Category Archives: Mumbai

It’s Raining, It’s Pouring…

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When it rains in the mornings, just when the students go to school and office drones go to work, the resulting jams are exactly like what happened today. This morning it started to rain around 6 am and by 7 am the jams outside the primary schools near my house needed to be seen to believed! There is a school just next to our building and it took us almost 10 minutes to just get out of the carpark and into the road. Next jam area was the one near GG & BB’s school and by the time I was dropped at my busstop, I was ready to call it a day (not that I need many excuses, if you have read my previous posts)

The initial bus ride was not bad considering the traffic earlier, but there was this hug traffic jam at the Whitley Road exit and then another major snarl near the Clark Quay MRT station and this meant I reached work around 15 minutes later than usual. Luckily I have a Skype meeting with someone around the time I normally leave so can make up the late entry.

During my commute I got thinking about the rains in Mumbai, especially during the time when I was in school. Nowadays it does not rain as much as it used to rain some 20 – 25 years back (Aagh! now I’ve given away my age!). Back then every school year we were guaranteed atleast 2 unscheduled holidays or at the very minimum half days due to heavy rains. These were pre cell phone, pre internet, heck, even pre-computer days and in fact, getting a phone connection used to be something that you had to wait a minimum of a couple of years. So we would be all dressed up and wait for the school bus which would not come. Then some parent would decide to walk/drive down to the school (the school was around a 15 minute walk from our home) and then they would come back and say the magic words – ‘no school’. We kids would love our unscheduled holiday and since it would be raining, we’d get to eat hot pakodas and as a bonus play in the rains….

Unfortunately this stopped when I reached college, since lectures used to take place even if there was one student. But during college and the time I worked, I’ve had many adventures in walking through waist-high water just to get home, being stranded in buses and trains, and seeing the good side of people in such situations.

Many people, especially those who come in from out of the city complain about the coldness of the people in Mumbai. About how neighbours don’t open the doors to neighbours and how they don’t even know who their neighbours are. But times like this, seem to bring out the best in the same people accused of being cold!

Here are some pictures of the rains in Mumbai – please note that these are more recent pictures, magnify these pictures by 10 or more and that was what I experienced, magnify it by 50 and that’s what my parents experienced, magnify it by 100 and that is what my grandparents said they experienced!

Trains stalled as the tracks are completely waterlogged. People have to just jump down is your train is not at/near a station and hope you don’t have a long walk home…

This is something that I have experienced myself…walking in waist-deep water and hoping and praying that some drain is not open near me!

The iconic BEST bus moving through a flooded street somewhere near the Hindmata, Parel area, if my geography of Mumbai still holds up.

We used to play like this at this one place near our home which always gets flooded!

1993 Mumbai Riots and Blasts

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The past few days I’ve been reading about the tributes that were paid to the heroes and the people who died in the horrific September 11, 2001 crashes. This made me think of all those people who have been affected by these acts of terrorism perpetuated by terrorists.

What is terrorism? Wikipedia says that although there is no universally agreed, legally binding criminal law definition, the word refers to acts of violence which create fear or terror in the minds of people and which are perpectuated for religious or political or ideological goal and which has no respect for the lives of the ordinary person.

If the above can be taken as a valid definition of terrorism, then there are many incidences which have happened in my home state which adhere to this definition and which the perpetrators would never agree on it being part of something which created terror to the layman or ‘aam janta’.

One of the incidence which for some reason is in my mind happened in December 1992 when the 16th century mosque of Babri Masjid was demolished in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya by Hindu nationalists and fundamentalists. The riots happened in spite of a commitment made the organisers of the rally that preceded it to the Supreme Court of India that the mosque would not be harmed. The justification given for the demolition of the mosque was that the mosque was actually built over the place where the revered Lord Shri Ram was born and that the Mughal King Babur actually had demolished the temple which was there and had constructed a mosque over it. The intercommunal tensions and riots which resulted from this demolition spread quickly to many parts of the country and this was the first time that my generation saw such riots happening in our own backyard in a city which we claimed to be the most secular in the country – Mumbai! This was very quickly followed by the horrific blasts which shook the city in March 1993. How naive we were back then!

When the riots and the blasts happened, I was in my first year of my degree programme and my sister was in class XI. I can’t remember much of the riots as it didn’t affect us directly, but I do remember reading and hearing really bad stories about women raped and killed just because they happened to belong to a different religion and decapacitated heads being found by people and animals. I also have this one image in my head – we were in the terrace of our building and a short distance away is the railway line. There is a break in the buildings and we could see the line clearly. On the other side of the railway line is a shanty area which used to be predominantly Muslim. We saw smoke and fire coming from an area near there. We were scared and I remember parents not letting anyone leave the house for a week or so after that.

A scene from the riot

The blast near the Mumbai Stock Exchange

Within two months however, it was the time of the Mumbai bomb blasts. When we had heard about the blasts in the city, I was back home from college as my classes usually ended before lunch. My sister on the other hand had classes the whole day till about 6 pm. The good thing was that her college was literally a 10 minute walk away from my home. Her other friends were not so lucky since they stayed quite a distance away. All public transport had come to a stop that day and phone lines were also not working. This was the pre-cellphone age and without the MTNL phones, there was no way to keep in touch. Around 4-5 of my sister’s friends came to my place that night. We tried to get in touch with their parents, but without phones it was very difficult to do so. Then around evening, we realised that we could make calls to some people and that started a phone relay across the city. I later learned that many people did the same to get news to friends and family. We called all the people we could get in touch with and left names, numbers and messages for the parents of the girls who were with us. Then they in turn tried the numbers and if they could, passed the message or otherwise did the same. This way through different people, we managed to get the message to the worried parents.

This actually made me realise the intrinsic goodness of people, especially in situations like this. I actually have many such stories, especially from the annual Mumbai rains, but that’s material  for another post.