Not everyone loves cricket

Not everyone loves cricket, but at least 25,000 screaming fans do. But more on that in a minute.

I started out yesterday by going down to the shipyards, or at least a part of them. (Quick aside, I learned yesterday that Mumbai, which a lot of people still call Bombay, was originally seven islands that have been joined together. Isn't that wild. So there's a lot of water around.) I'm still trying to figure out how to describe the experience. I'll post pictures later, that will help. There's essentially row after row of workshops, some small, some large, with men bending, grinding, cutting, and melting steel of all sizes and shapes. Big moving machines moving big pieces of metal. And above and around the workshops the families of the men living and going about their lives. It's dirty and seems pretty dangerous.

One photo you'll see sums it up for me. There's a few boats pulled up to the shore a couple of feet from the waters edge. And between them and the shore there are several kids swimming and playing. The boats are there to be worked on and the water is murky and grimy but the kids are swimming there because that's where they have to play.

And in the great dichotomy that is our world, that evening I went to a cricket match. The 25,000 screaming fans mentioned above. I've never seen a cricket game before but I found it very exciting. The pitching, actually called bowling, is weird and the batting is funny, but it's obviously a game of strategy and skill. I won't try and describe the rules, but I don't think they are as complicated as some would have you believe. The Mumbai Indians won which pleased the crowd. I would watch again.

In between those events I went to a nice museum of Indian culture and an art gallery with some fantastic contemporary work by an artist named Vipta Kapadia (www.viptakapadia.com).

More Mumbai today then tomorrow up to Ankleschwar for two days. Followed by Srinagar on the 12th and Benares (also called Varanasi) on the 16th.

until next time,

Benjamin Solotaire
Gooch Senior Foreign Correspondent