in rapidly. If you rode in the same coach on the same local train every day, you might notice the same straphangers occupying the same spots, as if theirs by right. Not surprisingly, a lively community bond ensues, forged by this daily commute. Such bonds have lasted, in many cases, through entire working lives of 30 years and more.

Once the frenzy of the morning rush hour subsides, it’s prime time for Mumbai’s dabbawallas to swing into action. The dabbawallas operate a meal delivery system that can justifiably be called Mumbai’s pride. Their noble enterprise delivers hot lunches from homes to offices every working day. Hundreds of thousands of dabbas, or lunchboxes, make their way from people’s homes to their offices, picked up late morning to be returned early afternoon. Come rain or shine, hosts of clanging dabbas can be seen on bicycles or transferring on to the local trains, ferried by the intrepid fleet of dabbawallas.

Notwithstanding the humongous scale of operation, instances of mismatches or missed deliveries are exceedingly rare. The reliability of the century old system of the dabbawallas continues to confound modern day pundits of logistics. Many an aspiring Silicon Valley food delivery startup can take a leaf out of the dabbawallas’ book, and they have been the subject of several business school case studies.

Many of the dabbawallas are barely literate, and the stipend for their tireless efforts is hardly enough to make ends meet. Yet, they bring to their job a proud and passionate work ethic, and an almost religious sense of mission. A scriptural simile is appropriate here. Just as in a herd of a thousand cows, a calf unerringly finds its own mother, Mumbai’s wonderful dabbawallas ensure that each dabba finds its exact owner to bring them nourishment from home.

Speaking of cows, this is where Mumbai gets truly interesting. Humans and cows have coexisted happily for millennia in a rural and pastoral setting, with cows free to roam and graze. City cows in India though are a stressed and challenged lot, uprooted as they are from their carefree natural environs and having to contend with the dangers of modern traffic. Bombay’s cows are however champions of the game, with street smarts to surpass even their human cousins. In this respect, the cows of Ghatkopar, a Central Bombay suburb, must take honors for a most impressive spectacle of bovine order.

The rail tracks in Bombay, running through its suburbs, are for the most part unfenced, and several people tempt fate daily as they cross over from one side to another. The rail stations on the network, of course, have pedestrian overbridges and subways to cross over safely. For example, if you needed to cross over from one side of Ghatkopar to the other as a pedestrian, the rail station at Ghatkopar is one place to do so, and thousands of pedestrians use its overbridge daily.

As you enter the station to cross over the bridge, though, be not surprised if you find yourself in the company of cows coming and going freely in either direction. These are Bombay cows, and like the human residents of the city, busy and hard pressed for time, and difficult to schedule appointments with even if you tried. Yet, unlike some of their foolhardy human brethren, no cow crosses the actual rail track, always using the pedestrian bridge instead. Cows and bulls routinely make their entrance, to climb up the ramp, saunter across and come down on the other side with nonchalant ease and familiarity. There’s no one to point or direct, but every cow conducts itself perfectly as if following the signs.

Swishing their tails about to keep away the ever pesky flies, the cows of Ghatkopar have crossed in this manner for generations. It is a curious sight indeed, especially in the rains, to watch a seamless crowd of humans and cows, coats and tails, horns and umbrellas, marching in jolly stride. Bipeds and quadrupeds might even exchange notes as they go about their daily commute. Rumor has it that savvy stockbrokers in the crowd interpret bull language for trading tips on the bourses.

Monsoon rains can sometimes make it challenging, especially for inexperienced calves, to find their footing on the wet and slippery ramps. Some of them choose to therefore make a speedy and carefree descent, where even the burliest of human commuters must make way with alacrity. A little monsoon fun is always in order.

All told though. Mumbai’s cows are probably the smartest of city cows anywhere, with a discipline that would do humans proud. Bovines and humans share a most easy and familiar bonhomie as they go about their respective daily business. This forever funny spectacle has to place Mumbai in a league all its own.

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Soul Déjà vu

In the everyday course of life, our experiences can range from the comfortable and mundane, to the challenging, to the startlingly new. For children, of course, all of life is an exotic discovery, starting with the surroundings of home and family, to every new and enticing color, flavor, sound and sensation. With time, the freshness will fade to make way for the familiar, but perhaps never completely so…for even if things stay the same on the outside, our view of the world evolves, and we see it through ever changing lenses.

Somewhere along this stream of life’s interactions, most, if not all of us, might have at some time or other encountered an experience of déjà vu. Seemingly new situations on the surface, something about these déjà vu occurrences feels uncannily, even overwhelmingly familiar. As  a déjà vu situation unfolds, one feels like the past has vividly stepped into the present, resonating and triggering recall from distant archives of memory.

You happen to visit a place for the first time, and it feels like you are simply rediscovering environs you have known before. As a kid growing up in Chennai, I had heard of Mumbai and its famous Marine Drive. When I did visit this lovely beachside promenade for the very first time, everything about the place felt like I’d been there already.

Similar was an occurrence later in life when I first moved to New York City. As I hopped off the Manhattan subway into the bustling beehive of activity that is Canal Street, the sights and sounds and the overall ambience impressed upon me the very definite conviction of having been there before.

My very first Sanskrit class in primary school had a situation which in hindsight seems a little curious. Something about the teacher and learning a new language felt very naturally familiar, and got me all eager and attentive. At one point, the teacher paused to ask the class the word (in Sanskrit) for ‘I’. Though not consciously having heard of the word before, I fairly jumped out of my seat to answer ‘Aham’, as if by spontaneous recall.

I’ve often wondered what triggers this phenomenon of déjà vu, and from where it might bubble up. For a start, let us consider a fairly common ‘new’ situation, as happens when we shift residence to new surroundings, or start work at a new place. In the first few days the landscape is pretty unfamiliar, and we have to navigate our way around quite consciously as we try get accustomed to the environs. At some point though, the place becomes ‘known’ territory, and we slip into auto pilot mode and merge in with the surroundings.

There is one explanation for this shift from ‘new’ to ‘familiar’ which I’ve come across. It builds on the fact that each of us carries a unique vibrational imprint which we exchange with our surroundings. As these energetic impressions from us accumulate over a few days in the new place, the place gradually becomes less alien, as there’s enough of our own imprints now in the environment, to welcome and make us feel ‘at home’.

This explanation is indeed quite intriguing. If we extrapolated this hypothesis, with the possibility that some of these imprints persist long enough, perhaps to even carry across lifetimes, we might just have found a metaphysical explanation for déjà vu.

Generally speaking, déjà vu occurrences are specific to the individual. There is also however déjà vu that happens on grander scale, as is the case with places of sacred geography. People have taken a holy dip in the Ganges and other sacred rivers and lakes since time immemorial. One can imagine the collective vibration of humanity from ages past, waiting to greet everyone who visits these sacred waters today, with a crystalline flow of blessings. That collective vibration could well have included our own.

Likewise for the solitude of pristine nature, which is imbued with the vibrations of saints and mystics and angels that resonate with the harmonious vibrations of our higher nature. The high Himalayan ranges and open spaces of Tibet can thus be teeming natural hotspots for déjà vu, as those fortunate to have soaked in the vibrations of these magical places will heartily attest to.

I also think of the déjà vu of legend. Whoever heard the music of Krishna’s flute was transported by an ineffable sweetness. Whoever might hear such music today is transported similarly to the sweet pastoral Vrindavan of the mind.

Perhaps the ultimate déjà vu is afforded by the inward journey of meditation. Mystics through the ages have made the extraordinary inner journey of penetrating through the veils of personality, to gaze upon their innermost being. With one voice as it were, they speak of this vision as the supreme homecoming. In a sense, this place is wholly foreign and uncharted, as there is nothing so perfectly hidden from us as our very own nature. But once glimpsed, even if fleetingly, they who have dwelt in this grandest déjà vu of all have called it the most intimately familiar place in the universe.