Tag Archives: holidays

Holidays

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So I haven’t blogged in a while, but we are still sort of alive. It’s not that the holidays were particularly time consuming or that nothing happened, but basically it seems like the entire town of Mumbai is getting new roads (and even some sidewalks) these days, so traffic has been, well, even worse. In fact, I’ve been heeding Ksenia’s advice and now let Deepak drive me home then and again – and even he has been quietly complaining about the traffic. They basically ripped open everything left, right and middle between home and work and are slowly starting from scratch. With hammers and little buckets of concrete carried by women in flip-flops, mind you, but there’s plenty of those around, so I guess it could be slower.

Of course, people still like to double park wherever they please and rickshaws still like to wait for customers practically in the middle of the road, and everyone still loves to make a u-turn against all odds, blocking all traffic in both directions. Nevermind the hawkers and slum dwellings that seem to re-appear within days on the shiny new sidewalks, pushing the pedestrians into the road. Anyways, I’ve been getting wild fantasies of running over rickshaws, pedestrians and little children, so I guess that was sort of a sign that maybe I should let Deepak drive then and again.

The holidays were pretty much non-existing. No snow, no Christmas trees (apart from plenty of fake ones in malls and stranger places), no days off, a busy business trip to Kanpur between Christmas and New Year, it was not the best birthday for little Jesus. It got a lot worse when we went to church on Christmas eve and the church choir started to sing, because not a single one of the 10 singers could get out a straight note. In fact, they were all solidly atrocious. Nevertheless, the church was packed to the hilt, people practically sitting on our laps, the fully unmemorable sermon and the, entirely dysfunctional sound system nonwithstanding.

Speaking of sound systems, we have yet to see an event where they use some sort of sound system that actually works. It is a given that there will be ear splitting feedbacks, crackling drop-outs, and some sound technician jumping around trying to fix the unfixable. Of course, if and when it does work, usually for a few seconds at a time, the volume is turned up to deafening levels, probably to make up for whatever was missed during the drop-outs.

But what else is new? Well, for starters, our apartment is missing a large mirror, a curtain rod, and the rod for the terrace awning. All gone since the last days of renovation while we were gone to Kerala. Instead, one wall is already leaking moisture again, and the awing has got a nice little hole now. That hole is new, courtesy of our neighbor who for some reason dropped a heavy steel kitchen utensil from her balcony. I have no idea how that utensil is called, suffice to say that it ripped straight through the awning and would certainly have killed anyone who might have happened to sit under the awning. Maybe when people talk about spiritual India what they really mean is that these sorts of things don’t even faze you all that much any more.

Or maybe they mean people like Deepak, our driver. He is the only one working in his family of mother, wife, kid, and two brothers, but he’s always in a good mood. He had tried to get a job in the army but was too slow a runner, and he tried to get a job with the police, but can’t afford the ridiculously high bribes required for that – $3000 or so, he says, and even that doesn’t guarantee a job; they might just keep the money. So now he’s a driver, and he says: my job no future, but I enjoy. Of course, the big attraction to a position with the police would be the large extra income in bribes, but we can’t even imagine him being able to take a bribe, he just seems more like the type who’d be happy to make the world a better place by standing at some road junction detangling traffic jams.

Anyways, he went out of his way to buy Ksenia a flower for Christmas, and we love him. At Rs7000 a month for five days a week, we are paying him a bit more than the standard Rs5000 or so for six days a week, but I think we’ll make him a big present when we leave, and I am not even sure he would take money. Our maid, by the way, has already asked us whether she can come with us back to New York, and if it weren’t so decadent and illegal, we’d actually be tempted, because she is great as well, even though she was very upset when we got back from Kerala and said to Ksenia: Oh my God, you are turning black! Madam, you have to use bleach creme!

One thing that isn’t illegal, but should be are Bollywood movies. The other day we made another desperate attempt at finding some quality entertainment and so we got Salaam Namaste, which was a big hit last year and apparently caused a bit of a circus, because it features a live-in relationship. Bottom line is, it’s simply and utterly unwatchable crap. How on earth anyone above the age of four can find this stuff funny is totally beyond me. It’s not even Louis De Funes or Jerry Lewis kind of stupid funny, it’s just painfully atrociously unbelievable not funny. It’s way beyond so unfunny that it even passed any chance of becoming funny in a twisted kind of way again. That’s how bad it is, and, yes, that’s pretty bad.

But enough of that. Wednesday is a holiday. I don’t even know which one, really, but we are off to the South again, until Sunday. We might have cramped our itinerary a bit too much, but the plan is to go to Nrityagram near Bangalore, then to Mysore, two nights in Mudumalai, via some weird mountain railway and a night express train to Kanchipuram, and then back home via Chennai.

Holiday Party

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Well, our apartment is still a bloody mess and of course nobody has showed up yet to start painting the walls, so they are still dusty with cement droppings everywhere. On the upside, we got rid of our entirely overpriced and underperforming internet cable service. The bastards had charged us almost $100/month for a broadband connection that was 56kps dial-up at best. But Ksenia finally took matters into her hands and went down to MTNL, the semi-government telephone provider.

Back when we had moved in, MTNL weren’t able to get us a working phone connection for ages, but I had been told that once they install DSL, it is actually very fast and cheap. We had tried at some point, but nothing ever happened after they determined that the phone lines in our building are crap. Funnily enough, they had left the DSL router in our apartment for about two months. Phone bills come every other month, so we weren’t all that pleased when we discovered a few weeks ago that they were charging us for DSL service anyways.

However, to our great surprise, two days after Ksenia went to their office (it’s a decrepit building that looks more like a prison, and the office rooms look more like disorganized torture chambers), they installed DSL and everything worked. Well, they couldn’t be bothered or were incapable to get their DSL play nicely with our router, but that was to be expected, and we took care of that ourselves. But since then, speed is great, Vonage works, and we are happy.

There were more positive developments this week. Our new maid started and she’s great. She is Karilyn’s maid’s aunt, a bit older, and positively pleasant. She actually figured out to best mop the terrace, which is really advanced service. Also, Deepak, our trusted driver, keeps cracking us up. He always seems incredibly disappointed when we tell him that he doesn’t have to work tomorrow and asks but why, Sir? And when Ksenia told him that on Saturdays I am her driver, he cracked up laughing. If I happen to see him in the evening when he drops off the car at work, he always tries to drive me all the way home, even though that means he’s got to take the train all the way back to his home, and he can’t believe that I of course insist to drop him off near where he lives and drive myself.

Ksenia tries to teach him a bit more English, so by now he knows that it’s not something something but a little bit. Apparently, it took him quite a while to learn the words a lot, inside, outside, and flyover – flyover is what Indians call the highway bridges that cross local roads, and Deepak would always call them flowers instead. Anyways, we are overpaying him by quite a bit, but he’s great.

Finally, yesterday was my company’s year-end party at the JW Marriott. The theme was Bollywood Bash and it really was the strangest company party I have ever been to. In New York, the company usually pays for some professional entertainment at these sorts of events – some band and/or acrobats or whatever. In Mumbai, employees insist that they will provide the entertainment themselves, no outside help needed.

So they had a sort of competition with a number of Bollywood movie scenes being re-enacted, including the costumes, dance and singing. Of course, I didn’t understand a word, but within minutes, the crowd of about 500 was absolutely ecstatically screaming and cheering. The whole thing culminated in senior managers doing an absolutely gay looking and incredibly funny dance scene, and that kicked off the open floor with hours of Bollywood dance music (interrupted with a bit of Smells Like Teen Spirit, oddly enough).

There was plenty of food, but no tables. I had wondered about that at the beginning, but I then realized that nobody needs any tables, because absolutely everybody was dancing like crazy. And I mean like crazy – dancing at Indian office parties apparently does not mean to shake your leg a little, trying not to make a complete ass of yourself. No, making a complete ass of yourself is the absolute requirement here, it is in fact the whole point.

Rather than just dance, you have to re-enact the dance scene of the movie that the song originated from. I had seen a bit of that in clubs, but I had not realized that my colleagues apparently were all total experts in Bollywood movies, because they re-enacted, and how! Grown-up men in their 40s doing the silliest dance moves imaginable, the arms waving wildly in the air, legs all over the place, hips going left and right, and pelvis going back and forth. The whole deal, for hours, and unlike in New York, they weren’t even slightly drunk. It was quite a scene, and of course the only one making an ass of himself was me, by trying very hard not to make an ass of himself…

So this was a pretty good week, I have to say.

Dhamaal

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Monday evenings is Dhamaal night at the Prithvi Theatre in Juhu. Dhamaal means turmoil, frolic, and is a kind of song which is sung at the Holi festival. Basically, there were eight or so different performers and groups performing Shakespeare-inspired pieces for 10-15 minutes each. Sort of an open mic evening, except better, because they actually had to do an audition. Entrance was free, and the MC was a French-Indian guy.

The place was pretty much packed with about 200 people, mostly hip looking young people. The first performer was a very cute 10 year old boy doing a funny sketch, in English, about how William Shakespeare is actually an Indian guy. There were a number of pretty intense young men performing. Almost all the performances were in Hindi, but it was pretty interesting to me nevertheless. My Scottish expat friend and her French roommate were doing a scene in French, and even though probably hardly anyone in the audience understood a word, it was well received.

There was a very very good young actor doing a Hamlet scene in Hindi, and a very good older actor doing a scene from The Merchant of Venice twice, in two different ways (both with a fabulous colonial British accent). A smart-looking comedy scene had everyone cracking up, and there was a very weird slapstick scene of a bunch of guys pretending to be from Nagaland. Nagaland, a small province in the Northeast, has a number of indigenous tribes, so people were laughing before the troupe even entered the stage. So then they did this strange primitive dance thing around Romeo and Juliet, which sort of reminded me of how Native Americans used to be represented in very old American Western movies. Pretty dumb, a little scary, but generally harmless. It was a bit embarrassing, but people seemed to think it was very funny, which was sort of remarkable, given that the same audience obviously also had appreciated the very serious acting skills of the Hamlet guy.

Anyways, what do I know, after all, I could only get the acting and movements, and didn’t understand a word for the most part. But I will definitely be back to Dhamaal.

In other news, Ksenia is finally coming back tonight, so I am very excited!! Next week we will have our old trusted driver Deepak back. Apparently, he has a salaried job, but he seemed pretty eager to quit his job and work for us. He seemed really happy back when I picked up the Ambassador with him and was looking forward to driving it. Speaking of the Ambassador, I took it to my regular gas station today. They usually also check the oil and water, but what really cracks me up every time is that the guy there seems to like to burn his fingers. Every single time he checks on the oil, he burns his fingers, then laughs about it, and then reaches for a piece of tissue paper to wipe off the oil from the stick. Then he throws the paper on the floor, reaches for the water coolant container, burns his fingers again, and laughs again. It is very strange.

Speaking of throwing paper on the floor, last Sunday I was in a public park in Dadar to play some frisbee with some expats. As I was walking around a bit, I saw three different people throwing their plastic garbage on the floor. Just like that. The park accordingly looks pretty shitty. Another day some guy was throwing his empty plastic bottle out of his car while driving. Just like that. Ugh!

Today is a holiday, Dassehra, by the way. From what I gather, it is a festival in honor of the goddess Durga. Dassehra means ‘the tenth’ and it is celebrated at the end of the nine-nights Navaratri festival, during which hymns are recited to Durga. Apparently, Dassehra is a special holiday for brides and engaged people. All I can say is that somewhere in my neighborhood last night there was a big disco evening, and they played that incredibly awful song by Queens We Will Rock You. Over and over again.

Ganesh Chaturthi III

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So the grande finale of Ganesh Chaturthi was indeed pretty grande. The firecrackers started going off sometime in the afternoon, which made me frantically search for earplugs. I found them, because Ksenia is always fantastically well prepared for this sort of stuff, but then I ended up not actually needing them. Rumor has it that people tend to go crazy with these things – kind of like with the rats during the floods: the boys just throw them into the crowds, having a laugh. But no such thing happened.

Instead, we starting walking towards Juhu, got drenched by a quick rain shower, and assembled with quite a few people on the beach. It was still light out, so we were somewhat early. The main event at this time was that we got constantly mobbed by people begging us to take pictures of them. It is quite strange, but people just love to be photographed; they can’t seem to get enough of it. But that’s great, because one doesn’t usually get a chance to take people pictures all that often, and of course the faces and clothes are always fantastic. So we did that for while, and then it was slowly getting dark, so we moved further along on the road to the main Juhu Beach area.

The crowds by now had noticeably densified and there was a good amount of pushing and shoving, and of course constant drumming, chanting, and lots of laughter. We were lucky to find a troupe that had a sizable big Ganesh and a lot of women. Also, it seemed like the smaller the Ganesh the louder and more ecstatic the crowd in front and behind of it. A lot of the crowds seem to enforce a strict teenage boys only policy, which was a bit scary, especially for K and S, who weren’t in the mood to be the only women among a hundred teenage boys. So our troupe was pretty grown up and solidly serious, which was nice.

A few heavy rain showers later, we were passing the VIP stage. There was bunch of important looking people in either all white Indian dress, or in uniforms, some of them well beyond retirement age and bedtime. I was later told that if they were wearing white, then they are most likely politicians. So these politicians and the uniformed brass were sitting there on their armchairs overseeing the crowds like Napoleon a battlefield. It had an odd feel of Soviet Russia, but I guess it was really just India. In any Western country during this sort of event with large teenage crowds one could hope for an odd plastic cup of beer or maybe a paint or water bomb here and there being thrown at the VIP stage, but there was probably no danger of any such thing happening here. After all, Ganesh Chaturthi is also a dry day, i.e. no alcohol whatsoever is being served or sold anywhere in the country, unless it’s a private club, i.e. some place like the Gymkhana. Imagine 4th of July in the US, or Rosenmontag in Germany, or any day in the UK without drinks? People would call for a general strike, I suspect.

Anyways, we then proceeded towards the water, there was a Pooja, i.e. some prayer, offerings, chanting, etc., a small fire was lit, and a few other things were happening, which I couldn’t quite make out. At some point, I was politely asked to take pictures later, and so eventually the big Ganesh got lifted off his pedestal and off he went, slowly being carried into the muddy waters of Juhu Beach. It was quite the spectacle and a lot of fun to watch.

On the way back home, there were hundreds of trucks fully loaded with worshippers and Ganeshes, and the most elaborate one attracted quite a scene. This Ganesh had its own little elaborate house. Inside was what I suspect was a Hindu priest, and so this truck slowly made its way to the beach with an enormous crowd around it, cameras rolling, people dancing, the whole nine yards. Apparently, some of these Ganeshes are 25 feet high, but this on was the biggest that we had seen, and it was quite impressive. I got a few nice pictures of the whole story, which I will put up on my photo blog over the next few days.

Ganesh Chaturthi II

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So we are in the fifth day of Ganesh Chaturthi, and my neighbors have been having a ceremony or other twice a day every day. Our parking lot is the temple for family, friends, and neighbors, there’s is a master of ceremonies, there’s singing, and they have set up big loudspeakers which they use to play what seems to be the same Ganesh Chaturthi CD over and over again at full volume. It is actually quite nice and touching how everybody comes together and seems to have a big blast. The whole extended family part is not something I would particular want for myself, but on the surface it looks as if everybody is having a great time, so who knows, maybe these are all picture book happy families with no dirt whatsoever under the carpet. Strangely, later in the evening, after the ceremonies and after they are having some food, they usually end up huddling around a laptop looking at I don’t know what.

Getting home on Thursday was a royal pain in the arse. It was ok until Juhu, but since it was the first immersion day where thousands of people go to Juhu Beach to immerse their Ganesh. Traffic was crawling for a good one and a half hour to get me home the last 5km from there. The cops were a bit overwhelmed trying to separate the processions from the traffic and to stop drivers from ignoring their improvised directions and traffic lanes. Me included, of course, since I am quite happy to report that I am getting pretty good at driving like an Indian.

I had one rickshaw driver pull up next to me at a red light the other day, slamming his hand onto my car, shouting or yelling about something or other. I guess I must have cut him off or maybe he didn’t like the way I was trying to zig zag my way around those atrocious potholes while I was passing him. I have not yet perfected the art of being on the fastest side of the road at various intersections, but I am getting there, and the fact that this rickshaw driver was not the only one yelling at me for my driving can only mean that I would now qualify perfectly well as a NYC cab driver.

Yesterday we had a little expat party in my apartment. That was all fun and well, even though I ended up checking my Blackberry for messages from Ksenia, as usual these days. My maid had made two big bowls of rice and chicken, which apparently no-one was hungry for. Unfortunately, at some point in the evening there was no water in the house, and it didn’t come back until later today afternoon, when I was way overdue for a shower. We also managed to break my CD player somehow, and when I tried to connect the little boombox that we had brought from NYC, it turned out to be covered in stinking mold from sitting around in a closet somewhere. Besides, as soon as I hooked it up to the electrical outlet the fuse of the extension cord blew, so we were without music. At that point, it was raining cats and dogs again, and our neighbors were still chanting and drumming I think. But who cares?

It apparently was a special day for my neighbors, because this time they actually set up a huge buffet and placed a woman onto a special chair centerstage, and everybody looked particularly dressed up. First I thought there’s going to be a wedding, but then I realized that the woman was very pregnant, so no doubt she was already married. I am guessing it was some kind of special child blessing. So while we are having a party on the terrace with our Muslim furniture, there was lots of singing and chanting for Ganesh Chaturthi on the parking lot, later followed by their usual play of Bingo or some sort of raffle, which seems to always come with the food after the ceremonies.

We ended up placing a delivery order for 20 big bottles of Kingfisher, so everyone was happy (well, apart from that there was no diet coke, no water, and no juice I guess). Not surprisingly, I ended up going to sleep while the party continued, but when I woke up, my apartment was in a surprisingly good shape, thanks to K and P, who will hopefully help me finishing off the remaining ten large bottles of Kingfisher one of these days.

Of course, I had a very lazy day at the coffee shop today. But when I got back home, there was a small procession of teenage boys (for some reason, most of these processions seem to be conducted by teenage boys), who were driving their Ganesh in a big truck, spearheaded by about a hundred of them drumming and dancing like crazy. So when I went to take some pictures, they went really wild and put on an extra show. Before I knew it, they pulled me right into the middle of them, and of course my first idiotic thought was Uh oh, there goes my camera!

They had no interest whatsoever in my camera other than shouting and yelling to take pictures of them while they were dancing around me like, well, I guess like Indian teenage boys at Ganesh Chaturthi. The fun only lasted for about 15 seconds, when some important looking older guy said thanks, shook my hand, and escorted me out of the crowd back to the sidelines, i.e. basically into the traffic. I almost got hit by the car, took some pictures of the back of the truck, and then went home.

The big final day, when supposedly thousands of Ganeshes get immersed into the water is either next Saturday or next Sunday; there’s different reports about that. I bet it will be one crazy scary event, but I am determined to go right into the middle of it, wherever that is.