Mumbai

Mumbai
is just as I remembered it – big, beautiful, hot, harassing, charming, chaotic. The water, the trees, the bougainvillea!! The street urchins, the vendors, the traffic! We stayed just two days there, long enough to go to the Mahalakshmi Temple, the Chor Bazaar (the famous Thieves Market) India Gate and the playa. I mean the beach. Chowpatty to be specific. We didn’t really GO to the beach, mind you, but it looked lovely from the taxi window as we passed it.

Adam reconnected with some business contacts, we saw some beautiful pieces of art, crashed the Taj Hotel, met up with a friend for lunch at the famous Leopold’s Café (big hangout for foreigners in the traveller-heavy Calaba district) began our search for the world’s best lassi and shot tons of video – I was a kid in a candy store, video-wise! Landing in Mumbai, it was immediately apparent that the question was not WHAT to shoot, but when to STOP shooting. Everything looked amazing! Strange! Beautiful! Different than anything we’re used to back home!

It was hot, but nothing like my last visit (April and May – ayiyi! Even the Indians complain about the heat and flee to the North if they can.) We didn’t sleep much, but were in good spirits as we explored and acclimatized. Our first experiences with technical difficulties began immediately, as we discovered our biggest problem was NOT difficulty filming people, as we’d thought (Indians, almost to a person, LOVE to be filmed, I’ve discovered) but electricity vs. electronics. Unfortunately for us, electricity won almost every round that first week. Oh sure, we’d brought adaptors and surge protectors – but we’d failed to realize that a) the power goes out randomly and often, all over India and 2) the wiring in most buildings is neither contemporary (by which I mean, of the last 80 years) or to code. If there is a code, which seems unlikely, now that I’m here. Plugging our electronics into the wall meant possible damage each time the power surged, went out, flickered or sometimes...just because. Inserting the surge protectors into the wall blew the circuits in our part of the hotel each and every time. Mind you, that is without plugging any electronics into them. Just the units on their own would do it. Sometimes the pop was so big the little surge protectors were smoking. The plugs were fried and etched from the battle. Hotel workers came to fix the circuits, but couldn’t do anything about the wiring. They looked at our electronics and smiled politely with the classic Indian head bobble. It’s hard to describe if you haven’t seen it – sort of a side-to-side head wobble – neither a nod nor a no, it’s vague and essentially meaningless, which is really the beautiful thing about it. And everyone does it. All the time. You can see a great example of it in this video – look for the guy unwinding wire in the Chor Bazaar – classic!

Frustrated, but not beaten, we took a night flight to Delhi on Wednesday February 27, arriving in the tourist ghetto of Paharganj at 1am. Although Adam’s first choice (the Cottage Yes Please! Yes, that is the name!) was full, as were most other hotels along the main bazaar, we found a nice spot at the Metropolis, where we stayed for two nights, blowing more circuits and befriending the hotel electrician (ah! Improvement!).

Here we thought we’d gotten the electricity thing dialed, and I joyfully neared completion on the first video webcast – 3 days behind, but better late than never! - when we experienced the first of several Delhi daily power outtages. Unfortunately, I’d chosen to use iMovie, rather than my usual FinalCut, because it’d been recommended to me (by someone who’d clearly never tried to use it in India) as it was “so easy! So simple! Perfect for quick podcasting!” I learend the hard way that this sweet, simple program just isn’t sophisticated enough for these conditions, as each time the power went out, the hard drive went down and we lost EVERYTHING. In FinalCut of course it’s non-destructive editing, so whatever you’re working on is still there when the power comes back on. Bummer! I started over from scratch several times before I found out that the power goes out in Delhi every day for four hours, but you never know when and the hours aren’t necessarily consecutive! I also got a closer look at some of the wiring – it’s a Robert Crumb heaven out there, with wads of wires wrapped around each other, poles, tree branches, potted plants, hanging signs and anything else that might be close by. I couldn’t help myself and shot some some video which gives you an idea of what India’s electrical situation is like. Video coming...