Investigating India #1: First Impressions
A stream-of-consciousness report from my first few days in India!
First Impressions
The first thing I saw from Indian soil was an array of solar panels, visible from the window of my just-landed plane in Delhi (I had found cheap tickets to Delhi and would take a transfer flight to Mumbai), The airports’ aesthetic was a very familiar “globalized capitalism” one, with smooth minimalist design, “blobjects,” and a mall-like food court near the departure gates, but even in this homogenized hub, the content was becoming distinctly unfamiliar to me, redolent of rapidly industrializing and increasingly prosperous India1. I saw huge banner ads for appliances from Vijay Sales, a Best Buy-like retail chain I’d never heard of before. The card readers at the airport restaurants bore the logo of Indian fintech company Paytm. Chinese EVs, made by the increasingly globally dominant BYD company (still import-banned in the USA) stood shinily in one corner. A TV discussed the latest election results from Gujarat with the chyron BATTLE FOR BHARAT, and another played a dramatic high-production values ad for JINDAL: THE STEEL OF INDIA. When had I last seen a steel ad on American television?
Once I landed in Mumbai (aka Bombay: many people I met still called it that2), I waved off the offers of a cab or rickshaw and walked to my Airbnb-booked dormitory. That night and the next morning, my first impressions of the city were a pointillistic palimpsest of past, present, and future urbanism. Mumbai is famously a mosaic of income levels, architectural styles, and public service reliabilities, agglomerating organically with titanic modern buildings and highway flyovers right next to densely packed tenement-like neighborhoods. Some cultural aspects were quite unexpected: on my way from the airport to the hotel, I heard a stereo playing loud, upbeat, vocals-heavy “dance floor-like” music emanating from lit windows and thought “nightclub.” As I got closer, I saw the saffron paint and icon of Ganesh, and revised my assessment to “temple.”
The air pollution wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected: my eyes stung a bit sometimes and my glasses seemed to always need cleaning, but that was all. By contrast, the infamous Mumbai traffic was much worse than I expected: there seemed to be no traffic lights anywhere, only a very occasional lane divider or crosswalk, and every driver basically did whatever they felt like at any time. Horn noises were a constant. At one point, I asked a traffic policeman how to cross the street safely. He shrugged and said “Jump?”
It would have been easy to just focus on the things I saw that conformed to traditional stereotypes about India; there was a cow in the street across from my hotel, feral dogs and cats were a common presence, plastic trash piled up in corners. But I’d seen the statistics on how fast India was improving its citizens’ quality of life, and I could see a lot of evidence of a growing, progressing society on the ground as well. The streets swarmed with cars, bikes, motorbikes, three-wheeled motorized rickshaws, and embattled pedestrians, but I didn’t see a single old-style human-powered rickshaw anywhere. Some of the buses whizzing by were fully electric. Several construction sites had signs on the side boasting that a new stop for the nascent Mumbai Metro Line 3 would soon arise. Near the center of town, cranes hovered around growing skyscrapers. I could count the number of times strangers asked me for money on one hand: far, far, less than I’d experienced in Madagascar, and a similar rate to some American cities’ panhandlers. Smartphones were seemingly everywhere. On the outskirts near my dormitory, only a few hundred meters away from where I saw the cow in the street, I found an air-conditioned café selling delicious Western-style coffee and pastries, which is where I’m finishing up this first article now. Maharashtra, the state where Mumbai is located, has seen a substantial drop in child deaths in recent years thanks to spreading public health initiatives, with the infant mortality rate dropping from 19 per 1000 live births in 2018 to 16 per 1000 in 2020. Life is getting better here.
Bright and early on the morning of May 3, my first full day in India, I took the Mumbai city bus to go to the delightful Mumbai Zoo, where I met up with the Wildlife Conservation Society India team!
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