While writing this entry, we hear that Slumdog won eight Oscars! The movie is about Mumbai, otherwise known as Bombay, a city that 19 million people call home (almost 3 times the population of Arizona). We are no longer in the state of Rajasthan, we flew Jet Airways to Mumbai in the state of Maharastra (one of the 24 states of India).
You'll see in the short video below that there are a LOT of slums, sidled right up to the new construction of huge highrises. The insanity of Bollywood's home is profound - tens of thousands of stray dogs, beggars, cows, mothers and children all competing for food in the garbage dumps, which are everywhere and mostly consist of plastic bags. This is the other side of India: it's living close to the earth.
There is a huge, thick layer of dirt that has landed on the plastic bag roofs of these huts and hangs in the air from the burning of diesel fuel, and the soundtrack to this place is the constant, high-pitched horn beeping. Beeping isn't done to get someone out of the way, it's mandatory if one is passing another cow, dog, person, bicyclist, truck, bus, car, or tuk tuk (the three-wheeled rickshaw.)
As we began this 1.5 hour ride north from Mumbai to Ganeshpuri, a tiny village where Marty lived in 1977, we listened to our Om Mane Padme Hum CD from Nepal. Then, we suggested our driver, Ganesh, who spoke almost English, choose the music. Between the incessant beeping and the Ganesh's favorite Bollywood song, the trip seemed like its own movie.
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