The Improvised City

🗓 posted Aug 26, 2024 by Josh Erb
🔢 1239 words
🏷
a dispatch from: Mumbai, Maharashtra

I've been dragging my feet on writing about my new city for a little bit. I wanted to take some time to make sure I had seen more of it than just the small corner our apartment complex is located in. I also needed the time to take stock of my own feelings about traveling at this moment in my life, or even honestly this moment in time.

Before I share impressions of Mumbai, I want to mention two big things that have struck me as significant compared to my previous experience with living abroad[1].

First and most impactful, the ubiquity of smart phones has made living abroad incredibly easy. It's a bit astounding that this has been a change I can feel so acutely in my own lifetime. When I was an exchange student in France, the iPhone had only just been released in the U.S. and only wealthy nerds had one. Internet on phones existed, but it was something you accidentally opened on your flip phone and then freaked out because of the outsized impact it would have on your monthly bill. This has completely changed in the past decade and a half. I now travel with a smart phone that is on an international data plan. If I need a ride somewhere in the city, I can pull up an app and have a car that knows my destination pull up in minutes. If I'm not sure about what something is called when I'm at a store, I can pause and look it up on my phone so that I have a better chance of having a successful interaction with a shop keeper who speaks limited English. I can't stress enough how significantly this has shaped the experience of navigating the context of a foreign country.[2]

Second, my past experiences have made me much more comfortable with discomfort. Living outside of your own country is always uncomfortable. This is inevitable. When you step outside of the context of your own culture, you are immediately confronted by the assumptions you make about daily life because these assumptions are not standardized across cultures. No matter how experienced of a traveler you are, this will always be true. However, my life to this point has been filled with experiences beyond the border of my own cultural sense of comfort. I had the opportunity to be an exchange student right after high school, I studied abroad in college thanks to a language scholarship, hell - I had a Midwestern upbringing and I lived in DC for the last 10 years. These experiences are compounding in one sense. The more familiar the feeling of discomfort, of not being entirely sure what the expectations or norms are for a given social situation, the more adept you become at navigating them. An imperfect metaphor that comes to mind is that it's a bit like learning to ride a motorcycle. The moment you learn to work with the machine, rather than fight against it, is the moment the experience becomes enjoyable rather than terrifying. Each successive ride adds confidence. Confidence allows you to feel the thrill of the experience rather than cringe at it. At least in my experience.

The Feeling of Being in the City

With those long winded caveats out of the way, what do I think of this new city? This has been the hardest thing to put my finger on. India itself is very different from anywhere else I've traveled. That being said, Mumbai feels very different. For starters, it is a sprawling city of ~24 million residents. The largest city I lived in prior to this point was Chicago, with its ~4 million people. But there's more to it than that, urbanization in India - the shift from mostly rural populations to highly concentrated urban populations - also appears to be happening[3] at a much more rapid clip than any other city I've lived in.

What do you do when the population of a city explodes faster than infrastructure projects can keep up? You improvise. This, to me, seems to be the central feature of the character of Mumbai. The people keep coming, and the local government is frantically trying to keep up. But this is an impossible task, and so in the gap between government structure and demand, what is there? There are the localized improvisations of the residents. By the time infrastructure projects eventually catch up, the improvisations are so thoroughly established and depended on by the community, that any improvement project must account for them and incorporate them. As a result, to be anywhere in Mumbai is to feel the presence of these innumerable improvisations. Either as the fluid, novel solutions to a pressing need or as a past solution that has solidified and become a cornerstone in daily life.

This is my anecdotal feeling of Mumbai after being here for only a few weeks. I am confident it will shift and change as I become more familiar with my home over the next two years. I don't pretend that my first impressions are always the most correct, but it will be interesting to look back on this post and see if this feeling has persisted.

An impression that I can share more confidently: India absolutely spoils you culinarily. I don't think I have any food that wasn't completely delicious. Even something as simple as a cup of fresh sugar cane juice for ₹15 from a stand. Much better than I expected, and when I asked it was because they add ginger and lemon as they serve it. There is a special attention to the details with any food you find. Currently my biggest problem is remembering the names of the dishes I've eaten so that I can re-order them.

Sights: Seen

This past weekend, Karolina and I decided to do our due diligence and book a guided tour of the city we've moved to. Here are a few of the sites we saw[4]:

bird's eye view of dhobi ghat, an open air laundry

the Gateway of India

the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, sometimes just called "The Taj"

a string of boats moored just off the coast near the Gateway of India

a plaque commemorating the historic residence of mahatma gandhi

Gandhi's preserved living quarters

a famous place to grab vada pav near Mumbai's train station, included here primarily for my own future reference

the inside of a section of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai, previously known as "Crawford Market"

  1. If you're curious about these previous experiences, you can browse the #france or #morocco blog tags here on my site.

  2. There is also, of course, a part of me that feels mournful about the loss of "friction" when living abroad. Yes, it was harder to accomplish simple tasks at first. But the deepened cultural knowledge and personal satisfaction that follow overcoming these frictions - after significant trial and error - are/were one of the most enriching parts of traveling abroad. However, this is a subject for a different post.

  3. or have happened? it is both something that has occurred and is constantly occurring, I suppose.

  4. We're still in the middle of the Monsoon, so it was a pretty gray day. I am also forced to admit that my photography skills are middling at best.

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