After a late evening flight out of Cairo, we woke up to find ourselves in Mumbai, India! And of course, our first day in a new country wouldn’t be complete with an immediate post-flight bus tour, a.k.a. an extended nap.
After the brown, dry dust of Egypt it’s nice to be in someplace green and lush…until the humidity hits. Temperature-wise India is not that much hotter than Egypt, but the lingering monsoon season makes everything feel sweaty and sticky. It’s a cute look.
Mumbai is located on India’s western coast, and the arc of the city’s harbor is nicknamed “The Queen’s Necklace” because at night the lights of the city twinkle against the contrast of the sea. It’s a beautiful city, with traces of colonial Britain in the architecture and slight accents of Indian English, and bright flashes of color everywhere, from women in magenta saris to flower vendors selling marigolds for the upcoming Diwali festival.
[Photo: Laundry district in Mumbai where workers wash clothes, sheets and other items by hand every day.]
Mumbai is also where the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” was set, and with good reason. Part of my psychology project involves observing different cultural attitudes towards poverty, and unfortunately I don’t think my group will have any difficulty collecting data. Call me a white upper-middle-class privileged Ole, which I am, but seeing entire families literally sleeping in the streets was an eye-opener. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of living in slums.
However, I did learn that the slums are micro-communities themselves, with neighborhoods and small businesses. Our tour guide informed us that the large Darabi slum in Mumbai in particular generates around one billion USD annually. I’m a little skeptical of the statistic, but it made me more aware that even though, by American standards, many of these people are living in extreme poverty, they’re still productive members of society.
Many of them are from lower castes which have traditionally been limited to certain sectors of the economy, like laundry or leather making. Today, the caste system is less of a rigid societal division than an economic segmentation, and like so many other areas of the world, education and money trump social strata. Students from poor families will study in parks by streetlight in order to get ahead.
Today we fly to Bangalore, a city in southern India to begin the more rural portion of Global. We’re staying at the Ecumenical Christian Center, and will be studying religions of India. Conditions are likely to be a bit more…rustic than we’ve experienced before, but that will just make my transformation into a complete hippie that much easier! I’ve already invested in genie pants, now all I need are multiple beaded bracelets and dreadlocks.
Namaste!
*Catherine O’Connor ’13 is on Global for first semester and J-term. She majors in Asian Studies with a concentration in Chinese.