Bombay!

By Niyantha Shekar 10 December 2007 135 views No Comment

Niyantha Shekar, originally from Chennai in India, made a spontaneous decision (for once) and decided to check out Bombay during the Summer of 07.

I was feeling terribly bored at home, so I decided to head out to Bombay because I had a couple of friends from college there, and from what I’d heard Bombay was ‘the place to be’. My knowledge about Bombay was restricted to the places that Gregory David Roberts had mentioned in his book, ‘ Shantaram’ *. So when the friend whom I stayed with in Bombay asked me where I wanted to go, I just gave him my well practiced ‘I don’t know’ shrug. It was a good thing I did, because he gave me a tour of Bombay that no paid guide could have given.

Nariman Point

Gateway of India

It wasn’t the ‘And here is the Gateway of India … and if you look to your right, you will see Amitabh Bachchan’s** house’ kind of tour. I walked through the streets of Bombay , went on a crowded train from Churchgate to Bandra***, took a stinky cab at 1 in the night, and sat facing Nariman Point completely oblivious to the hustle and bustle right behind me. I saw cab drivers swear at each other with comfortable ease, people running into a train which was taking a longer route just to catch a seat (and when they couldn’t, making a seated person move further in so that there was some piece of wood to sit on), prostitutes standing on a bridge with their pimps inviting customers and of course foreigners drinking away in Cafe Leopold’s just like G.D. Roberts wrote in Shantaram. I saw tall sky scrapers and multiple sky lines, stock brokers running around Dalal Street (the Wall Street of India ), box-sized restaurants serving brilliant food and an hour’s rain bringing traffic to a standstill. I took a turn at a posh colony and arrived at a neighborhood that had no resemblance to the tall buildings and fancy shops that were present just a few feet away.

But more than anything else, I saw people who were always on the move, wearing their emotions on their sleeves, and that is what made Bombay fascinating to me - watching people go about their business at a pace that was tough to keep up with.

The Bombay Stock Exchange

View from Worli Sea Face

The trip to Bombay made me realize how lazy I’d been when it came to observing my surroundings. I had never taken the time to explore my own city, and every city has something extraordinary about it. Experiencing Bombay as a citizen, rather than as a tourist, was brilliant. I did go to the tourist hot spots like everyone else, but I also understood how the common man lives. It is the people that make a place fascinating and Bombay certainly has an abundance of that. It was the highlight of my summer.

* To learn more about Shantaram, visit: http://www.shantaram.com/

** A famous Indian actor

*** Churchgate and Bandra are suburbs in Bombay