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A double birthday in Vakola
I suppose two kids in the neighbourhood with the same birthday is going to happen more often in Mumbai (pop 18 million) than in Booligal (pop 25), Australia - sheesh the total population of entire Australia is no more than about 24 million! In fact, at this modest little event - but with two rounds of cake for every kid's and adult's mouths, and two rounds of Happy Birthday enthusiastically sung by those same mouths - I met another guy with the same birthday as me, 8 May!
I had only my Canon 40D and 24-70mm, and I was very rusty. It was night. The room was 3m x 3m and lit by a couple of small fluorescent tubes. The kids were three times as fast as me. And I sorely missed my speedlite.
Drop a word of C&C, it will be very welcome!
1 Twin suns
2 Finger lickin'
3 Chocolate and banana kisses
4 Schwesterlein
5 Two out of three
6 Life at the bottom is a real hoot!
7 Tiger story!
8 But life at the top is better!
9 He ain't heavy...
10 XYZ
11 Manoj, Roshan, Paresh and the tiger, Kunal
12 Last but not least Mom, Raksha
Neil
I had only my Canon 40D and 24-70mm, and I was very rusty. It was night. The room was 3m x 3m and lit by a couple of small fluorescent tubes. The kids were three times as fast as me. And I sorely missed my speedlite.
Drop a word of C&C, it will be very welcome!
1 Twin suns
2 Finger lickin'
3 Chocolate and banana kisses
4 Schwesterlein
5 Two out of three
6 Life at the bottom is a real hoot!
7 Tiger story!
8 But life at the top is better!
9 He ain't heavy...
10 XYZ
11 Manoj, Roshan, Paresh and the tiger, Kunal
12 Last but not least Mom, Raksha
Neil
"Snow. Ice. Slow!" "Half-winter. Half-moon. Half-asleep!"
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Thanks for looking, Nik. Glad you liked them!
Good word, 'authentic'.
These people live in an area of Mumbai cheek by jowl with the international airport. It is usually described as a slum, but there is worse in Mumbai. To rent a place here, that is a downstairs room and an upstairs room each no bigger than 3mx3m (no plumbing) costs 7500 rupees per month, about US$ 154, or US$ 5 per day. The family who are my friends, and which the birthday boys belong to, earn on average, from a job and hawking, just about that amount, and they then still have to feed and clothe themselves, educate their children and pay for cooking gas and transport. They claw this income from the uncertainties of each single day. Two adults, one teen and four children.
They live with an incapacitating load of stress and anxiety, and their health and lives are constanly threatened in the hellish megalopolis that is Mumbai. They are no more immune to their condition than soldiers on a battlefront or chronic sufferers of serious illness.
They laugh and smile because not to would indeed be the finish of them! They rely on each other, and networking is a critical survival art, but they can scarcely be human under the conditions. The mothers of young children do not enjoy parenting, as we understand it. It is a kind of no-exit relationship which is sustained by unmeetable responsibility reacting with unmeetable need.
India as the West imagines it has disappeared. India is now an egg of capitalism which is hatching. An extensive panoply of activities is attending the birth, from investment-exploitation to socialistic amelioration. Terrorism is in the mix, too. It is one of the epic dramas of our time, of which this little double birthday party in Vakola is a tiny fragment.
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