Mumbai - Part One

I started my career in Mumbai. Having never left home till then, I was posted to Mumbai to manage business in Mumbai and coastal Maharashtra. My first thoughts about the city in no particular order then:

• So many people in sight and all seem to be in a hurry. But where are they rushing to?
• Apartments and apartments and apartments; what about individual houses?
• Most apartments look dilapidated and appeared as though they were crying!!!
• All of them have windows with a standard protective grill (the grill maker must have surely become a millionaire)
• People wait in queues at bus stops; they always board the bus only from the rear door and alight only from the front door. Anyone trying to jump the queue would be suitably hospitalised
• Buses would stop AT the earmarked bus stop and not 10 metres ahead/beyond
• Trains scheduled at odd timings (9.17AM, 10.22PM), no 9.15AM/10.20PM here. By the way, they would be on time, all the time, every time
• Bus conductors and drivers smartly dressed in well maintained bearing name and ID badge
• Auto/rick guys would quietly flick the metre and get you to where you wanted to go and not where they wanted you to go!!! (unlike most other Indian cities)
• These guys always seemed to have enough rupee change and importantly, enough fuel in the cab/rick (you know what I mean!!??)
• Auto/taxi waalaas pay back change to the rupee; coming from Chennai, something I was shocked looking at coz in Chennai the minimum return-worthy change was in denominations of 5/10...MIND IT!!
• A huge number of coin operated phones and people not wanting to part with them and go (someone has a bag full of one rupee coins hunh??!!)
• Restaurants all over, each with door delivery (customer centricity at an all time high here)
• People having breakfast in the car, women plaiting their hair in trains, some even chopping vegetables on their way back home
• Local trains that are scarily crowded; when the train approaches you, it is as though humanity is headed towards you (btw 'local' I learnt means 'suburban train')
• And in these crowded trains, people play cards, read a 10:1 folded version of the ET. New lessons in space management here

Well these were a first aspects that stood out as I went around the city.

More thoughts and life in Mumbai follows!!!