I’m writing this in an art gallery café, where I’m killing time until rush hour calms down and it’s a bit cooler for my cross-town trip to the railway station. The café is self-proclaimed as an ‘artist-bohemian’ joint, but all the people around me are families and a few businessmen. The music, hilariously, is an instrumental pan-pipes version of I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues! Truly ludicrous, though India seems to have a thing for covering Western songs badly, then playing them in bars and cafés, airports and shops. Don’t ask me why.
Today I got to see the touristy side of the city, visiting the imperial, hubris-filled Gateway to India, built in the Raj days to welcome one of the Georges and his wife to Bombay. It’s impressive, superbly monumental, but now is just a huge arch leading nowhere, perhaps a fitting metaphor for the end of the colonial era in general.
It was nice to see that the majority of the tourists flocking around it were Indian, not Western, and it made me smile to see these domestic sightseeing families performing exactly like their European counterparts would do in front of, say, the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. Kids looked either bored or overexcited depending on their ages, parents looked overworked and were happy to buy conciliatory ice-creams for their broods, and there was usually at least one member of the family looking confused over how to operate the latest moment-capturing piece of technology whilst the rest waited impatiently, trying to follow the shouted directions: “Back! Back! Smile! Stop hitting your sister! Stop crying! Smile! Left! Come on, smile!”
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