It has been 3 months since I moved to India, and I have no doubts that these have been the most intense months in my life. Every single day is so full of happenings, funny stories, lessons, misadventures, news, good and bad emotions. I could write a blog entry for every single day... but, since it's been so intense, I don`t have time anymore. Time.. time is something I never missed as much. I guess it means I have a cool exciting life, but I often wish I had more time to ponder and digest things... Those times in Bologna where I had days and days of nothing but thinking seem so far now...
One way to summarize what happened in the past 3 months is to go by PLACES. I have lived, worked and taken trips in several places and each one of them can tell a story about my new life in India. Let's start with the city where i leave, Mumbai, a "small" town of 20 million people, that feels more like a country than a city. These are the 3 most significant neighborhoods in my Mumbai experience. So here we go:
MUMBAI: BANDRA
This is my home now. It's one of the coolest neighborhoods in Mumbai, in the outskirts of the city but at the same time very central. This is where a lot of Bollywood stars live, there's a boardwalk, palm trees, a "potential beach", lots of cafes, restaurants, bars, gyms and shopping. My apartment is in the heart of Bandra, and I couldn't be happier about it. I love my house and I love my neighborhood, it makes me happy every time I come home from other parts of the city. The bad side is that when you live in Bandra, you forget about the fact that it is just a happy island that has everything you need, which you never feel the need to leave, and living there is a privilege that most of the people who live in Mumbai cannot afford. Foreigners usually come from countries with much stronger currencies that automatically give them the benefit of having a much higher purchasing power. So fancy Bandra is becoming the land of foreigners, where the prices for groceries are 10 times higher and the rent is extremely expensive.... but... surprise: there are other neighborhoods of the city that are even MORE expensive...
I have lots of memories in Bandra... from jogging in the morning on Carter Road, a beautiful promenade right by the ocean, .....to going to Hindi class at 7 in the morning, my teacher lives in a high-rise building right next to a small slum area, an island inside fancy Bandra, .....to my first night in India, when I went to an "expat party", with only Americans and Europeans and an environment that was exactly like one of those college party back in Berkeley and made me wonder where I was.. ....to the time I went and bought a small plant and some decorations to make it look like a Christmas tree... ..to all the dinners with friends in one of the many restaurants of the neighborhood, some cheap and good, other extremely overpriced.. ...to the funny adventures all around the place looking for "passata" to make pasta sauce, after realizing that here there is not really a difference between pasta sauce and ketchup.. ...to the never-boring rickshaw ride to the super-busy Bandra train station every morning to go to work, .....to the nice feeling of happiness that I get everynight when I finally get to Bandra after my long commute on the train...
I know Bandra is not India.. but I cannot deny that it makes it so much easier for me to live here.. and especially lately I appreciate it more and more every day.
MUMBAI: ANDHERI EAST
Thinking about it still gives me chills. It's another neighborhood in northern Mumbai and it's where my first job was. I have nothing specifically against Andheri East, really, but the only bad memories I have from India are basically all from there... :-). I don't want to list all of them, but the main one was something that probably affected my whole experience there: TRAFFIC. Traffic of cars, traffic of buses, traffic of pedestrians... I had no idea that so many people could do so many things and go to so many places all at the same time. If anybody still doesn't believe that our planet is overpopulated, they should probably spend 1 hour in Andheri East during commuting time.. I'm pretty sure they would change their mind. This is the place where I had my first crisis.. one day I left my office at 6:30 pm to go home. My ride home was usually made up of a 40 minutes rickshaw ride, a 30 minutes train ride and another 15 minutes rickshaw ride. That night I waited for a rickshaw for 30 minutes, how it works is that you stop one, if it's empty you tell the driver where to go and he takes you there: simple as that. Except ..NO! That day most rickshaws were taken, if any empty one stopped for me, some smart, fast and mean 14-year-old girl would steal it from me (yeah I know..), and when I finally got to talk to some driver, they were all telling me "NO" with an angry face..... I didn't understand.. it was getting late, and I was still hours away from home. So I tried to take a bus. The first bus was full, the second bus was full + 10 people hanging out of the doors, the third one was full + 10 people hanging out of the doors + people on the rooftop..... 30 minutes later.. I was hopeless... I thought I would never get home... but then: MIRACLE: an almost empty bus came! I quickly got on and I was so happy.... 5 minutes later there was smoke everywhere and the bus broke down in the middle of the road. As I got off like everybody else, I started to feel my first "I-wanna-go-home" moment ever. Something I had never felt before, even when I lived in California for 2.5 years, 9 time zones away from home. I had no idea what to do, I started walking towards the train station, aware of the fact that it would have taken me more than one hour just to reach it, and it was a pretty miserable walk. I was walking fast, pushing everybody and making my way through thousands of people doing all kinds of activity on the side of the road (there are no sideways). I felt angry, sad, disappointed in myself for not being able to adapt to this country. I remember thinking: "This is not the place for me. Who am I kidding? I cannot live here. I am just a spoiled European that needs his comforts all the time, I just need to go back home as soon as possible". I almost cried during that walk and I felt defeated, lost, and not worth anything.
I am thankful for that day, because it's what gave me the strength to change, to realize that I really didn't deserve to complain like a child, when there are millions of people in this city doing that every single day, and they don't get to complain, they just do it because they have to. So the day after I gathered all my courage and began my transformation (still far from being completed) into a MUMBAIKER! So in a few days I learned how to run for rickshaws, how to aggressively push people to get on the train, how to ride buses hanging out of the windows and how to be smarter than 14-year-old girls. Forget about kindness, forget about politeness, forget about good manners, it's a jungle. No, worse: it's rush hour in Mumbai.
MUMBAI: SOUTH MUMBAI/COLABA
or.. "The Rebirth". Colaba is the most famous neighborhood in Mumbai, the place where most of the important monuments are, and it's full of tourists every day of the year. It can be considered the "Center" of Mumbai and the prevalent British Gothic architecture makes it unique in India and in the world. It's my favorite part of Bombay, I love the huge, magnificent, gothic buildings, I love how much history you can feel everywhere, but, mostly, I love my new job. Our office is in the heart of Colaba, 10 minutes walk from the world-famous Gateway of India, and since I started working here my life has completely changed. The second day of work, at night, I remember walking towards the station after an exciting day in the office. It's a very cheap taxi ride, but I decided to walk to get to know the neighborhood. As I was strolling under the ancient porticoes, right next to the elegant old buildings of the University of Mumbai, noticing how surprisingly empty and peaceful this place becomes at night (something you really learn to appreciate when you live in Mumbai), for the very first time I came to the realization that I love Mumbai, and I love my life here. For the first time in years everything seems to be going exactly how I want it to. After I reached my biggest goal of going to Berkeley in 2008, I had a few years where I didn't know exactly what the next step was.. I didn't know what I wanted to do professionally, and my personal life pulled me in different directions.. But a miracle happened and now I have everything that I wanted at the same time. I had not felt this happy and content for a while... and realizing this, that night, was an extreme moment of happiness. I smiled. I was happy. I am happy.
