Contrasts

So far I mostly wrote about the reality in Kovalam, where the school where I’m volunteering (SISP) is. In the last few days I visited Mumbai, where a friend of mine lives. Mumbai is a metropolis. About 12 millions people live there. There are skyscrapers, flanked by slums. Poverty is more evident in Mumbai than in Kovalam because there are people literally living on the street: during the day they sell flowers or other small things and in the evening they lie down and sleep on the pavements. Many children only know this reality.

Mumbai is also the city where the richest people in India live. Along the beach there are fabulous houses-palaces that are an insult to poverty and surely not very environment-friendly. The areas that I visited of Mumbai didn’t have heaps of garbage on the side of the street, nor cows in the middle of the street. The people that you can see come from any sort of origin: rich, poor, fashionable, working class, etc. The traffic is terribly noisy and congested.

As every big city, Mumbai is a melting pot, but it also feels impersonal. I lived four years in London and one thing I didn’t like very much there was the impersonality: it is very difficult to meet new people and most of the people don’t really care if you’re walking on the street naked/crying/etc. Kovalam, instead, is so small that within one week many people know you, and you know them. I came back after 5 days in Mumbai and within a few hours I met three students from the school and several surfers of the Kovalam Surf Club (which is also part of SISP) plus friends knocked at my door when they saw the light on. All of them welcomed me as if I had been away for a long time and was coming back home. Isn’t it nice when you are in a foreign country, to be treated as part of a family?!