Dear friends,

For one month now, I have been in Mumbai and settled down a little bit.

Slowly, I had time to build a social network within and outside BCG and to understand better my environment.

MUMBAI IS A CITY OF CONTRAST

• People sleep in the street just beside the best hotels
  Even in the best quarters of Mumbai, you will be confronted with the consequences of tremendous incomes difference. Where some live in an apartment costing several thousands USD a month, you will find poor “untouchable” sleeping right on the ground with a unique tissue on their face to shelter them.
  Daily, I take the taxi for going at work that costs me only 20 Rs (almost 0.6 CHF). But for some Indians, this represents the salary of a whole day of hard work.
• Most women dress traditionally but young girls tend to wear tight jeans
  Most of Indian women still dress traditionally. At work, on the street, everywhere you see them in those wonderful and colourful sarees. Younger girls however, influenced by Bollywood (the Indian movie industry) and western videos on MTV, tend to wear tight jeans and more provocative blouses. On the other hand, most men were just normal trousers and long sleeves shirts (despite the temperature).
• Prices for a full lunch range from 18 to 1000 Rs (0.6 to 30.0 CHF)
  Mumbai is a paradise if you like Asian food. You can find everything in every quality; it is just a question of price. A Thali (traditional dish with rice, lenses and some vegetables) costs only 18 Rs and fills your stomach for a while. For this price however, you will be served in a small restaurant with steel tables and neon lights. You are there to feed yourself, not for spending a romantic candle light dinner.
  On the other hand, you can eat in very pleasant but exclusive restaurant, with excellent service and delicious seafood nicely presented. In the background, you will hear music from Café Del Mar and if you are lucky, you can even have a veritable cappuccino for desert.

SOME VERY BUT ALSO MANY ABSOLUTELY NOT EFFICIENT PROCESSES

• Employees of bank and telephone companies come to your place with the required forms (if they come…)
  This was quite surprising. Within three days, different people came to the office to present me the various advantages of their products, brought along all the required forms to enable me having rapidly a mobile phone number and a new bank account. The drawback of this system is that once you signed, it gets almost impossible to fetch that guy anymore if you have any complaints. He will always promise you to come tomorrow, but that can easily mean one week.
• I had to provide a 2cm thick file and to go through interviews to get my apartment
  Getting into my apartment was a Sisyphus work. Although there was an informal agreement that we would get the place, the landlord was asking every second day for additional documents (including my CV, copies of official documents, recommendation letters from BCG, etc). Once they obviously could not think of anything else to ask, I had to go and present myself in front of five people representing the landlord. Basically, I had to comment my CV and assure them that I will behave nicely. I somehow convinced them but had to wait one more day to be able to move in. Click here if you want to have a look at it.
• Every basic repair required four people: one to assess the work to be done, a second for reassessing the work to be done and a third one to tell the fourth one what to do J
  It might sound funny, but this clearly the impression I get. It is probably very difficult to find qualified workers. So people just come, kind of all rounder, give it a try and realise that it won’t work. So they call in the next one, who again will follow the same procedure… As a result, I am still waiting for my stove to be properly installed, to get hot water in the kitchen and the A/C in the bedroom to be repaired.

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Last updated: 3/2/2003 4:32 PM More about Mumbai Back home