Good Morning Mumbai

Mumbai or Bombay (both names seem to be fine) is a gigantic city. It reminds me a little of New York, built on a peninsular jutting out into the Arabian Sea. The train lines run in parallel from North to South, and areas are either East or West Side. Pretty much the comparison stops here! This is the Gateway of India, Mumbai's icon.

I am living in an area called Ville Parle, which is Greater Mumbai in the suburbs. It takes about 45 minutes by local train to reach the South of the peninsula, where the Gateway of India is. The area I am living in is nice residential area with a vibrant market and tree lined streets, so I think it will become home shortly. Vile Parle is a Gujurati area and therefore vegetarian, which is great as I had the intention to turn veggie out here. The food here is fabulous, I’ve discovered a southern Indian speciality called Pav Bhaji, "pav" been a burger bun type bread with lashings of butter and "bhaji" is a purred sauce, my favourite being tomato and cheese. It’s not far off a tomato-pasta sauce but better, its very yummy. You use the bread to mop up the sauce, I am sure I will come back double the size from India!

I have also now moved into my tiny flat, which is great after two months living out of my rucksack. Its pretty small, a studio with a separate kitchen, but it’s only 10 minutes walk from work, which is fabulous. It is on the first floor and has lots of windows, so feeling a bit on display at the minute without any curtains. I have an interesting view onto the local communal well, so every morning see whole families taking showers, brushing teeth, washing clothes. Seems very social. Thankfully I don’t have to join them as I have running water into my flat.

The "Oddity of the Week", this week goes to my trip to the cinema. I saw Namesake (English Bollywood film, well worth watching) and as it has been out for a while, I was the only one in the cinema. They play the national anthem before each film. Whilst sitting merrily in my seat, suddenly heard the cinema attendant say quite sternly, “ Please stand up”, so here I was, looking pretty awkward, standing up on my own in a 1,000 seater cinema humming along to the Indian national anthem. Thankfully 4 other people turn up shortly after the film started!

Seb was out last week, and we did some travelling, went to the Taj Mahal for my second visit, still as impressive as the first. We also headed up north to the Punjab, where we visited the famous Sikh Golden Temple. It was incredible, a very spiritual experience.

My Job

Some of you have asked regarding my job, as contrary to the blog entries so far I’m not here just here for travel! The organisation I am working for is called iVolunteer. It is a small Indian NGO (non governmental organisation) of 17 people. Principally based in Delhi with around 10 staff, 4 of us here in Mumbai, and a couple of people based in Chennai and Bangalore. The organisation has two programmes, firstly it recruits people to do volunteering projects, working in both rural India as well as in the slums in the cities, and secondly it also recruits Indian professionals to do VSO in Africa and Asia. My principal objectives are to grow the organisations brand awareness in India to promote volunteering, both nationally and internationally. A large part of my role is also to work with corporations based here in Mumbai to build partnerships. Corporate Social Responsibility is growing, and with the increase of home grown companies, the desire to do something about the mass poverty here is also thankfully on the increase. Despite the double digit economic growth and India now having the largest number Billionaires (US$) in Asia (more than Japan), there’s other statistics that seem to escape the world press. For example, India also houses over 25% of the world poor. Basically 1 out of every 4 people who live on less than 1US$ a day, who do not have access to running water or electricity, who live from a hand to mouth existence are in fact Indian. The other unfortunate fact is that the wealthy emerging middle class in India, who live mainly in urban areas are not really that aware of the extent of poverty in their own county. I already feel very detached from it, living in Mumbai, in my nice little flat with running water. It’s easy to become quite distant from the extent of the problems. This is some of the problems we are encountering with the organisation, when trying to get people to volunteer. So on that note, to endeavour to become more aware of reality and understand what my organisation does, I am going to volunteer. I will probably spend one day a week working with an NGO which supports street kids here in the slums of Mumbai. Another depressing fact, Mumbai has the biggest slum in Asia and it is growing at an unfathomable rate.