the madness that is mumbai.

well, mumbai is already madness. without me having to add to it...

I had just relocated to Bombay. Leaving Bangalore was a tough decision for me, but had to make it for the sheer adventure of exploring life in a new place. I have always been a vagabond at heart, and somehow found the idea of being rooted to a single place a little unsettling. But on second thoughts, I now realize how much I have traded for this new sojourn. I left behind everything I have built in the two years that I have stayed there – the friendships, the familiarity of buses and bus-routes, the places that I got so used to frequenting, the people, the workplace... Well, sometimes you do want to break free from the mundane familiarity of places, things and people.
but then again, sometimes you just want the reassuring comfort of familiarity.

Bombay is an enchanting place. Love it, hate it, you just can’t ignore it. That’s Bombay for you! the city of dreams, a city where swanky complexes juxtapose grimy slums, and filthy gutters flow beside plush multiplexes. A city that is perpetually on the run, and a city that proverbially “never sleeps”. And what can perhaps capture the quintessential spirit of Mumbai, better than its local trains?? I start my day traveling in them. And so do millions of others. An estimated 4 million people use them everyday!! Crowded, filthy yet fast and efficient, they operate as the lifeline of Bombay. Each one of these trains is designed to carry 1400 people, but at peak hours, sometimes the number swells to 7000, that’s five times its capacity! people squeeze into each other, until you believe it’s practically impossible to fit another person in. And then the great Mumbai miracle happens!! Another person actually pushes his way inside… people push, shove, fall down, hurt themselves, fight, swear, jostle, but somehow eventually make it to their destination. The train stops for about a minute at each station, and about a hundred people push in and out of each bogie in that time. A slurry of action, accompanied by the din of frantically rushing footsteps ensues even before the train stops… it’s worth watching, albeit from a safe distance. And as the train starts moving out, the last trickle of desperate people fight for the foothold at the door. Scores of people hang from the train, hinged precarious at the footboard. some with one foot on the foothold, some with half-a-foot.
It’s Mumbai :-) and it teaches you a lesson or two in endurance, patience and more importantly, to fight for survival.

the first mussoorie international writers festival

The first mussoorie internatonal writers festival – experiences.

There’s something about mussoorie...something that makes writers flock to it. Or something that makes it’s residents turn into writers. Well, could it have something to do with the sparkling air, the hills and mountains, or maybe the unhurried pace of life? How else could you explain the fact that mussoorie has the highest "per-capita" number of resident authors in the country? For a town of it’s size, with a popuation of 35,000, it has a disproportionately huge lot of popular authors. Be it Ruskin Bond, who captured the imagination of generations of school children, with his tales of this hill-station or the pioneers of travel writing in this country – hugh & colleen gantza, or Stephen Alter, whose travelogues to the Himalayas are the next best thing to actually visiting them! And then, there are billl aitken, sudheer thapliyal, ganesh saili, allen seally, namitha gokhale, and a whole lot of writers popularly referred to as the “mussoorie school” of writers. Anita desai was born here, the first Australian novelist john lang was buried here, jim Corbett, Rudyard kipling have both been here…isn’t that SOME list??

And then, one cold evening last winter, when Steve Alter told me that he is organzing a writers festival in mussoorie, I was all excited!

I had visited him to get my book autographed. It was around 9 in the night( quite late, for a hill station in winter ) And inspite of my impromptu visit at such a ghastly time(man, I have guts!), steve was very inviting, friendly and kind to me. I apologized profusely, told him how much I enjoyed reading his book “ all the way to heaven” and how much I am looking forward to reading his “sacred waters”, flashed it before him and requested for an autograph. And before I could realize it, we already had been talking for an hour!! We talked about the treks we had made to common destinations, the events and places about which he had written about, about mussoorie, about the writing assignments he was working on and writing in general. I was particularly amused when I found out that his grandfather was among the first to discover dodital, a beautiful lake in the Himalayas, where I have trekked to in 1999. The dairy of his grandfather carrying the accounts of that trek had influenced steve so much, that he wanted to visit the place so badly for so long. But it was not until 2001 that he could actually visit the place. The reason? this lake lies outside the “inner boundary” that existed ( with china ), beyond which which no foreigner/anglo-indian was allowed to venture for security reasons. This inner boundary was hundreds of kilometers well within the Indian territory, and was finally opened to everyone in the late nineties.


Well, that’s when he told me that he would be organizing a writers festival, with sponsorship from the winterline foundation along with the publishing houses of penguin, roli books and harper Collins. He handed me a brochure, and told me I could attend the sessions!!!! my reaction was that of disbelief! Well, here’s a writers festival, with the list of invitees including the who’s who of india’s literary scene! What more could I ask for???


That was December, 2006. Cut to April 2007....

to be concluded...