Mumbai – you crazy!
We’re back in Bali for the last time (sniff sniff) reflecting on the crazy week we like to call ‘Sleepless in Mumbai’ but without the romance and Meg Ryan hairstyles. Our attempts to buy train tickets were thwarted by the crowds of the Indian Wedding Season. So we bussed it to Udaipur with a brief stop including a family dinner at Dinesh’s and then back on the bus to Ahmedabad for our flight to cosmopolitan capital Mumbai! As the guidebook suggested, Mumbai is a city of contradictions and extremes. We found ourselves culture-shocked again with the gleaming malls, movie theatres, flashy restaurants and western conveniences. However on every corner there were countless beggar children who stored their belongings in the trees during the day. When one girl asked us for water we realised just how much they lived without.
At the other end of the Mumbai scale, we caught a glimpse of the Bollywood high life. When Mukesh, Claire’s contact for the editing studios, pulled up at the guesthouse on his motorbike in pointy leather shoes and aviator sunglasses we wondered if we should have read up on who’s who in Bollywood. He quickly won us over with his casual and happy-go-lucky manner. He whizzed Claire off to the studios to start editing the FEGG Creative Learning Training DVD. We soon discovered that the Mumbai day schedule works around the nightlife with the workday starting at 11am and ending in time to make it to a party. Claire found it hard to stay as chilled as everyone told her to be with the looming deadline and continual technical difficulties. Fortunately, humour prevailed and by the last day Claire and the editor were bantering at 3am as they tried to work out how to use the DVD authoring software. After everyone involved pulled a mammoth effort to get the job done, the DVDs are out and ready for FEGG to use in their mission to improve the quality of education in government schools.
In the meantime, the dairy-phobic Amelia was delighted to rediscover the existence of soymilk in Mumbai. Don’t worry, she also had plenty of work to keep her busy. She visited the office of DASRA, an NGO who helps develop grassroots organisations like FEGG. There she met Parthi to finalise the stories that will go up on the website to provide outsiders with an insight into what life is like for Rajasthani girls. The real challenge was in getting back to the guesthouse as Amelia’s grasp of Hindi numbers and the Mumbai bus system was somewhat lacking. There was a moment of pure elation as she confidently eenie meenie minie moed a bus and successfully leapt up the steps as it moved past the stand (Important addition to Lonely Planet transport section – buses slow down but do not stop at bus ‘stops’). Amelia beamed at her fellow passengers but the bubble burst when she told the ticket man her destination and he replied with a pitying shake of his head.
We were reunited after many solo workdays for a meeting with Safeena and the website designers in the FEGG Mumbai office. It wasn’t all work though (well actually…) as we happily had dinner with Dinesh, Nissar and Vincent at the guesthouse. Indian take-out, a Bollywood romantic comedy and good company – can’t get much better!
Our projects are coming to a close and our time in Bali is running out. Next time you’ll hear from us we’ll have left the FEGG house and taken our last bus trip over the hills to Udaipur…
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