Cricket

Having been laid up with a dose of genuine Delhi Belly (well, I suppose it's strictly Bombay Belly, but let's not split hairs), I've had plenty of time to devote to watching 346546456 channels of cable TV and reading the newspapers. Doing so has been an interesting insight into India, and specifically into its seemingly limitless appetite for two things: hilariously overblown Bollywood music videos, and cricket.

It's well known that India loves its cricket, but even so, I hadn't realised quite how much. Case in point: the Indian team is making a bit of a bollocks of its tour of South Africa - its batsmen have capitulated in the first couple of one-dayers, and even when they had SA on the ropes in the third match, they somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, with the hitherto-useless SA 'all-rounder' Justin Kemp smashing an even 100 to lift SA from 6/76 to 270 or so.

In Australia, such a performance would draw some scathing newspaper columns and perhaps some soul-searching about what had gone wrong. In India, it's drawn a parliamentary censure motion against the coach (Greg Chappell, who suffers all the more for the fact that he's a foreigner), a veritable avalanche of minute-by-minute coverage on all the TV news channels, front-page coverage in all the newspapers across the country, and seemingly limitless rage from the man on the street. It's astonishing. I'm sure life's great if you're an Indian cricketer when all's going well, but by god, I wouldn't want to be in their shoes at the moment.

Anyway, thankfully my stomach seems to have settled, so we're thinking about hitting the road soon. The other amusing event of the last couple of days has been a stand-up row with the hotel's laundry guy, who lost one of my shirts. He was adamant that he was given precisely 24 articles of clothing to wash, and then when I set them out and demonstrated that only 23 came back, he insisted on counting them himself twice, skipping from 21 to 23 both times (ie. 19, 20, 21, 23... see, sir, there are 24!) Finally, with much apologetic head-waggling, he's gone off to try and locate it. Time will tell, I suppose.

That's about it. Oh, and we have a phone - I don't have the number with me, but if anyone wants to get in touch, e-mail me and I'll send it on.

The shits

Well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. Yecch.

First birthday

At the risk of jinxing myself, the initial rush of "What the fuuuuuuuuck are we doing here?" seems to have subsided, and the constant barrage of traffic, beggars and hawkers in Colaba is starting to feel, well, normal. It's interesting how quickly you can adapt to things. Of course, one dose of Delhi belly and I might be a lot less comfortable about India, but fingers crossed, all is fine so far.

*crosses fingers, toes, and anything else crossable*

Been doing the tourist thing for the last couple of days - been to see...

- The Gateway of India: a huge triumphal arch thingy erected by the British in the mid-1920s - suitably imposing and predictably awash with people wanting to sell you giant lightglobe-shaped balloons and other entirely useless stuff;
- The Taj Hotel: so big that it takes up an entire block and is virtually a mini-city in itself - just the thing if you're the sort of person who wants to go to India without going to India;
- Haji Ali's mosque, which probably deserves an entry of its own - one that I'll leave til later;
- Victoria Station, the High Court, and various other buildings which are architecturally fascinating, although it gets difficult to get excited at grandiose architecture when it's smack-bang in the middle of a city where 60% of people are homeless.

More interestingly, we also went to a 1st birthday party, thrown for twins born to a woman who lives in Nasir's little enclave - unfortunately, their names escape me, perhaps because they're so similar (Alitha and Talitha.... maybe). For the party, they closed off the entire street was closed off, festooning with balloons and stage-set type arrangements decorated with fairies and signs saying "Happy birthday!" Someone got hold of a sound system, the entire neighbourhood turned out, and it was fantastic.

I was interested to see that, in this little corner of Bombay (and I suspect most of India), raising a child seems to be kinda a collaborative effort. The twins' mother is Nasir's neighbour, but they seem to spend as much time at his house as they do at hers. This is also true of the rest of the local kids, who seem to wander in and out of each others' houses to eat, play, and sleep. There's a palpable sense of community, one that seems to be on the way out in Australia - I remember growing up in Albert Park, there were the vestiges of a similar camaraderie amongst the longer-term residents, one that we were lucky enough to be included in, but it's all gone now, and we seem to be going the way of London, a city so transitory and impermanent that no-one knows their neighbours. Or, indeed, themselves.

Anyway, it was a cracking party - the Bollywood music was blasting, there were people everywhere (including heaps of kids, who danced as happily as anyone), Leila and I seemed to make quite an impression by getting up and dancing, and a good time was had by all. Funny to think that in Australia we take ecstasy to achieve a similar effect.

That'll do for now. Gonna hang out at the hotel tonight and watch Man Utd - Chelsea on satellite TV. I could get used to this place...

Indian hospitality

So last night we had the honour and pleasure of dining with the astoundingly lovely Nasir, a friend of Leila's mother's and director of the nascent Shantaram Foundation, a charitable organisation set up by Greg Roberts (of Shantaram fame) with the initial aim of eradicating tuberculosis in Colaba. Nasir, his wife Zuleikha and his family were hospitable to a fault - they fed us (with some fantastic food, too), gave us presents although they'd never met us, offered to drive us around, the works. It was humbling.

I got to thinking that you'd never receive this sort of hospitality in a 'rich' country such as Australia, the UK, etc. It might sound like some guilt-ridden Western romanticisation of poverty or the East in general, but it seems to me that it's a fact nonetheless: the more you have, the more paranoid you become about protecting it, and the less generous you become. Or so it seems, anyway. You can draw your own conclusions about our home country, and the fact that we lock people away indefinitely in glorified concentration camps for having the temerity to want to go there.

Bah. Anyway, the upshot of this is that it was a rare pleasure to meet such good people, and it was fascinating to hear about the Shantaram Foundation - the idea is that it will self-sustaining, run from the profits of various businesses that will be set up around Mumbai (motorcycle dealerships, bars, etc). Tackling TB in Colaba is an initial aim - from there, they hope to spread outward, and expand to other projects as well. It's a thoroughly worthy goal, and here's to hoping it takes off like a rocket.

Enough for today. This afternoon we're heading to Haji Ali's Mosque and perhaps to Fashion Street, a conglomeration of clothes markets that apparently puts the hectic street stalls of Colaba to shame. Should be... interesting.

So here we are

Typing this in a boxy little internet cafe in Colaba, a funny little tiled room that's about the size of our wardrobe at Gipps Street and is home to eight computers and a manfully struggling air conditioner.

Thus far, Mumbai has been everything we've been told it'd be - loud, chaotic, smelly, and enthralling. We're staying at the very well-appointed Ascot Hotel, for now at least - for the princely sum of $50 a night each (doubtless a small fortune in India), we get airconditioning, Sky TV, a bath, the works. We arrived late last night after a hilariously chaotic 45 minute drive from the airport - Mumbai traffic is berserk, a constant battle for space and strategic position amongst at least twice as many "lanes" as there should be on any given stretch of road.

Despite this, the general lack of aggravation is impressive. There was no road rage, very little shouting - just lots of inoffensive tooting, which seems to be more to draw people's attention to the fact that you're about to swerve in front of them than it is to annoy them. I'm starting to understand Shantaram's observation that only the Indians could live in India - one billion Americans or Australians crammed into this small a space would have killed each other long ago.

The other striking feature about Mumbai thus far is the smell. Everything here smells - the entire airport smelt of damp, every shop has incense or oil burning in it, the streets are full of a strange and head stench of tanneries, food, petrol, and God only knows what else. At times it's not a problem, at times it's overpowering, but it's always there.

And there are *so* many people. Of course you *read* about the fact that this is one of the most overcrowded cities in the world, but you don't *know* it until you actually experience it. There are people everywhere. Apparently there are 32 million people in Bombay, and half of them are homeless. This means that there's not a flagstone or piece of land anywhere that's not occupied. If there's not something built on it, there's someone sleeping on it, or driving on it, or trying to sell something from it. People sleep between the railway tracks. It's astonishing.

So anyway: so far, so good. I must admit that on the way in from the airport I was wondering quite what we'd got ourselves into, especially as I kept falling asleep and having strange semi-wakeful dreams in which first impressions of Mumbai kept meshing themselves with scenes from Memento, which I watched on the plane, which was trippy in the *extreme*. But now, with a day's wandering and a lunch at Leopold's (something of a tourist trap, unfortunately) under the belt, it feels good to be here. Good, and exciting. And that's all you can ask, surely?

More soon.

Sydney

Holed up for a few days in Sydney, a city which I've always found kinda objectionable - I do my best to come here with an open mind, but it's just the general ambiance of the place, some indefinable feeling about it that shits me. I think it's that it's so sure of its place as one of The Great Cities of the World, a vaguley arrogant self-assurance that's just as unattractive in a city as it is in a person (if you can ascribe such characteristics to an entire city).

Anyway, despite all this, it's been an enjoyable couple of days, mainly because we've been able to hit the beaches. If there's one aspect in which Sydney undeniably shits all over Melbourne, it's in the fact that it has surf beaches. We're in Waverley, a 10-minute walk from the lovely Bronte beach, where I spent most of yesterday and this morning. There's a certain naive joy about getting into the surf to catch waves, an unaffected pleasure that gives a sense of satisfaction and calm, a feeling of renewed possibilty. After months of sitting in an office during a Melbourne winter, being able to go for a swim in the morning makes me feel that all of a sudden there are a million things that I could be doing with my day, a sense that things are possible after all. It's good. I like it.

It also feels like a reminder that in all the drinking and everything else, something's been lost along the way. Lost, but not irretrievably. A sense that it's never too late.

And looking at the ocean, it strikes me that months of travel stretch out before us like the ocean, like Patti Smith's sea of possibility, months that can take us anywhere.

Bring it on...

Testing

Just making sure that this actually works. Nothing of note will appear here until late November.