Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan

Another Cheap Title...

Bombay it is where I am going to start my phase of the life where for a change, I am going to be living on my own after about 24 years of living on almost everyone else. Well for starters I never liked Bombay much from the limited interaction I had with her , I must have made about 3 trips to Bombay in my entire life with one being a mere stopover for a connecting flight, Remember staying in Bombay for about a day, because of a technical glitch in the flight, It used to be known as Bombay those days, First impression of the city was at a pedestrian crossing “ This place is bloody stuffed like a can of sardines” saw this huge crowd waiting to cross the road at a signal and I am thinking that the population of the entire town where we used to stay then would be less than the amount of people waiting to cross the road , In other words I found it extremely crowded , a suffocating environment, and a place which had this petrol laden moisture which sticks on you giving you a second shade , never had a chance to interact with the people out there or the places.

Second time around went last year to receive a prize for a paper, my sole contribution to the Endeavour was to go collect the prize as the other chappies had an exam, called up a friend who was working in Patni, or was it I flex, Shankar aka Mudalvan, he was the savior, came to pick me up at Santa Cruz at about 11 in the night, it was way off his regular route, we then took up about three modes of transportation to reach his place , my trip to Bombay form Bangalore had taken just about the same time to reach his place. The next day around, manage to get a ride on his company’s bus till a particular place, and was advised to take a train to Bandra, I had to go to the Taj there, well me in all my innocence went to the station, it was just a ten minute trip to Bandra, I go there and see this huge crowd waiting to get into a single bogey, there I was wondering if I would be able to survive this seething mass of Humanity, I gave up, took a cab, reached Bandra , One thing positive about the entire trip were the people who in their own way did help us out and the cabbies who insisted on using the meter

Another chum from Bombay, who goes up with this naara “Mumbai rocks” on all his internal messenger posts claims that anyone who lived in Bombay/Mumbai would be a Bombayite for life. Let’s see how true it is…..

As of now I do know where I am going ………..

It is to this crowdy, humid, eternally busy place which hopefully shall be better than I think it is going to be, But on another note, am going to live on near the sea, for a land lubber like me, Bah …………………


P.s: Bombay I presume is the only place where IPO advertisements are painted on buses