Alright, Part 3 - the final part of the India trip reports is here. Part 1 and Part 2.
I flew to Mumbai around the end of November to visit my ILs (in laws), V (N’s brother) and V’s wife K (V and K got married in the later part of 2020 and I couldn’t visit due to pandemic restrictions) and N herself who was spending some quality time with her parents. V and K lived (for the moment) in a house in the same building above my ILs until they found different jobs and covid showed signs of ending. In any case, my visit was timed so I could see all of them (K was to leave in a week to her home to prep for CA exams).
Mumbai ⏩
I like Mumbai despite the fact that the city is brimming with all the things that normally make me anxious including dense crowds, crumbling, grungy infrastructure, incessant noise and the most important red flag of all - the heat and humidity.
Why do I like it? Something about the city makes me feel at home. It was a city where something was always happening and more importantly:
I do not stick out in Mumbai. The city envelops everyone into the same state of hassled purpose. No one has time to judge you.
People are friendly. At least I think so or there are many confused people in Mumbai wondering why a random dude was smiling at them.
Commerce, not status, drives the city for the most part. Unlike a conservative Chennai or extremely status driven Delhi, Mumbai at its heart is about commerce and this makes it the most tolerant of cities.
To be honest, despite my many, many visits, I have barely seen Mumbai. I have, at some point, done the tourist checklist, been to a couple of popular eating joints and travelled in a local perhaps only once ever. I have had more than a smattering of vendor visits when working with Amazon roaming through some of the commercial sections.
And over the last decade, all the trips involve crossing the Vashi Bridge to head to the ‘other side’, to Navi Mumbai and this has often meant little enthusiasm to make a 2 hour trip to get to the peninsular core of Mumbai. This time too, I took a cab from the airport and settled down for an hour and a half long ride, entertaining myself by taking pics of grungy apartment buildings (why is everything so grungy in Mumbai), backwaters and the general grey-white dusk in the big city.
Beyond the Vashi Bridge 🌉
N’s parents live in Kharghar, which is potentially halfway to Pune the way Bengaluru airport is halfway to Hyderabad. Once these were all farmlands. Then, city and industrial development corporation (CIDCO) - a building and name that evokes the soviet era for some reason - decided, in a rare moment of foresight, to create potential urban areas for a Mumbai that was already splitting in its seams like a healthy aunty in a tight salwar. Mumbai needed some loosening of stitches and expanding.
The intentions were top-notch. As it ever so rarely happens in India, they even planned these suburbs, paying off large farmers to get lands, designing roads that actually were perpendicular to each other, planning sectors for commercial and residential zones, walking spaces, parks, the works. They even gave names like central business district, which is evocative of Raffles-place like feels.
Then reality overwhelmed the plans. Mostly in a good way I think:
Navi mumbai’s inherent rural nature (as V used to say with a hint of derision, “its in Raigad district”) asserted itself
Mumbai’s propensity of overwhelming any place by its sheer bustle. The explosion of people in Kharghar is a testament to the fact that if Mumbai were to become a state-sized city, it would still be densely packed and full of people moving around busily. You can never build enough.
Mumbai’s commercial enthusiasm.
If my ILs are used as a reference, I think people in Kharghar are proud of three things:
The incredible ability to buy anything you want by walking 200 metres from where you live
Having a Central Park
The mythical international airport that is supposed to come up anytime now (not so mythical but I will believe it when I see it)
On my first visit to Khargar, while pottering around the neatly laid landscape and a circle,V pointed out nonchalantly, “there’s Taloja jail,” and sensing my lack of general knowledge on this subject continued, “the most notorious gangsters are there.” Abu Salem, the man responsible for the 1993 bomb blasts, was housed there. Inside that place, other gangsters affiliated with D-company (and working for Chota Shakeel) make attempts on his life like it was some video game and they were trying to cross a level. Anyway, the gruesome excitement of living so close to such a place waned out quickly when I realised that there wasn’t going to be any gang war action play out on the streets.
A middle class commercial paradise 🛍
In fact, Kharghar couldn’t be more middle class and residential if it tried. The commercial chops of Kharghar is truly something. Remember my amazement with Amazon’s ability to get me anything earlier? Kharghar is the same but in the physical world. In an area of about 500 square metres, lies every useful product you’d ever need as a red blooded Indian middle class.
In this cluster is everything from novelty stores, fashion stores, bakeries, chaat places, eight specialty chai places, lassi bars, grocery stores, branded shoe stores, restaurants (including multiple udupi ones), jewellers, gift shops, banks, barber shops, clinics, hospitals - i mean, you name it. Walking along, you cannot be not filled with this nostalgic, middle class wonder to be in a place of infinite selection to browse as you walk the streets.
Recently, a Theobroma has opened as well, the first warning bells of gentrification that is likely to sweep the neighbourhood. Are we soon going to see fancy hipster cafes and pretentious all-natural stores? I hope not. I am not complaining about the Theobroma though. We bought ourselves some nice Christmas cakes which turned out to be delicious.
Kharghar continues to surprise me though. This time, we found a little hill to climb about 10 mins from home and from up there the hazy, suburban sprawl of navi mumbai stretched out before us interspersed with mountains, a small lake, some army bunker type construction and tall residential apartments. The sun was setting on one side and I was pleasantly surprised by the views.
We could have gone up further if not for N’s fear of climbing down steep inclines. As we tentatively stood on the slippery dry soil slope an old auntyji wearing full salwar and nothing more than basic chappals climbed up nonchalantly, humming a tune to herself and walking past us up the slope, where presumably she’d do some spelunking and base jumping as her constitutional for the evening.
Chaat hopping 😋
As it inevitably happens, we made lots of plans to eat. Every time we are in Mumbai, N usually has two things on her mind: 1. Visit her parents and 2. Eat Pav Bhaji. N loves Pav Bhaji like my father loves Annapurna (refer to part 2 ). Having grown up eating Pav Bhaji at Geeta Bhavan (which she rates among the top 3 ever), you could call her a connoisseur but one who is happy repeating the same place again and again.
It’s been a few years since we found pav bhaji at Geetha Bhavan so we end up going to other places in Chembur like Sadguru. In any case, in the recent past, Kharghar, being the shining beacon of finding anything you want, has raised its Pav Bhaji chops tremendously so that one that passes N’s high bar can actually get delivered home. This has elevated Kharghar in N’s opinion more than any hospital or grocery store could ever achieve.
This time around, having not been there for nearly two years, I was told that there were several new fancy chaat places around and so we decided one evening to do some chaat hopping across places. We started with some cutting chai and proceeded to hit a few places for chaat. Then, with a feeling of wanting to eat more chaat but feeling too full, we parcelled a bunch of it to have an evening eating chaat, watching a mindless movie and hydrating ourselves in V and K’s current residence. For the mindless movie we picked Red Notice in which The Rock was The Rock, Ryan Reynolds was Deadpool and Gal Gadot had less personality than the armband she wore in Wonder Woman. Nevertheless, it was excellent fun.
Anushaktinagar ⚛
As with most trips, we also made a pilgrimage to BARC campus to have chaat. I think the chaat is more or less an excuse in this case. These are often trips of nostalgia for N and V. Twelve years ago, just after N and I got married, N’s dad left the campus to go live in Kharghar, having retired after working there for many decades. Naturally, they all miss the place.
I personally love walking in the tree-lined campus that feels like a world of its own. I remember coming here as a kid (my father’s uncle worked here too) and being fascinated by this curated colony, the tall buildings named after mountains and just being in a double digit floor in an apartment - which for a Coimbatore boy was something fascinating. I mean where else in Mumbai are you going to find such amazing tree-lined avenues with footpaths to walk around for hours.
The BARC campus or The Republic of Anushaktinagar, is a world of its own. Around 45,000 people live in this township across dozens of multistorey residential buildings all named after mountains, rivers, etc. It has its own grocery stores, temples, mosque, church, a handful of grounds to play, several schools, clinics, a hospital, canteens, post office and banks. I am fairly certain that the place has its own laws. I mean, why not. A few years back, N and I visited an island in Norway called Lofoten that had about half of the people living inside Anushaktinagar.
The BARC kids were in for a surprise as they discovered that a lake that had previously been hidden in the wilderness had been spruced up. Now,a whole concrete walkway had been built around it and at its centre was a fountain. In this walkway / picnic spot was now the chaat wala doing roaring business. After some oohs and aahs, we all proceeded to walk to the edge of the walkway which stretched into the lake with a tacky boat like construction where many kids and aunties, forced by the evil will of James Cameron, stood in the Titanic pose to take pictures.
On the boat were painted many acronyms, which the trained eye of BARC kids picked out as departments within BARC. Why these acronyms are painted on a concrete boat in the middle of the lake is a question without clear answers akin to the question of what happens within the BARC campus itself. N’s dad, the master of being self-effacing, once remarked that about 100 BARC employees are engaged in some top secret stuff with atoms and such while the other thousands of employees are there to make it hard (presumably for the dreaded videshi hand) to know which are the 100 important ones.
Anyway, we all took selfies too and I was commandeered by N to take many photos of the lake to be sent over to impress her dad and mom. After this, we proceeded to eat Chaat from the chaat wala who had since moved to this new ‘promenade by the lake’ while swatting away the mosquitoes and eventually left.
Parag Agrawal’s ascension 🐤
Sometime towards the end of November, something momentous happened. If you remember, Parag I-had-to-look-up-the-spelling-of-the-second-name Agrawal took over as the CEO of Twitter. Jack Dorsey, unable to muster up enough interest in the bird app despite his Ayahuasca retreats, decided to become a full time bitcoin bro while a responsible Indian took over and thought about boring things like profitability, scaling and generally satisfying hundreds of thousands of shareholders.
In any case, Parag went from nobody to mr. famous in an instant. The ascension of an Indian to become the CEO of a multi billion dollar company happens about every other Monday and yet in India this is always a mini celebration.
In N’s household, this was a bit more of a sensation. Turns out that Parag Agrawal was also a product of the aforementioned BARC. Over some locally sourced upma and crispy vadai for breakfast, the family gathered to discuss this red letter day for the institution. As it has happened with other famous BARC products before, like Shreya Ghoshal, for instance, N pointed out things like “he lived in Girnar (a residential building)” or “we used to go to the same school number 4” or “My mother knows his mother well” or, specifically in the case of Parag Agrawal, “he wasn’t that impressive in school.” Ok, I may have made that last statement up.
In India, pride increases exponentially as the hyperlocal association increases. And so, Indians celebrated the new Indian CEO, Mumbaikars celebrated a little harder the fact that it was a Mumbai boy who was the CEO and BARC folks let loose a few celebratory nuclear tipped warheads because we had our first BARC boy as the CEO of a multi-billion global corporation.
Ruined Bangalore Plans 😞
Post Mumbai, N and I had planned a visit to the city of traffic jams - Bangalore. After all, it was the place where we had lived together the most and had fondness for. I had plans to catch up with vada and kara bath in veena stores, full meals in Nagarjuna, a CTR benne masala dosa, one quick visit to Blossoms apart from some relatives and friends.
Alas, it was not to be. Omicron happened. News reported that it was 5x more virulent and that everyone was now going to turn into zombies, etc. We promptly got spooked and while I was still debated if the Nagarjuna meals may be worth braving Omicron-shomicron, N quickly put an end to that train of thought and that was that. Bangalore visit never happened and many catchups over craft beer and kara bath still remain pending.
Could be worse,
Tyag
Hi Tyag, Thoroughly enjoyed reading this three part series. You have an innate talent for writing.
Very interesting with varied activities and anecdotes. Expect more thrilling and scintillating write ups.