Our own Bollywood Flicks

Take a look at the web documentaries Elsa and I made on Bollywood tourism last week:

Thursday 13th November 2008

Priti sits in a bright red and white bedspread, tracing her fingers along the lines of a book as she mumbles the words to herself. At 10 years old, she's eloquent in both English and Hindi. She's reading Thumbelina, the tale of a tiny girl who meets adversity in everyone she meets: kidnapped by a toad, rejected by a beetle, bitten by the winter cold. Eventually, a fieldmouse encourages her to find her handsome prince. She grows wings to fly away with him.

Priti was born HIV positive. Both her parents are dead, and, here in India, she has slim chance of growing up in a family. She's a lifelong burden to whoever might otherwise foster her. She has to keep her status secret from the school she attends, for otherwise other parents, if not teachers, are sure to hound her out. When she is older, she's unlikely to get a good job, and even less likely to find a husband.

But she has found her fieldmouse in the NAZ foundation, the orphanage where she lives. Here, another 35 other children are schooled, fed, and cared for. They sleep in brightly coloured dormitories, scattered with toys and adorned with glittered decorations and cartoon-pattered curtains. A bookcase in the corner is full of books. Other children jump off beds and on to the floor, giggling and throwing paper aeroplanes.

"Most of them are the highest five in their class," says Anjali Gopalan, who has run the orphanage for eight years, alongside a peer education programme and an outreach group for infected adults and the gay community. "I can see them giving back to society. They are aspiring to be engineers and doctors and anything they want to be."

But society does not want to give back to them. Many of these children have been rejected by their families, and even by doctors and other orphanages.

The misunderstandings such children face are both physical and moral. Gopalan says that while people believe they can be infected simply by touching HIV infected individuals, they also see them - even children - as being sexually promiscuous, or otherwise behaving against society's norms.

"One child was brought to me by a woman from a major orphanage who was wearing gloves up to her elbows," she says. "A lot has to do with the fact that the medical profession is still reluctant to even touch people with HIV. Doctors are not touching patients."

In June of this year, the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) said it would work with the National AIDS Control Board (NACB) to set up 10 care homes in the most AIDS-ravaged regions of India - Tamil Nadu, Andra Pradesh, Maharastra, and Manipur. NACO has identified 32,000 AIDS orphans in India. In 2005 the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated the real number to be more than 2 million. Gopalan says she feels these are empty promises.

"I'm very grateful to the government for having done what they claim to be doing," says Gopalan. "But I know at the ground level, it's not reaching people who really need it." said Gopalan. "There's nothing being done for children. Any government minister who says that is lying through their teeth."

Tarundeep, at 15, is the oldest child at the NAZ foundation. He is a singer, whose reputation at the orphanage precedes him, though he's too shy to sing for the cameras. He has plans for the future.

"First I want to become a playback singer," He says. Though he's too shy to dance up front, he'll fill the lips of the stars who will.

Tarundeep must soon leave NAZ and join a society that will treat him and his illness with hostility. The orphanage has given him wings; now it's his turn to fly. And if he can't fly to Bollywood?

"I'll take care of NAZ," he says, chuckling gently, before going downstairs to have dinner, finish his evening studies, and say his prayers.

Tuesday 11th November 2008

A kerfuffle breaks out on board the Rajdhani Express to Delhi. At a time when many passengers are attempting to drop off to sleep, three men are shouting in Hindi.

“You are like a machine, sir,” one man shouts to the ticket inspector. And again: “you are like a machine.” It appears that two of the men have purchased senior citizen tickets, at a 50% discount, but cannot seem to produce any I.D. Despite the presence of the ubiquitous Indian moustache and manly paunch, they still don’t quite look old enough. The argument snowballs as high pitched female voices join the fray.

Taking on Indian bureaucracy is more dangerous than competing with it’s cricket team, and you’re twice as sure to lose. When something is written on a piece of paper in India, especially when it’s in someone’s job description, it’s hammered with a golden chisel. India probably has the largest list of rules in the world. And it’s not always clear who is allowed to break them and when.

For example, when do you call a place after its British name, and when must you use the politically correct post-independence moniker? Kasturba Gandhi Marg instead of Curzon Road, but Victoria Terminus Station instead of the mouthful that is Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus? Many Indians have laughed at our polite use of ‘Mumbai,’ instead of the far more common ‘Bombay.’ Try telling someone you are hoping to visit post-colonial ‘Puducherry’ rather than the original ‘Pondicherry’ and most people will just frown and look confused. The same ambiguity that applies to place names also applies to rickshaw driver etiquette, tipping, and the behaviour of traffic policemen. Rule-breaking is the secret language of India, but must have some logical system behind it. I think back to ‘Indian Mind’ and accept that as a foreigner it will always elude me.

Yesterday, we queued at the foreign traveller’s ticket desk at Churchgate Station in central Bombay. All major ticket offices in India have a separate office for tourists. In a strange fit of benevolence, Indian Railways decided to reserve foreigners a certain quota of tickets on each train. Today, however, most of the people in line look suspiciously Indian. No one bats an eyelid, and not even the portly lady behind the glass counter.

We were here to change our rail tickets for the same train the next day. When we reached the front counter, we were handed a form, faded from relentless photocopying. It was almost unreadable. After we’d filled it out, we joined the line once again.

In the meantime, a middle aged gentleman had poised himself to jump to the front of the line with the classic sideways manoeuvre. His sense of entitlement was baffling, though it wasn’t the first time we’d seen it done. The assembled ‘tourists’ would not, this time, let him get away with it, and he was neither surprised nor apologetic as he was hissed and shooed to the back of the queue.

Reaching the portly lady once again, she told us that we were too late: an hour earlier and she could have done something for us, but now…it was impossible. Didn’t we know it was impossible? Glancing at the wall clock behind her head, we were baffled by the seemingly arbitrary cut-off point. She sighed, and explained that for a higher sum, she could help us. And did we have our passports? Sadly, one of us did, and the other did not. We hadn’t needed them to book in the first place, but once again we came upon a rule that seemed nothing if not random. But we had driving licenses, and surely she could see we were foreign? If one of us was, it made sense that the other was too. We looked meaningfully around at the sea of Indian faces behind us.

“I can see you are foreign, madam,” she said. “You are white. I know you are white, you know you are white.” She sighed. “I wish I could help you.” And then she came out with a line we had heard many times before in India, the line that slid the last brick into the impenetrable wall: “It’s in my job.”

The official who draws up job descriptions, I think to myself, is a bit like the army chief in Monty Python, I think to myself, except with a bushier moustache. He sits in his office, and twiddles his thumbs. He pretends in his pomposity to know it all, and when he is forced to divulge a rule, he resorts to making it up, There’s a Railway rule book it is possible to buy from stations, and it’s several centimetres thick.

So, we give up the interview we were hoping to stay in Bombay for, and instead join the Rajdhani Express. Here, we find that the berth reservations have been entirely rejigged, and we have no idea where we are supposed to sleep. The ticket inspector standing outside with a sign points out our new numbers, and writes them on our tickets. We are half a carriage away from each other. When the train leaves, Elsa shifts bunks, choosing from the two opposite me. An old man points and shouts in Hindi.

“He says that seat belongs to someone,” translates a businessman in the berth below. Does it belong to him, I ask? “No. It belongs to someone. Someone who will get on the train later.” But isn’t this an express train? I thought it didn’t make any stops. He shrugs. “It belongs to somebody.” And so, as the man and his translator begin to fall asleep, we make a bed in tribute to the absent passenger, and Elsa considers it a rule to crawl in. For, as with faries, if you believe in a rule hard enough, it’s certain to exist.

Monday 10th November 2008

The 3.45 pm train from Churchgate to Bandra is twenty minutes late. Not that it matters; the platforms are always crammed with people, the women pushing around each other, creating a kaleidoscope of sari silks, the men a throng of filthy shirts and sacks held up in the air. As the train pulls in, and passengers pour off, another load climbs in, elbows out, anxious to board, even though the train won’t leave for at least another ten minutes. It’s every person for themselves: God help you if you stop to apologise for treading on someone’s feet. If you’re lucky enough to land a seat, someone is bound to ask where you are getting off, and then say, assassin-like, “when you go, this seat is mine.” We get into the all-women’s carriage, and Elsa muses as we cower in a corner, is this some old-fashioned way of separating the sexes, or is it just to protect the women from the men?

While we are stationary, a couple of boys surreptitiously jump on the train, avoiding the train stewards, to sell snacks before jumping out the other side. By the time we pull out, it is impossible to remove your elbow from someone’s face without hitting someone else with it anyway. Some hang half outside the open doors, their scarves blowing precariously in the wind. The smell of fish floats disperses through the carriage as wives are bringing their groceries home from the docks. During the journey, old women with tattered saris tied beneath them like sparkling loincloths squeeze through impossibly small spaces between ladies, holding aloft oranges to sell, or costume rings, or sweets made from apricots, shoving them in front of faces that are practically eyeball to eyeball already.

India laughs in the face of the Malthusian theory. With a population of 1.2 billion and growing, the country is still growing fast. It is estimated to pip China by 2035. In addition, India has 25 million expats in 35 countries abroad. Its insatiable growth – around 25% in the past ten years alone – would, it is assumed, leave the country’s infrastructure staggering under its weight. In reality, sanitation and poverty is just as much a problem as it ever was, but no worse. The levels of starvation are no higher in this decade of population explosion than they have been before. The government are slowly raising levels of literacy, and more and more ordinary children from rural areas are speaking English as well as their regional language, giving them hopes of easier social mobility. More young people are studying abroad, only to come back to contribute to their country’s economy. There are as many hopes for India’s next generation. Malthus would be left scratching his head.

A corollary of India’s huge population is its employment situation. More people require more work. India’s job creation, and cheap labour rates, have made the country a service culture. There is someone to do everything for you: to hand you a hand towel in a high class hotel, to open the door on your way into a café. In restaurants, there are some waiters who simply stand all evening, backs pushed straight against the wall. Pull into any main train station and a dozen unformed men will descend, ready to take your baggage ten feet to the front entrance. Electronic ticket machines are few and far between, despite the length of the queues on the concourse. Instead, ticket clerks fuss behind clear plastic screens.

And yet in certain circumstances, it’s hard to see it happening any other way. In Bombay, hundreds of tiffin-wallahs are responsible for ferrying packed lunched from kitchens, cafes and even housewives to the desks and dens of workers. For want of a travelling lunchbox and a microwave for reheating, they deliver 600,000 meals each day, with a centralised sorting office co-ordinating the whole system. In another area of the city – one that has now become a tourist destination – is Mahalaxmi Dhobi Gat, where hundreds of people create a human washing machine, receiving dirty laundry from Bombay’s restaurants and hotels, scrubbing them and wringing them clean. When labour is so cheap, and jobs are so essential, machines will never interfere with what humans can do.

Neither, however, will India’s trains become any less crowded. As we leave the train at Bandra, the old lady who’d bagsied our seat is thrown off by a woman with a huge bag stuffed with sweetcorn kernels. Now we know, I say. The ladies carriage is not there to protect the men from the women; quite the opposite. With handbags like these, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

Sunday 9th November 2008

“You will wear very small dress,” says Viki. He hold the sides of his palms against the bottom of his jeans pocket, and then mimes a cropped boob tube on his chest. His teeth are stained red with paan and his breath stinks of whisky, even though it’s ten o’clock in the morning.

We met Viki yesterday while pounding the pavements for the story we’ve come to report: tourists are picked up on the streets of Bombay by casting touts, and paid to work as extras in Bollywood movies. It’s a well-known phenomena to backpackers, who are left to wait for hours in ridiculous costumes, as Bollywood divas pass by, and normally spend two weeks hovering over the toilet bowl thanks to the pakoras they ate on set. But to the average Indian, the whole phenomenon is an hilarious quirk.

We spent the day lurking outside hotels and in the tourist bars and cafes, around India Gateway and in marketplaces, waiting to be talent-spotted. We were told by friends who had gone before us that we would hardly be able to breathe for all the scouts offering us work. We tried to be as authentic a pair of tourists as we could, snapping photographs of everything from market sellers to our lunch, bartering badly for jewellery, waving our Lonely Planets and even wearing a red sandalwood spot on our white foreheads, but will it wasn’t until 6 hours in the scorching sun that we finally met Viki, who took our phone numbers annd promised, in broken English, to pick us up from our house at 8am the next morning. We would get paid 500 rupees (£6) for the entire day. The other details would be worked out later.

As the mist rolled over our neighbourhood of Pali Hill this morning, we trudged to our designated meeting point, bought a copy of the Sunday newspaper and waited. And waited some more. We read the matrimonial advertising section, choosing ourselves husbands from the array of Brahmin soldiers, American-educated lawyers and half-crippled divorcees. An hour passed. We called Viki and a woman answered the phone, shrieking something in Hindi. Eventually a man’s voice, which wasn’t Viki’s, told us to meet him at a location that was ninety minutes away by bus. From there, he said, we’d be taken to the studio.

When we arrived on the street corner, we were not met by Viki and his promised steed, but instead were ferried from a cinema to a designated café by someone we hadn’t met before, and never would again.

And here we are, having worked our way through the matromonial section of the paper and now trying to decipher the cricket reporting. It is almost ten o’clock. Someone comes in, claiming to be Viki’s ‘brother’, and tells us Viki will be here in five minutes. Just past eleven o’clock, he turns up, in the same dishevelled football shirt he’d worn yesterday, his hair slicked back with grease.

“You’re late,” he says, smiling, and showing a row of half-rotten teeth. When I explain that he, not we, were three hours tardy, he shrugs and giggles, explaining in stuttered English that he had drunk too much whisky last night and forgotten to wake up. When I explain that it wasn’t really an acceptable excuse (not least because we’d been our clubbing that night until 4am) his smirk disappears and he apologises. He hops along the road with us for another four blocks and leaves us on a pavement, promising that he is just going to find his boss. Twenty minutes passes. He comes back, smelling conspicuously of vodka.

“Married?” he says, pulling open a foil packet of paan and popping the huge wad into one mouth cheek. “Yes,” I said. I might have slammed my fist a little too hard on the bench. “Is she married?” He pointed to Elsa. “Yes,” I said again. He hadn’t bothered to check for a wedding ring but it didn’t seem to matter. Viki leant over me, huffing boozy breath into my face, his hand resting on my knee. I remove it.

“When are we leaving?” I ask. It’s nearing twelve. Four hours away from the agreed time, and more than forty kilometers from the agreed place. “Soon,” he says, spitting part of his red smile out onto the street. Two boys come along asking Elsa and I to be in their photo. They disappear after a few refusals. “Fucking bastards,” says Viki. It’s the most coherent piece of English he’s spoken all morning. He offers us a cigarette, waving a golden packet of Benson and Hedges under our noses. It would have been a harmless gesture, except that today happens to be the first day of my drive to quit smoking. My gittery nerves are ready to break, and he doesn’t seem to be able to take no for an answer.

“You want Wodka?” he asks. We stare incredulously at him. “Is nice,” he says. He disappears again, allegedly to ‘look for his boss’ again. His boss must he quite lost, I say when he returns, the odour of alcohol a little more pungent than before. He brings with him a toothy old man in a driver’s uniform, who sits with us for twenty minutes, bringing with him the hope that we might soon get in a car. But eventually, in just as random a fashion as he arrived, he leaves again. It is now that Viki makes reference to my outfit.

I ask exactly what it is we are supposed to be doing in this film. “You dance,” he grins, and puts his hand on my knee again. I yank it off. I really need a cigarette now. “I in film too.” We are both beginning to wonder exactly what genre this Bollywood flick might be. Viki’s eyes flash. I ask him again how long we’ll be waiting. He deflects attention with another question.

“What is this?” he says, pointing to Elsa. “This is Elsa,” I say. He nods. Elsa looks up dejectedly from her newspaper and nods in his direction. It’s the third time I’ve introduced her to him in ten minutes.

Eventually, after an hour or so of dodging time-related questions, Viki announces that he has had a call from his boss who is waiting at McDonald’s for us. When we arrive, we are greeted by yet another old toothy driver – perhaps they are all brothers in the business – who informs us that he has been waiting for us since 8am. He has no idea who Viki is, or indeed who his fabled boss might be. The shoot is off.

By this point, my brain cells are shreiking like tightened violin strings. We have been waiting for five hours. I need caffiene, and water, and I need to get out of the sun. Shouting and pointing at Viki, I tell him that he is lazy, he is rude, he is drunk. And he is definitely not going to be my husband. A German couple who were previously poring over some elephant carvings look up. I realise that I am unleashing not only a chemical imbalance, but over a month of pent up anger at India: the India that rips us off, yanks at our arms at stoplights, gropes us in the marketplaces, stares at us in the street. I shout at the India that keeps us waiting for hours, and keeps telling us that it is looking for a good wife. And most of all I shout at the India that won’t really let us hate it at all, before agreeing that yes, we will see Viki same time same place tomorrow.

Friday 7th November 2008

The first thing you notice upon arriving in Bombay from Delhi is the breeze. The air that comes off the sea saves the city from Delhi’s dustbowl climate.



As the sun sets by the coast, most of Bombay seems to gather around India Gateway, a huge grey basalt arch stnding tall in front of the ocean, built to commemorate a 1911 visit by King George V (it must have been some guest book to sign). Children are pulled from the edge of the sea wall by hassled parents. Groups of young boys swagger in and out of people peddling almost anything: earrings, chai, samosas, pastel-coloured ice lollies, multicoloured marbles. One man is sitting on an outspread rug blowing up plastic bubbles and sticking them together in a tower formation. There are several men dragging around enormous orange marbled balloons the size of motorbikes. An emormous silver-gilded carriage, attached to a healthy looking horse stand on the road, decorated with smaller balloons, waiting for an unsuspecting tourist.



People stand around watching the boats come in. One man is holding a contraption that looks like an enormous tin ear-trumpet, but turns out to be a telescope that he charges five rupees to use. The breeze is gentle this evening. Two boys tug at black and yellow kite that has proved entirely useless.



“Please, ma’am, have photo taken with my friend,” one man says, grabbing my arm. I politely refuse, but he continues, grabbing Elsa also. “Have picture taken with my friend. No rupees, I charge you nothing.” Quite why we would want to pay for the privilege is beyond me. “Don’t you like your Indian friend?” Eventually we agree, posing politely with a young scrawny man who giggles as we stand on either side of him. It really does feel a little seedy. Straight afterwards, we are asked again. Unwilling to be seen as a source of entertainment, we agree so long as they’ll leave us alone. Just as we are posing for photo number two, we notice that the two men from photo op number one are gathering around a cordless photo printer. It turns out someone’s running a lucrative business selling snaps with the foreigners. You have to admire the ingenuity.



Over the road, the Taj Mahal Palace hotel looms over, intimidating the gateway with its sunset shadow. Its domes and spires spike the sky. It was built in 1903 by JN Tata, one of the founders of Tata Motors, now the second biggest company in India. He pledged to build it after being ejected from another Bombay hotel for being ‘a native.’ As we sneak in to use the bathroom, scruffy and sweating profusely, we have a peak into the courtyard marked ‘residents only.’ A smattering of white tourists sit drinking beers in the sun. Others swim a lazy stroke or two in the pool.



Out on the streets of Colaba, sellers press jewellery on goggle-eyed tourists. Pashiminas, bangles and handbags onto leather-skinned skinny backpackers, who generally dress like Indians might have fifty years ago, but with the mandatory dreadlocks/hair dyed pink. In Leopold’s café, two Italian women are working their way through a yard of beer. They finish it and order two more Coronas and a ramekin of peanuts. Outside, a man sets up a stall selling nautical memorabilia – ship’s compasses, pocket telescopes, charts and antique deep-sea divers’ helmets – along with a collection of old comedy car horns, a saxaphone, trombone and a trumpet. Somehow he must do business. I suppose setting up shop late in the evening at the exit to a bar allows you to sell as many brass periscopes as knock-off t-shirts outside Brixton Academy.



As we jump, exhausted, onto the ladies-only carriage of the rusty train at Churchgate Station, it’s the greatest feeling to have the breeze on your face. We pass shanty houses lit warmly with star-shaped paper lanterns, their kitchens open to the railway tracks. People hang out of trains, nodding to passengers travelling the other way. The lights of skyscrapers twinkle in the distance.

This is Bombay.

Thursday 6th November 2008

New Delhi train station’s architecture might be modelled on a British Polytechnic university. The crowds milling through it give it away, though – travelling at frenetic speeds, weaving in and out of maniacal rickshaw drivers, which just about manage to keep their loads of bags and people inside the vehicle as they lurch around corners. Three priests in identical black and purple robes watch as we pull our bags, cameras and tripods towards the station entrance. We’re on our way to Mumbai to make some documentaries for the paper.

On the main concourse, families sit huddled together in little circles under the departure boards which read both in English and Hindi. There’s none of the push and shove of the bus stations here, or of the rickshaw scrums and marketplaces. Those travelling air conditioned (A/C) classes walk with a sense of briskness and self-importance. There are stalls on each platform selling tea and samosas, and stands selling books and medicines (or both together, for those who like to take a Xanax before Tolstoy).

Every so often a train will pull in alongside us, with open sides and no seating arrangements, and without glass in the windows. Men, boys and the occasional woman will peek out from behind rusty bars.

Indian Railways employs 1.6 million people – 1.3% of the population. It’s the second biggest employer in the world. And 14 million passengers travel Indian trains every day. For a large chunk of an already large country, they’re part of daily life.

We eventually find our train, which is a class above rusty bars, but certainly not anything Wes Anderson might have dreamed up. We’re travelling 2 A/C, the class down from first which includes air conditioning and two tier berths rather than one. Elsa and I have been tucked into a side compartment, and we spend some time squeaking, pulling at curtains and lifting and lowering seats, and generally acting like silly Western tourists should. Already, the more trainwise Indians have unwrapped their blankets, stowed themselves away into their berths, and are snoozing with makeshift blindfolds tied around their heads.

A train wallah comes around selling snacks and we buy cookies and chocolate and giggle about midnight feasts. Wearing a gingham shirt and a matching cap, a second comes around taking our meal orders – there are two things on the menu, the descriptive ‘veg’ and ‘non-veg’ and even trying to make this preference understood proves surprisingly difficult. But soon we are on our way, helped by a startlingly hot samosa, silver and red mithai and a cup of chai.

Indian trains have three gears: steady rolling, stock still, and painful crawl. For the first hour we’re on third as we creep past slums on the outskirts of the city, allowing people to run, jump up and sit on the roof cross legged. There is a class all of its own up there, an open air cabin the ticket inspectors will never brave. There are people running over the tracks, adults as well as children. An Indian train driver will, on average, kill forty people during their career, even at speeds such as this.

Through the night, the train picks up speed and rocks its human cargo gently to sleep. The Indian landscape whizzes past in shades of black. Occasionally it’s possible to catch the twinkling pattern of a building’s Diwali lights but as we get closer. The gentle piped Indian folk music is only occasionally interspersed with the crackling headlines of All-India radio, which bring us back into a world of plunging stock markets and new American presidents.

As the journey continues, we catch a whiff of moist toes and stale bodily emissions, so it’s something of a relief when dinner arrives, masking it with the scent of cumin and warm paratha. There are little foil packets – of daal, rice, rolled up parathas and paneer masala (Indian cheese curry). Everything is steaming, fresh and spicy.

“If we were in America, this would all be shrink-wrapped,” Elsa says. “There’d be nothing bad in it, but there there’d be nothing good in it either.”

Taking a walk through the crowds of bodies that crawl over bunks, steam is sucked through the train corridors from the kitchen car. Inside, huge puts bubble over with red viscous liquid, hands madly chop. One man is flipping chapattis over a jumping flame. Another is pouring dall into the little foil containers, and passing full trays to a man who scurries away to put them in on a hit plate a few carriages away. Awaiting distribution. It’s a terrific human chain which feeds the hundreds of people on the train.

Carriage through carriage, families sit in their berths, the kids crawling over the top bunks, and their parents holding babies on the laps on the seats below. They take their trays as they are handed around by the stewards who squeeze past with trays piled high. Kids peek from the bunks above, grinning and playing hide and seek with the white girl. “Foreigner!” they call as they giggle and pop their head behind their curtain. “Foreigner! Foreigner!”

Squeezing back the way we came, we pass squat toilets where people battle with obstreperous children or smoke furiously and without subtlety.

Back in the bunk, one last bulletin from All India news is played before people hunker down with blankets and pillows for the night. Curtains close and lights are dimmed. It is all too easy, lulled by the gentle sideways rocking of the train, to fall into a deep and satisfying sleep.

We are woken by another bulletin, and Obama has “hardly been shown a warm welcome” by Wall Street, which seems to have gone and crashed again. Chai is brought around, and people rush to the sinks, of which there seems to be a major shortage, to perform morning ablutions. In the meantime, the smell of omelette wafts down the train, and people open up their morning Times of India. More on Obama. He’s expected to save Kashmir, and avoid more war with Pakistan. And still 89 days before he becomes president.

A steward fights his way through the carriage, snatching bedsheets and blankets as people are distracted by washing or chai, and folding them quickly and neatly, into perfect uniform quadrilaterals, whipping them off. A complete turnaround is performed before we reach Mumbai Central station. The next set of passengers is already waiting, and there is no time to lose.