Wanderlust Heaven!

Mumbai’s a far more liveable place than it was years ago.  As with some other cities I’ve spent time in, it’s slowly becoming “normal.”  Define that as you may…I have a simple definition along the lines of there being a decent slew of restos, bars, cinemas, shops, hotels such that you can lead a reasonably civilized existence.  We may not be entirely there yet in Mumbai, but it really has come a ways.

Funny how small this world really is – an invaluable help to my move here has been Karen, the cousin of Tufts/New York friend Eric (actually, his wife’s cousin), who lives here and who hooked me up large with the Yahoo and Facebook Bombay Expat Group boards.  Within mere minutes of joining these two sites, and sending a quickie intro/help me find a apartment broker email, I got numerous replies, not only with the names of agents, but also invitations to various social events.  Bingo.  That, plus my existing contacts, my seemingly-fun new work team, and the Hash House Harriers (last Sunday of every month – I made nearly all my friends here last time round through the Hash), and I should have more than I can readily handle.  I’ll manage, somehow.

Am still staying in the Suba Palace Hotel, till I find my own flat.  More on that later.  The hotel is solid, and right in the thick of Colaba, a mosh-pit of mayhem and offerings.  Even if I choose to live elsewhere, I have a feeling I’ll be in Colaba often.

Saturday night went over to the INOX Theater (yet another offering not here back in ’92) to see Revolutionary Road, another step in my ogling of Kate Winslet in her latest string of downer flicks.  This one was devastating, a complete take-down of the American Dream (at least as it existed in the 50s).  Winslet is an absolute goddess, and her hubby Sam Mendes, the director (and a lucky guy, natch) yet again nailed the topic.  He directed American Dream, yet another race to the bottom of everyday American life. ..what a brilliant chronicler of this stuff.  I somewhat identified with Kate’s character, who based her/their future on a move from generica to Paris – she needed to have an edge in life, and so do I.  I thought the span of the movie was a bit short to fully explore the theme, there were some parts that felt clipped or even left out…still, quite well done.  Now I need to see a comedy or two – between The Reader and Revolutionary Road, I feel a bit down.

Edge aside, I should point out the benefits of a stable, predictable life.  You can cook and eat reasonably healthy food (sometimes)…you can practice/play guitar…you can get into a regular exercise routine.  All things I couldn’t really do on the road.  I think the key for me is to have the flexibility to change settings in life…perhaps not on a dime, but over the course of a few years.  Not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s good for me.

After the movie I took a cab up to Breach Candy, my old ‘hood, to have a few beers at The Ghetto, a good little joint on Warden Road.  It wasn’t there when I lived on Warden Road, but I’ve visited and written a bit about this place in old slog entries.  The cabbie was incredibly friendly/obsequious and insisted on giving me his mobile # so that he could serve as my personal driver around town.  Saved the # but it’s really not an issue finding a cab around here…

The Ghetto was fairly busy…sucked on a couple Kingfishers, watched some Premier League soccer, and eventually fell into conversation with Niels and Jose, two fellow expats who work for a firm that sets up law offices around the world.  Nice guys – they bought me a beer, I returned the favor, then we repeated the process till closing time.  Jose spent time in Japan and is marrying a Japanese woman, so we had lots of notes to compare.

Heard on the news that Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwe PM, and his wife were in a car accident, a truck lost control and mashed their car.  Tsvangirai was pretty badly hurt, and his wife was killed.  Raise your hand if you believe it was a random accident…

On Sunday I worked most of the day, catching up on various things.  Had dinner with a couple colleagues at Indigo Deli, a delightful little place near my hotel.  Managed to squeeze a run in beforehand – very hot and the Marine Drive promenade was crowded, so I had to weave through people constantly.  I think joining a club is imperative to maintaining my girlish figure…

The work-week was extremely busy – was basically in meetings morning to night.  Met the rest of my team and got acquainted with their work.  Had dinner with some colleagues at a terrific place in the Khala Goda area called Joss – very nice fish.  We’re working on rolling out the findings from a large piece of work the team did over the past year, and are having a big conference in Delhi in mid-May.  If you’re interested, let me know and I can fill you in – it’s public record info.

On Tuesday we had a heavy-duty team strategy session.  This is a newish team and we could go in a variety of directions – all of which, of course, require us to bring in revenues and at least pay our way.  Interesting session – some of us want to get more into implementation, the bane of most strategy consultants, others want to stick to our bread and butter.  Me, I’m closer to the latter position, but am keeping an open mind for now.

Had a beer that night at Leopold’s, the upstairs bar.  Leopold’s is more popular than ever – the terrorist attacks don’t seem to have scared anyone away from this place, at least.  Talked to a U.K. healthcare type who was in town for an anti-tobacco conference – hadn’t heard about this.  His first time in India – I could tell it was blowing his mind.

Wednesday was Holi, the Festival of Colors – a major Hindi holiday involving the throwing of coloured chalk and water balloons at others.  People get pasted with all sorts of colors – not a good day to wear your Savile Row bespoke suit.  It was a day off, but I had a trillion things to do so went to the office late morning, and wound up staying there till night – had a follow-up strategy session with two senior colleagues, made some decisions, and felt decent about the state of things.

En route to the office I asked the driver to drop me right at the office parking gate – I didn’t want to get nailed by colored water balloons, a real risk on Holi.  And they love to get tourists – last year I was in Darjeeling on Holi and got pasted pretty badly.  The driver, a Muslim guy, told me that there was a law on the books in India to the effect that people can’t throw Holi chalk/balloons at others against their will.  Right.  There are lots of laws in India, and about 3% are enforced.

The office guy, Manoj, has been here for ages and seems to spend 23 hours a day, at least, in the office.  He’s incredibly friendly and helpful – I wish he were a consultant, the guy’s energy level is astronomical.  Maybe he’s just thrilled to have a decent job…that counts for a lot here, and in fact for a lot in New York, London and Tokyo these days…

I’ve been too busy to spend money since I got here – a bit like the old days.  It’s a bit of a mixed bag, that – I’m more than happy to salt away the cash, but I do feel somewhat captive when I have meetings till night, then a business dinner, then an early morning meeting.  Still, I think I’m handling it pretty well – I’m enjoying the team and the subject matter, and am reminding myself to try and lighten up when I get swamped with commitments.

Read the Times of India – a few good stories in there.  One:  the papacy has been around for nearly 2,000 years, and in all that time precisely one Pope has visited the Holy Land, on just one visit.  Pope John Paul II was the man, back in 2000.  The current Pope is planning to go there soon.  I’m only 41 years old, but I’ve been there twice.  So there.

Second story of note:  they found a 15-inch whaleshark off Donsol, where I snorkeled with the big guys a few weeks ago.  So now they have evidence that the whalesharks grow up in the vicinity and aren’t just visiting for food.  Sort of funny to be reading about tiny Donsol in the Indian papers…

Spoke with b-school friend Hasmeeth on the phone.  He told me about a Darden India Night that’s held the last Friday of each month in Delhi – will try to make one of those.  There are quite a few fellow alumni here in India, as you’d suspect.  India’s taken over from Japan as a huge source of b-school candidates.

That night, went to an Expat Night at Henry Tham’s, a chi-chi bar/Chinese resto in Colaba.  Attendance was so-so, it being a holiday.  Good cast of characters – an older Brit who is a movie director and who lives in the Yacht Club, right across the street; a Finnish government worker; an Aussie school teacher; an NRI (Non-Resident Indian) who now lives here and works for a major re-insurance company; a Jewish attorney named Ezekial Solomon (I love it), etc.  Got into a lengthy discussion about Gujarat state and the Rann of Kutch, a massive salt marsh in that state.  Gotta see this place sometime.  Made some good social connections and drank my fair share of beers.  Silently thanked Karen for hooking me up with these online groups – I already feel part of the scene.  Of course, I still haven’t actually met Karen, who spends most of her time in Chennai (Madras), she’ll be back in Mumbai one of these days…

One fellow told me that he was in Henry Thams when the terror attacks took place, right down the street.  The bar staff pulled down the metal shutters and that kept everyone safe inside.  If the attackers had really wanted to get in, I’m sure they could have…but at least there was no collateral damage at this place.

On Thursday the office tech guy worked on hooking up my Treo to Lotus Notes, on my work laptop.  Good thing I had the presence of mind (read:  paranoia) to back up my Treo the night before, after the Expat Night, a bit tipsy – I backed it up twice, on an SD card and on my trusty VAIO.  Good thing, because the Lotus Notes database apparently overrode my Treo, erasing nearly the entire calendar and probably some other databases also.  Pulled out my VAIO, changed the settings so I wouldn’t repeat that disaster (i.e., I made the laptop override the Treo), and brought everything back from the dead.  Whew.  Then I downloaded the Treo’s stuff onto the work laptop.  Seemed to go OK…but the Treo is clearly having a hard time with the third-party software required to sync Lotus and the Treo, it’s called mNotes and my Treo isn’t having any of it.  It’s rebooting constantly, and generally quite slow.  May need to either bring in a real Treo expert to try and sort this out, or bite the bullet and get a crackberry – I don’t mind the cost, it’s more the pain of migrating all my data over.  That isn’t likely to be pretty.  Let’s see what happens…

Thursday night I had another social commitment, this time with Michael and Angeline, who I know through friend Bettina in Manila.  Michael works for the US Consulate in Mumbai, and was based for a while in Manila, where he got to know Bettina.  We met at the Woodside Inn, near Regal Theater, Michael was DJing there that night and there was a small expat gathering.  Nice little place – yet another good addition to the Mumbai nightlife scene.  It’s a “normal” little resto-pub where you can get whatever drink you like and also have some good eats.  Leopold’s is no longer the only game in town…

Late night, after a few beers with Michael, Angeline, and the re-insurance guy (I was already recognizing patterns and people), I wound up at Bade Miya with Parsod, a friend of Angeline’s from the Asia Society, and a young analyst from Deutsche Bank.  Had the usual chicken/paneer/lamb rolls standing on the street with dozens of our closest friends – i.e., random driunken, hungry people.   Then I stumbled back to the hotel to get some rest…Friday was looking like a pretty full day.

Read a bit before bedtime – still on “The Sign and the Seal,” about the lost Ark of the Covenant.  The book’s getting very weird – the author is positing that Moses was a master of ancient Egyptian magic and that the Ark may have gotten its dangerous power not from the hand of God, but from some substance, perhaps radioactive, that Moses mined from a Sinai mountain and put inside.  I think he’s reading the Bible a bit too literally – brother, it’s a good yarn and some elements are trueish, but that’s as far as I’d go.  Still, an entertaining read.

It strikes me that I’ve used and abused the Treo Memo application more than anyone in history.  If I shift to a Blackberry, it’d better have something similar – this slog would be toast if I couldn’t take notes on my smartphone.

Friday – full on.  All day meetings, which were productive, then dinner with a couple colleagues and one’s wife.  We went to Indigo, which has been around for years and is still excellent – they’ve kept up their quality, but they’ve also kept raising their prices.  Still, a nice night out.  Found out that my US-based colleague was also born in Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.  Random.

We said our goodbyes and went to our respective homes/hotels for some rest.  It was Friday night, but I couldn’t muster the joie to go out and have random experiences…so you know I was truly spent.  Spoke a bit with my US-based colleague before he got in a taxi – we trying to close the loop on a couple things, but a guy was trying to hit us up for money, and was holding up a/his baby to help his cause.  It was annoying, and my colleague told him to leave us be.  I totally agreed, but also felt sheepish given that we’re in the social change space and are focused on helping people like him.  Or perhaps not, in a strict sense – we’re focusing on helping enterprises refine their business models and scale up, which would help large swathes of the bottom of the pyramid population – we’re not in the business of giving handouts to the poor.  However you look at it, I try to be more sensitive to those begging for money, even if I don’t always hand any over…

The wild week was over – I felt like a sponge all week, absorbing information.  I’ll be happier in a few weeks/months once I’ve incorporated the knowledge and develop a point of view for myself…

On Saturday, couldn’t sleep in much, as I had appointments to see a bunch of flats.  Had two morning appointments, saw 3-4 places with each of two brokers.  Some absolute crap places, a couple good ones.  Am leaning towards a modestly-sized 1-bedroom flat in Kemp’s Corner, a stone’s throw from where I used to live.  It’s also near the terrific Breach Candy Club, where I plan to get into tip-top shape during all of my free time…sigh.

After seeing the slew of flats, had lunch at Moishe’s, a small resto owned by – wait for it – a Jewish guy.  Great sandwiches – we really need to have Moishe’s deliver to our office for lunch.  I think that’s a possibility – their stuff is so much better than the crap I ate for lunch last week.  The issue is that our office isn’t that close to any places you’d want to visit for lunch…and we’re on the top floor of the building, with slow elevators, so it can take 10 minutes to get an elevator and reach the lobby.  If you went out for lunch, it’d be at least an hourlong affair.  I certainly want to escape for lunch some days, but for now I’d better plan on eating in-house and simply trying to increase the quality…

So it’s been a full-on week – as expected.  Learned a huge amount, made some progress in finding a place to live, expanded my social calendar.  Despite it’s numerous frustrations, Mumbai may well be the city of destiny for me, at least for the next few years.  I think I can handle that.

On Thursday, while in a meeting, one of my colleagues invited me to a Saturday night party at a nightclub, Zenzi, up in Phoenix Mills/Worli.  He was DJing the party, and sounded pretty fun.  Made plans to go, and left it at that.  On Saturday, while viewing flats, my mobile rang – it was old girlfriend Roxanne, who now lives in her homeland, Nagaland, in the northeast near the Burmese border.  She was coming to Mumbai that night (she’d alerted me earlier), and wanted to hang out.  Cool.  Wound up meeting her at Henry Tham’s and having some terrific prawns and “drunken chicken balls,” then cabbing it up to Worli.  Hadn’t seen Roxanne since sometime in 1996 or 1997, in New York City – we’d both wound up there, after first meeting and spending time together in Mumbai in 1992.  She and her two fun sisters helped me get into the swing of things in Mumbai that summer, and I always tried to stay in touch with Rozelle.  We’d eventually lost touch, but found each other on LinkedIn.  And we’d tried to meet the past couple years when I was in-country, but couldn’t make it work.  Now, finally, we were in the same town and hanging out again.  Yowza.

Went into Zenzi, and eventually ran into pretty much my entire team, who were there to support our colleague, the DJ.  Good times…had lots to drink, and really covered a lot of ground with Roxanne, we had a lot to catch each other up on.  I think there was a bit of a spark there, too…but probably too many years have gone by, and anyway I tend to dislike second acts.  That said, here I am in Mumbai again.

After a few drinks we moved to the dance floor and said hi to my colleague, who was hard at work DJing, and doing a great job.  He’s quite talented and did a lot of this in the UK – he’s an NRI from there.  Roxanneand I danced for the better part of an hour…last time we’d danced together was at one of the big hotel discos in ’92, that summer we went out 5 nights a week, or partied in my flat in Breach Candy.  Back then I was very into Roxanne and she was a huge part of why that summer was so memorable and fun for me…this time I could hardly avoid being overcome with those old memories and I think she felt the same way.  When our eyes met we smiled a bit, and there was a good vibe and body language.  And perhaps I was imagining things, but I got the sense she was eager to cuddle…whereas I was not quite there yet.  It’s a bit sad that two people are rarely on the same level – in ’92 I was panting after her, and now I don’t think that’s the case – now she seems more eager.  Hmmm…how to manage this one, I wonder.  Stay tuned.

On Sunday I awoke with a headache, and had to get up and do another round of flat-viewing.  This new broker showed me 3 OK places, those are in my consideration set for the time being.  Of course, none of the places are perfect, but I can compromise on some fronts.  It’s not like I’ll be spending tons of time there…and I am used to some modest accoms from my travels.

The good thing about the often-gruesome smells of Mumbai is that you can get away with farting quite easily.  I couldn’t help but cut one when riding around with Jyoti the female real estate broker, and she just said ‘Wow, Pedder Road really stinks today.’  Not sure, on second thought, that she didn’t realize I was to blame…but Pedder Road did stink, and I think I can usually get away with this here.

Met b-school friend Rajan at Oxford Bookshop for coffee and a chat.  Good seeing him again – he gave me a few contacts that might be helpful in my new field.  Then parted ways, walked to my hotel, and came here to the office to do some work.  It’s now Sunday night and I’m supposed to have dinner with Roxanne, so I’m getting out of here.  Just 3 more things:

1 – Friend Al reminded me that my ‘Top 20 list’ was missing our insane night in Vagator, Goa where I fell off the motorbike while trying to show the traffic cop my papers.  We managed to slide out of that one intact, except for our pride…on the topic of motorbikes, riding around Laos (esp. around Vang Vieng) was another great memory, the landscape was stunning and I was really out in the middle of nowhere.

2 – my India mobile # is +91-99-8726-6011.  I’m 9.5 hours ahead of USA East Coast time, give me a jangle or text whenever you’d like.

3 – here are a few shots from the terrace of my office, I’ve had some people want to know how this looks.  The terrace looks out on an ancient Koli fishing community, and is quite visually cool:

That’s it for this week.  Over and out.

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