Brunch at the Leela

This is my 4th day in Mumbai, and they have been 4 very full days indeed.  We have had the minimum of meetings and the maximum of shopping trips and time to get ourselves sorted out.  We have been able to sort out our gym membership, find housekeepers for our apartments, go shopping (several times), open bank accounts, visit the foreign registration office and so on.  We have had breakfasts in the local hotel, evening meals in restaurants or at the homes of administrators and today we had brunch at Leela's.  This hotel is right near the airport and has one of the most famous brunches in Mumbai.  It was also featured in the book Behind the Beautiful Forevers which is about life in a Mumbai undercity, as one of the people in the book manages to secure a job at Leela's.  For me, this brunch certainly lived up to expectations.

The great difference between rich and poor is so obvious here.  Just an hour ago I was surrounded by 5 star luxury, now as I look outside my window I can see a construction site where the people working there would never have the opportunity to have brunch at Leela's.  I'm currently reading In Spite of the Gods by Edward Luce, a writer for the Financial Times.  He interviewed a Frenchman called Andre who had lived in India for a number of years and asked him about why he lived in India.  Here is his reply:

India has thousands and thousands of years of practice at harmonising differences and penetrating to the unity beyond.  There is an essence to India that other countries do not have, which tells you that behind the diversity of life there is a spiritual reality called unity.

Diverse it certainly is:  while India is acquiring the trappings of a superpower, the majority of the people lack basic amenities. Yesterday we drove past the world's first million dollar home in South Mumbai, called Antilia, after a mythical island.  This home has 27 storeys and more floor space than the Palace of Versailles.  On the roof are 3 helicopter pads and the ground floor has space to park 160 cars.  A staff of 600 work here, taking care of the 5 members of the Ambani family!  At the same time India is home to a third of the world's chronically malnourisehd children, and over two thirds of Indians live in villages, half of which lack roads, healthcare and schools.  Almost half of India's women don't know how to read and write.

Slowly Rachel and I are adapting - from living in a country that has one of the highest standards of living in the world.  We are trying to embrace India - the sights and smells, the food, the noise.  Last night we went out for a meal with no plans for how to get home, and only one person in our party who had any idea of the name of the road we live on.  We bargained, tried 2 different taxis and had an entertaining (and sometimes scary) drive home.  We made it!

Embracing India

We were shown this video on the first day at our new school and told that the thing that will make us a success or failure here is our ability to embrace India.

An aerogram from India

Over the past few weeks we've been busy helping my mother to downsize and move house. One of the things we discovered is that she has kept every postcard and letter that she ever received from me. It was because of this that I stumbled across this old aerogram that I wrote to her the last time I lived in India, thirty years ago. I was curious to see what I'd written about way back then when I was working in Jammu and Kashmir. Here are a few extracts.

From Sonamarg in Kashmir

We walked up to a glacier.  Once there it started to blizzard - lumps of ice were hitting me, so I hurried to the bottom of the valley and sheltered under a lorry or horse manure.  After it stopped raining I got in lift in the back of the same lorry to a Dak Bungalow where I stayed the night.  It was so cold I was wearing every stitch of clothing that I'd brought and was still shivering. 

Each of the towns and villages here has a different craft.  We went through one village that only sold cricket bats!  In Kashmir there is a lot of wood carving and papier mache - each box brightly pained with a scene from mythology.

In contrast this is what I wrote from Agra where I travelled for a visit

In Agra it's 48 degrees C in the shade.  At night it's still in the upper 30s.  The journey to Agra was exceptionally long and tiring and took about 38 hours by bus and train, including about a 2 hour queue for a train ticket at Jammu.  The train journey itself was hot and sticky - not much air gets into the carriages and the air that does is burning hot.  At Agra station I got a lift to the hotel in a horse drawn cart.  The two boys who drove it decided to race everything else in sight.  I can tell you Ben Hur had nothing on us!  The hotel was full but they let me sleep on the roof which was nice - relatively cool and with a view over to the Taj, but the best thing about the hotel is the food.  Most of the time I've been relatively careful about eating - no fruit etc - now I'm relaxing a bit.  I drink the water and today even had a mango.  I've been healthy up to now too, though somewhat dirty and sweaty.  In Agra there is an electricity and water strike!  The water is turned off from about 1 - 6 pm and the electricity from ab out 3-5pm and for an hour in the evenings  The afternoons are like being in a sauna with no fans to circulate the air and not even the luxury of a shower to cool off by.  And to think that in England people actually pay to sit in little rooms and sweat!

At the time I wrote: "So much news but I can't write half of it down because it's sights and smells".   I'm planning on doing a better job of recording our adventure to India this time around.

Karma

Karma means both action and the result of the action, because the two cannot be separated.  It is the law of cause and effect.  Our thoughts, words and deeds have repercussions, the effects of which follow us throughout our lives.  Actions in a part life secured fortune in this one; actions in this life will affect future reincarnations.  What seems to be injustice when bad things happen to good people is only so because of the limitations of our knowledge:  we cannot remember our past lives.  (text from Culture Shock India)

Leaving Switzerland

We set off from Switzerland on Saturday to fly to San Diego (the first stop on our whistlestop tour of 4 countries this summer).  Our lovely friend Sue had given us some money to treat ourselves at the airport.  We bought a connector to attach the iPad and an SD card but then also had some left and were persuaded to try a new drink:  white wine with vodka, guava, orange and peach.  It was presented really nicely and we were tempted - so we bought a bottle to drink when we got to San Diego to celebrate the next stage of our lives.

Packing Up and Shipping Out

Last week was a pretty tough one for me.  My family and I (and 4 packers) packed up our life here in Switzerland into 160 boxes and these were loaded into a 20 foot container which is now sailing down the Rhine to Rotterdam and in 10 days time it will be loaded onto a container ship and will set sail for Nhava Sheva, in Mumbai.  It will be sometime in early August before we see our belongings again and until that time we will each be living out of one suitcase.  Sometimes it's good to reduce right down to the essentials - it helps you to appreciate what is important.

Moving from Switzerland, the country that for many years has been top of the quality of life index ratings, to Mumbai where the population of the city is 3 times the size of the country where I'm currently living and over a million people in the city live in slums, is likely to be a challenge - I think of it in terms of night and day.  I'm buoyed up by the support I've got from my new school, by the excitement of returning to the cutting edge of education and of educational technology, by the feeling that I'm valued and that I can make a contribution.  Actually I'm more excited by the possibilities of this move than by any move I've ever made before (and I've lived in 7 countries).
Today as I was packing I was feeling quite depressed.  I wrote a post on Facebook about how I felt seeing my entire life being packed in to boxes.  This is the reply I got:

Your whole life doesn't fit into boxes, it never could. Your life is all over this great world in the hearts and minds of your precious family and all the kids you've taught and all the people you've worked with. Bits and pieces fit into the boxes but your life...never.

Mother India

Farewell to India by Trey Ratcliffe on Flickr

Last week I was sent the Cutlure Shock India book by ASB.  I started readin it on the plane as I was going to the ISTE Conference.  This is what I'm reading that really excites me about moving to India:

India was never just a country; it has always been a dream, an idea, an elusive vision that attracted travelers from all over the world for thousands of years .... the images that the word India conjoures up are diverse and often contradictory, suggesting that one must e the real India, and it's only a matter of finding out which one.  If only it were that simple!  To understand India at all you must be able to hold onto completely contradictory images and realize that both represent the true India.

If you lay a map of India over a map of Europe it covers the area from Denmark to Libya and from Spain to Russia.  As different as each of these European countries are, so are the different parts of India.  The billion plus people of India belong to at least 4 different racial groups, speak 325 different languages and practise more than 7 religions.