Tag Archives: Mumbai

Neighbours all

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For some wierd reason I feel like posting on neighbours, so please bear with me.

Housing in Singapore is of two very distinct types – public and private. We live in a Housing & Development Board (HDB) Executive Apartment type of flat. It’s not too bad and around 80% of people in Singapore live in these kinds of flats. Our previous home was also an HDB flat and when we wanted to move to a bigger flat, we decided to go to HDB again since we had not taken the subsidy they give locals and so wanted to use that before we move to private housing.

We’ve lived in our present home for the past year and a half and till  today I barely know our neighbours. The block we live in is in an L shaped arrangement with the longer side having around 7 duplex type of flats and three in the shorter side (including ours) which are all on one level.

The day we shifted, we met the other two neighbours on our side of the building. They seemed nice and we exchanged hellos when we met or when the doors opened. Then one of them moved away (we didn’t know as we were on a holiday and when we came back, the neighbour was gone!). As for the others on the floor, we do not know ANY OF THEM! Funny right?

At our previous place, since I was working full-time, we also had a hello-bye relationship with our neighbours (there were a total of 6 flats on our floor including ours). But as soon as BB & GG were born, we became very friendly with them and the 6 years we spent there after the children’s birth were fun!

Contrast this with my home in Mumbai. We live in a building with 19 flats and almost all have been there for as long our family has been there (give or take around 60 years, the age of the building). I’ve grown up there and know every single person in the building. There was no fear of the unknown and all the adults living there were surrogate uncles/aunties/grandmas and grandpas! When we were younger and my parents had to go out for the evening, we used to go to one of these neighbours homes and if it became late, even slept over and came back home in the morning. When my grandparents passed away and my parents had to go to the city they were living in, it was to this particular uncle/aunty’s care that my mom left us in. She would bring us food and make sure we went to college and later to work. It didn’t matter to them that we were adults by then, my parents had left me and my sister in their care and they were going to look after us, come what may!

I miss that sense of camaraderie that we had, here it feels like every one just lives their own lives and noone is interested in the other person’s life. But then if I want to be really honest, I am also more of a self contained person and prefer my own company and that of my family’s to others…So guess this is quid pro quid…

Yearning for school – Part 1

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When I wrote about my school going life earlier this week, it made me nostalgic about my school. So this post is dedicated to my alma mater – J.B. Vachha High School. JBV is it was (and is still) called is the short form for the loong formal name of the school. The name which used to be printed on all our school note books for the 12 years that I spent there reads like this – J.B. Vachha High School for Parsi Girls & The Cawasji Jehangir Primary and Infant School. I can’t find the school website so there’s no link to the school, although I did remember checking it out a few years back!

The school badge

I studied in the same school right from Junior KG (or Kindergarten 1) till I completed my Secondary School Certificate or SSC exams. Most of the teachers who taught me, saw me grow from a naughty 4 year old to a mature 15 year old young lady. The school was a purely girls school and except for our Games master and Indian music teachers, all the teachers were also female. While I was growing up, this was the most popular school for girls around the area I lived in (this would mean the Dadar, Wadala, Matunga, Sion areas, but we did get students from other places like Chembur, Parel also). I also remember seeing huge queues of people waiting to get the admission forms for their daughters and this was at a time when school admission was not as difficult as it is today. My mother used to see the queues and say that they didn’t really have to queue up so much – they just went to the school in the morning, got the form and I was called for an interview, which I did well and just like that I was in! In fact my grand parents were against my joining JBV as they wanted me to go to the same school as my dad – this school was literally a hop, skip and jump away from home and more inportantly for them, was a south Indian school and hence to their eyes, had all the right values and attributes. But I am so glad that my parents, and especially my mom stood her ground and put me and later my sis in this school.

What we called the 'New Building'.

Those days, when it was just education all the time, this was one of the very few schools which had a big emphasis on extra curricular activities. From the time we were in third standard till we graduated these were the extra activities we did – embroidery, needlework, library, Indian music/Western music/Dancing (you had to choose one), cookery, gardening, laundry, girl guides/social service. We also did typing and economics as special subjects in the IX and X grades. We also had one period of drill or PE every week and from the VII grade till the X grade, we had to stay back after school once a week for around 90 minutes of games.

Since this is proving to be a loong post, I’ll stop here for Part 1 and do Part 2 another time.

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!

Conversations with God!

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What is religion? According to Wikipedia:

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and moral values.Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature.

I was born and raised as a Hindu, particularly a South Indian Iyer Brahmin. While we follow all the tenets of the Hindu religion, there are some which are uniquely ours. I’ll be writing more about these in subsequent posts, but while the overarching theme of this post is religion, it is more specifically about God and my relationship with Him.

Different people view religion is their own ways. For some, this may take form of praying religiously in front of the manifestation of their preferred religion, for others it may be something they view with suspicion and fear and shun it altogether.

Where I am concerned, I believe in the religion I was brought up in and within which I bring up my children. I believe everyone needs an emotional anchor with which to anchor their lives and religion, if handled correctly, can provide that. My relationship with my religion and the God who personifies it for me is very personal and intense. To me, it is not necessary to pray a certian number of times a day, go to the temple so many times a week, but not be a good person internally. I believe that what lies between you and your deity is personal and should remain so. I definitely pray and constantly think of him, but it is very personal.

Painting of Lord Ganesh from Bali at home

Many Hindus have something called an ‘ishtadev‘ which essentially means a favourite God or Deity. I do too and with my ishtadev, I have a one-on-one relationship. My ishtadev by the way is the Lord Ganesh. I have always been drawn to him since childhood and there is one particular temple in my hometown of Mumbai that I love going to. This is the Siddhivinayak Temple in Prabhadevi and never fail to go there each time I go back.

I look up to Lord Ganesh or Siddhivinayak as a friend. I pray to him many, many times a day and selfishly also ask him loads of things during the course of my day. If something is not going my way, I ask for his intervention and when things are working in my favour, I

Idol of Siddhivinayak at the Siddhivinayak Temple, Mumbai

do thank him. A case in point – last night we got home very late from the temple (details later) and I didn’t have a very good night. Today morning, when I got dropped off at my bus stop, I did mention to S that although I am sleepy, I know I won’t get place to sit in the bus. Then the bus that came my way was not the bus I usually take, it was an abbreviated service that I usually ignore since using that bus means changing to another bus later on. But this bus was fairly empty and I saw if I boarded it, I can get a seat, so I got in and slept till it was time to get off and change buses, which coincidently came within 3 minutes!

This is my relationship with my God, my friend. How about you? Do you believe in God, in a higher power? If yes, then how do you communicate with him/her?

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.