Yes , finally , i get to write a travelogue , and its not about the experience i had ,trying to catch some sleep after 15 hrs of work , in an AC bus with a 90s mallu movie playing in the background..Yaaay..
Bombay , is one of the most beautiful cities i have visited so far.Sure , it has a lot of negatives , by which i mean the slums that you see all around it.The infinity of wannabes and most importantly the "unimportant" unemployed who stach all their dreams in a 150 Rs ticket that brings them to the city they call their own,Aamchi mumbai.
The place is great if you look at how well oiled it is for such a big city.Yes , you might have heard them all shouting at the mumbai corporation all their lives for spoiling their drainage system and crap like that.The point is that people can always shout at the Govt for amenities that never exist.This ofcourse is the first rule among the countless ones that we can use to excuse ourselves from social responsibility... (i wonder why people never took up rainwater harvesting...hmmm..)..
The awesome part -I
The must see in Bombay , the one place you cannot miss,the one place if you miss, will make you equivalent to a college goer who has not tried watching a single episode of how i met your mother .. (its awesome, just had to put it in somewhere..) , is the greate MARINE DRIVE ! (if you lost the context , read again... :)
Marine drive is like the big daddy of all sea shore views in india.I can swear that there can be no other place like it , anywhere in india , simply coz india definitely has no city which has managed to bring up about a 150 skyscrapers arranged in a clean circumference of a semicircle which inturn gapes ,to a million nautical miles of an endless ocean (k technically , its the arabian sea...yes,its not a million nautical miles or anything...).They say its view is absolutely brilliant at night with all the lights and everything.Never managed to catch that.Had to make a choice between that and the train .
Wah-Taj
It would be impolite , not to mention a big chunky sandwich which we had on the way.Mumbai style ofcourse...Huge volumes of cheese and masala..(in a sandwich ..yes !)
Then it was the Taj Hotel,the big daddy when it comes to the maximum coverage for a building in a day without excess replay.. ( K that is an overstatement , but it got a lot of live coverage )...not to mention the monument of how stupid pakistan thinks we indians are..(Pakistan needed bigger evidence,i thought the Taj was big enough..)
PS : We went to see the gateway of india , it stood there masking yet another beautiful view of the mumbai sea coast...( :) ).But it would be really rude if i said that it didnt add to the incredible beauty of the city at all...(its a pity that i did not get enough time to see it up close.).
The not so whirly sealink !
The worli sealink looks beautiful,traverses around 4.5 km by sea , and charges you around 75 for a one way cruise for it and if u are a person who is just wanting to take a round trip around it just like me , understands that you are not going to come around this place too often and the makes you pay only 110 for the whole trip..The sea is beautiful, the coastline beautiful, and now add to it the incredibly symmetric trusses that emanate from a 50 ft tall titanium rod-pillar ,arranged beautifully ,forming moire patterns with the adjacent pillars...God , lemme tell you, made the moire patterns for good..."Yes, sometimes beauty is confusing"... .. is what he might have wanted to say... :).The sea in worli isnt bad too .We managed a nice 1 hr sit on the barricades which opened up to a 10 ft fall to a shore that was hardly 10 metres , before the sea came up and gobbled it up again......I thought it was hard to find beauty in shoreless seas, but then mumbai proved me wrong.
Mocha~
The friend that he always has been, or should i say the really confused and crazy fudge he always has been , and as a matter of fact we all have been, any plan involving a long pipe tat spews out smoke almost propotional to the amount of desperate love for nirvana you put into it, always brings out a shrill YES DUDE ! in a matter of micro seconds..well , i dint say everybody agrees to the plan ,take for instance me the non - smoker. . well , the only non - smoker...But wen tough times like these come where you need to sacrifice your obvious shortage of options for nothingness,....Well .. u have to..
The coffee at mocha was deplorable though, the girls i might have liked to have coffee with were not - so -deplorable , which would again be too-much-of an understatement.I wonder what happens to those chicks who migrate from bangalore to bombay...Do they get hotter ? find it hard to survive coz there are too many mumbai chicks who hardly have to try nor carry any o those fake english accents or go for flat 50 sales...nor fake gucci....Hmm i wonder , what would happen to the fake chicks ,if the world were Bombay.....
"Friends never say Goodbye " -- Elton John (and lots english speakin folks.Eltons more famous..Ever wondered how all the ppl say the same thing and only the famous one gets lauded for it ? wtf ! like amitabh bachan sayin Shabba Khair .. feel bad for those urdu ppll... :( )
K M DEVIATING>......IT was time to say goodbye to our dear friend leaving for a quest beyond the oceans and hills to find his destiny, the vending machine in the computer science department which would puff out a pack of pod,the way i see it if hes planning to do whatever hes doin here in india,in an american way... :P
Nah ! fuk it ! It was time to say goodbye and we did in our usual fkoff dude way.Hugged .. somehow, and then managed to run to the Parel railway station.The local train never cheated and we reached Dadar in around 5 mins.All i remember after that is gulping down an old russian salad sandwich and goin to deep slumber and waking up to see some real beautiful scenery in karnataka.....
Home sweet home..was not so sweet again .. (in ref to the bangalore home ,with no sea coasts.)