Adapted?

The film turned out to be a silly comedy. Despite the fact that it was all in Hindi, I got most of it. A floaker guy spots a beautiful girl, miraculously she agrees for a date, but he doesn’t have a car to pick her up with (!). So he decides to steal the new shiny car his dad got especially for his sister’s writing. Obviously everything goes wrong, the car is stolen, replaced, found, mistaken, but all ends well. Formulaic characters, including a funny sidekick, a girl who is so pretty she thinks she can always get what she wants (ugh, my favorite kind), straightforward plot, nothing much. Except that it’s a Bollywood movie. So: there is a lot of loud music all the time and every now and then the characters sing and dance; the language is a weird mixture of Hindi and English; in the middle of the film there is an interval; the viewing starts with everybody standing up for the national anthem. The main characters are Indian, but look almost as if they were white. All in all, a pretty interesting experience.

On the next day I checked out from the hostel, took my bag and went exploring further north. First, the Mahalaxmi temple. Actually, it’s an entire street with multiple temples of various gods, together with a good deal of street shops. I took my shoes of to walk into quite a few of them, and I was lucky to see a part of the service (I’m not sure what the right word is here, since the Hindu practices are nothing like Christian mass). I`m getting used to the fact that the specifics of Hinduism don’t require impressive temples as some other religions do – most here are literally just shrines, little, but actually quite charming. Once again I was left pondering on the lack of decorum – the temples are mostly in a pitiful state, very run down, surrounded by mess and heaps of rubbish. Moreover, imagine the colorful shrines, garlands of beautiful flowers, interesting architecture and sculptures.. and a red LED display panel bang in the middle of the main altar with some text on it.

Right behind the Mahalaxmi, with a view at the Haji Ali mosque

The Hali Aji mosque was no different – located on a tiny island and connected with just a path with the city, the way up to it leads through dozens of shops, piles of rubbish, and curious and numerous people with scales charging money for checking your weight (are you meant to weigh yourself before and after you go to check how many sins you lost?). The mosque is rather underwhelming, though perhaps the fact that the tourist guide described it with some grandeur made me expect too much.

And right berhind the mosque…

In the meantime I discovered that wearing sunglasses partially protects from pushy vendors – if they can’t see I’m looking at their stuff they don’t always try to stop me. Also, it makes the fact the people stare at me a bit more bearable – and I mean stare, in Europe people check me out but stop looking when they notice that I noticed, while here they just keep looking.

I then found my way to mahalaxmi dobi ghat, a washing district. Literally, a couple blocks worth of space with dozens of people hand washing clothes. And after that, Mumbai City Museum. An interesting collection of local craftworks and info about crafting and general lifestyles. Incidentally, I think that the fact that this 16 million city has literally two fairly small museums and one gallery reflects the character of the place.

The zoo is full of texts like that

Finally, with a couple hours to kill, I popped into the nearby zoo. Now I can sort of understand the local obsession with security checks in museums, the policemen and scanning gates in the cinema puzzled me a bit – but in the zoo? Seriously? Anyway – the place wasn’t too interesting, all the same as everywhere else, just in a run down version.