Landed in Mumbai

Every sense is overloaded at every moment in Mumbai. People yelling, cars honking, bright lights, more people, boiling hot weather, more people, dust, smoke, and the smell. This is heaven.

It’s not a bad smell either, but you notice it the moment you leave the plane. It will stay with you while you are there and remain for a few weeks after you come back. Your clothes will have it whether you wore them or not and the clothes you bought there will have it for longer. There is nothing else in the world like it, the best way I can describe it is a mix between the smell of the pages of a dusty old book that was read to death in the 60’s but hasn’t been touched since, and the smell of your clothes after spending a night by a campfire.

Another thing that struck me as funny was that people don’t only enjoy the sensory overload but they thrive on it. Most westerners will wear a plane white or brown shirt to work or something like that. The average Indian man on the street seems to reason that “why spend all that money on a shirt and get only one colour when I can spend the same amount of money and get ten?!!” When trucks back up in Australian they beep to warn people behind. Indian trucks don’t beep, they play the latest Bollywood hit or some classic Hindi song at full blast. Drivers don’t honk their horns to warn of danger, but instead to say hello, goodbye and every word in between. On the roadside people dance to a symphony of honking, ghetto blasters, drums and the sounds of life in general. Twice on the way from the airport our cars side mirrors were knocked forward by another car and had to be pushed back into place. Welcome to India.