Mumbai City Tour

Yesterday afternooon we went on a city tour of Mumbai. Our first port of call was the Victoria Terminus railway station which brings in 7 million passengers per day. If I had time I would have liked to take an Indian railway ride as I imagine it’s quite an experience with animals, food bought en route and the general good-natured, noisy chaos that characterises the country. We then stopped at the Gandhi museum which was much the same as the one in Delhi. Here we saw letters he wrote to Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill but there were no replies. I read one book on the partition by Woodrow Wyatt who observed British government paid out large sums  of money to make Gandhi look poor. There are so many photographs of him, so many references to “I”, so little reference to his 4 sons and wife that he seems egotistical and sanctimonious.

We stopped at the biggest slum Dharavi.

The difference here between the shanty towns I saw in South Africa and the American city ghettos is that these are functioning communities. Indeed the economic output is assessed between $600,000-1m dollars. They are not centres of crime and drug dealing. From then we visited the Prince Of Wales museum and our final port of call was the famous Taj Mahal hotel where the first liquor licence was granted. Despite the skyscrapers and impression of economic progress it is not an elegant city like Delhi. The Taj Mahal is hosting a world cricket conference which is seeking to regulate the width and depth of bats and introduce the red card dismissal.

The Taj Mahal, the station and our hotel were all victims of the terrorist attacks between 26-29 November 2008 which resulted in 166 deaths and 293 injured. For this reason security is now tight.

You can now acquire two 2000 rupee notes worth about £50 each from the bank. The withdrawal of the 500 and 1000 rupee suddenly did not work as the rich classes had wind of it and bought gold with their cash reserves. The poorer classes many of whom do not possess a  credit card are left with valueless notes. One poor girl  died in a hospital here as the family could not pay for any treatment. The southern province of Tamil Nadu is mourning the death of their Chief Minister Jayalitha, a former actress who was jailed for corruption but much loved for her personality and poverty programmes. We saw crowds gather outside the hospital in numbers on the tv and none of us could think of any British politician who would generate such depth of grief.

Today let battle commence with the fourth test at the Wankhede stadium….