Mumbai!

Wow, I’m so behind again. Let me give you a quick update for our Mumbai trip.

We stayed in a YWCA- the women’s equivalent of the YMCA. I was kind of surprised of its setup- I’ve never stayed in a YMCA or YWCA before, so I didn’t realize it would be so hotel-like. It looked out onto “Old Mumbai,” built when it was part of the Empire and which really does look like an old European city.

Some group snapshots:

Anna, Stephanie and Amy all look so cute!

Our first stop? St. Vincent’s Centre for the Visually Impaired.  I was particularly interested in this because, well, I am the daughter of two special-ed teachers and anything about disability always makes me prick up my ears. I think it’s particularly interesting in India, because there’s not a lot of documentation on the subject, considering how ridiculously big the country is and comparing it to the rest of the world. (It REALLY gets like that if you try and find out anything significant about psychological issues in India. Psychology as a discipline is only just gaining a real foothold in Indian society.) I also don’t have a whole lot of experience with the blind, so that also made things more interesting.

Here’s something cool we found there- a Braille typewriter. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to get a picture where you can see the actual Braille, but it’s really cool.

Someone showed us his modified computer and text-to-speech system.

Yeah, this poster pretty much says it all.

Then I got to geek out a little more because we went to the Mahatma Gandhi Museum. Gandhiji has always been a fascination of mine and one of the subjects that really drew me to examine India more closely. Getting to visit his house was so cool.

Pictures of me and Giselle (respectively) with Gandhiji.

The museum’s mostly made up of photographs and documents of Gandhiji. A lot of his quotes line the halls.

Baby Gandhiji!!

This is one of my favorite things that we found: hidden away, there is a letter that Gandhi wrote to Adolf Hitler in the early 30s. (If I remember correctly it was from 1934, so right around when he took over… Czechoslovakia, maybe?) It sounds like a 70s buddy cop TV show waiting to happen, and the letter is as bizarre as it sounds. He basically argues, “Hey, why you gotta fight, baby? Have you ever thought about trying nonviolence? It’d probably get your way much faster.”

There’s also a letter that he wrote to FDR asking him to lobby for an independent India in WWII, but that’s not as entertaining as Gandhi and Hitler.

Here’s a picture of where he used to meet visitors.

They also had these nifty dioramas on his life. Here’s his famous march to the sea, the satyagraha, and his death, respectively.

Then we went to Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the world and the setting for Slumdog Millionaire. They very clearly brought us to the nicer parts- it was astonishingly clean and very much not what you’d think of as a slum. I’m not so naïve as to think that’s what the whole thing looks like, though.

We met some local potters.

There were all of these little kids that swarmed around us and started asking me to take pictures of them.

A goat and…

A KITTY! (for Mom’s benefit, of course. He even sort of looks like Freddy.)

A view of the rooftops of Dharavi.