Mumbai Coffee House

Have you noticed how most of the new office complexes in Mumbai don't allow auto rickshaws inside?. Black and yellow taxis too.   If you are using these then you have to get off at the gate and make the long trek in. No such problems if you are in a private car or in air-conditioned cab. Those are allowed in. Though parking is a pain.   Most of these office complexes are not pedestrian friendly and you have to walk in quite a bit to reach your destination. There is no shade or shelter on the walkway. Which means that you are left at the mercy of the blazing sun these days. And it will be much worse when it rains.   Contrast this with Fort, the old CBD of Mumbai. The plethora of lofty trees there and building awnings means that you can always walk in the shade. Even if it rains. Nor does that area get flooded.   Bliss compared to the new office complexes in Saki Naka, BKC, Goregaon and Powai.   And don't ev...

If you had told me that sunny afternoon in the early 90s when I had dashed off in a cycle rickshaw  after school to pick up a gas cylinder at a godown in Kolkata, which we had booked months back, that today I would just dial the IVR on my cell, punch buttons, and half an later receive a call from a gas cylinder delivery guy to coordinate when to deliver the cylinder at our place in Mumbai I would have said, 'yeah right, next you will say we will all have telephones and can carry them with us!' Incidentally it was Bharat Gas in both cases.  Different centuries. Different cities.

Yesterday I shot with the host of a TV food show for an episode of her show. The episode is going to centre around a couple of food bloggers. The idea of the show apparently came up when the host realised that she was increasingly using blog posts to decide on where to eat rather than mass media reviews. This evening in The News Hour on Times Now Arnab Goswami suddenly looked at the camera and exhorted the audience to go viral and protest against police performing odd jobs for politicians or something like that. 'Go to Facebook and twitter and register your protest' said Goswami. Incidentally while Times Now has a twitter handle, Goswami doesn't. A bit later I was watching Barkha Dutt chat with Salman Rushdie and Deepa Mehta and their conversation suddenly turned to twitter. Rushdie pointed out that for him twitter is the fastest way of finding out what's happening around him. Barkha herself is on twitter and unlike other big TV journalists on Twitter, such ...

A colleague of mine who is getting married this month was pretty happy after they identified a flat in Andheri W that they planned to rent after they got back. Then I heard that the rent deal fell through. The housing society insists that they need a wedding certificate. Their parents met the society and yet the society didn't agree. And they can't even take the house when they get married as the certificate needs 2,3 weeks. That they are planning the wedding in some coastal spot in Kerala with loads of folks coming in doesn't count. The landlady is helpless and loses a tenant. There are many mafias in Mumbai and the housing societies sit pretty much at the top

This morning I woke up and checked twitter & facebook on the phone as I do first thing everyday. Except today wasn’t ‘any day’. The news waiting for us was the most saddening one possible. The young lady in Delhi, who was brutally raped and assaulted in the bus from hell a few days back, who since then was fighting for her life against all odds, had finally lost her battle. This anonymous girl, who became an unfortunate symbol of the atrocities that women in India are subjected to, had breathed her last. Murdered by the six monsters in that ill fated bus. I flinched the moment I read the news. My first thoughts were about what must have happened in the bus and what inhuman brutality the young lady was subjected to. If the very thought of it made one cringe and recoil in horror then one cannot even imagine how the girl who actually went though it and tried to fight it out suffered. A fight which seems to have galvanised the nation...

We were headed to town for lunch on the 7th of Feb. Almost three weeks back. We stopped at a traffic signal at Bandra Reclamation opposite the Candies turn. The road was largely empty. Suddenly there was a jolt from the back and a very loud sound. Turned out that a woman driving a silver coloured Santro had banged into our car which was stationary. We were sitting at the rear seat and were quite shaken up. We got down to check the damages. Despite the loud noise and the impact we seemed to be ok. No visible damages to us. Our car seemed to be fine too. The lady driving the car that banged into us was quite shaken up herself. She got off and kept apologizing to us. Her car seemed to be more bruised than ours even though she had banged into us. I got back into the car. I decided not to get into a fight or argument. Didn’t see the point. Didn’t want to spoil the day. So I barely spoke to her, glared and went away. When we came home that evening we figured out that things were ...

  There was an article in the papers this morning which reminded me of an incident from a while back. I had just joined the work force then.   Some folks had come to work in jeans that day. Not standard regulations. Turned out that they were on leave. They were on leave as they could not claim their LTA otherwise. But apparently had too much work, were too busy, were too important to actually go on leave. Wearing jeans at work was their honour badge. The vacation … only on paper.   It was the 90s.   Kolkata actually. Not Mumbai.   Then a new century started. A new city for me. Mumbai. Another corporate concept… ‘Half day’.   I remember at least two occasions…in two different companies where folks went all the way to the office gate taunting their colleagues, who were leaving just a bit after official closing hours, with a kindergarten bully-like taunt of ‘half day … half day’. A very prevalent form of sledging then.   Luck...