The company I am visiting here arranged a tour of Mumbai for us on Saturday - so we saw just about everything you can see. Slums, homelessness, pollution...but also some brilliant architecture, industrial genious, and the Arabian Sea. This place is a sociologist's dream - the "have's" and the "have not's", money and poverty everywhere - a culture that contains anything you can imagine. Here are two of them - pretend you are in your 7th grade Geography class, and allow me to share what I learned with you:
This? This is the outdoor laundry. There are several around the city...and each launderer is self employed and has his own clientele. He shows up at your door, picks up your things, marks them with chalk, and gives you a claim check listing everything you gave him. He does this for all of your neighbors, and then heads to the laundry...where he makes his own soap, pays for his booth rent, and proceeds to beat the hell out of each item until it is the crispest white you have ever seen. Here's the amazing thing about this operation - THEY HAVE A SIX SIGMA RATING, which, as those of you in the business world know, is pretty hard to do. It means that from a quality perspective, they are virtually never late, rarely ever misplace anything, and hardly ever ruin anything (there are all sorts of fancy metrics around their performance) - basically though, it's as close to a flawless operation as you can get - something that is studied in MBA programs around the world. And those whites? Seriously - whiter than anything I have ever seen.
Pretty amazing, given that grubby water.
So then we headed to the Jain temple. If I remember correctly, this is the richest religion in India, and also the smallest. Their monks NEVER take a bath in their lives, and they yank their hair out at the roots so that they are completely bald. How's that for a beauty operation? This temple is covered in real gold...the doors and the altar are solid silver. It's beautiful.
So there you have it - 2 tourist things about India, from me to you. OH! And yesterday? Yesterday I took a rickshaw home from the office. Hee!
4 comments:
I REALLY wish I had come to explore with you. I knew I would be kicking myself. These pictures are wonderful!
Wow that temple architecture is beyond amazing. I could go to places like that forever and never get bored.
Awesome!
That laundry situation looks like craziness. I can't believe it's so organized!
Hooray for traveling vicariously through you. I am loving it from your point of view. Very interesting.
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