First Impressions

I arrived in Mumbai on 17^th August 2013. We touched down about half midnight and having jostled our way through numerous men trying to carry our cases for small tips, we had just under an hour’s drive to the apartment. This drive was to be extremely memorable and provide my very first impressions of Mumbai.

After having been in the car just short of five minutes our initial thoughts were, what the hell have we done? Let me explain why...

We came out into extremely high temperatures and rain, so much rain. The roads were like raging rivers in places. Aside from the fact that drivers in Mumbai rarely use the driving lanes (even on roads that are twice the size of a standard British motorway) there were dogs, goats and cows all patrolling the sides of roads if not walking down the middle of them. Cars weave in and out of the heavy traffic dodging each other with incredible accuracy and constant beeping of their horns! It was not just the traffic and the animals that surrounded us however, it was the people too. Mumbai seems to come alive at night and there is a real buzz of energy after dark. EVERYWHERE you look there are people – on tops of cars, in the backs of open lorries, piled into overloaded cars and mo-peds, under bridges, and selling from street stalls at the side of the road. Stepping off a plane into Mumbai is nothing short of a sensory overload, and we were completely and utterly overwhelmed.

Below are just some of the things my senses experienced on that first car journey through Mumbai:

Sight: bright lights, slums, skyscrapers, traffic (so much traffic), people, animals, snippets of greenery and palm trees.

Smell: India certainly has some overwhelming smells and they come in all shapes and sizes - street food, incense, sewage, stagnant water, and pollution (plus many many more!)

Touch: humidity, warm rain, sweat!!!

Taste: Many of the smells in Mumbai have the effect of “hitting the back of your throat”. They really are strong and something you probably haven’t experienced before. It is the smell and taste of Mumbai life which has taken me the longest to get used to even now on day ten.

Hear: street sellers shouting, crows calling, road works, car engines and the constant beeping of horns. I cannot express to you how often people sound their horn in Mumbai. From what I can make out it is to warn when you are about to crash into the side/back of them, they are used instead of indicators, to encourage traffic to pull off at traffic lights and just generally beeping when there is not a single other person on the stretch of road. You quickly become accustomed to the sound of horns all the time you are awake and asleep in India, they form the constant background noise.  

Hopefully the selection of photos and sensory descriptions above help paint a vivid picture of the cultural shock I got after stepping off the plane into Mumbai. I think there is a certain benefit to using the senses to describe either a situation or place as it makes a situation a lot more memorable and easier to recall. It is also a good cross-curricular skill for students to access as it helps them develop higher levels of thinking rather than describing purely what they see, they would need to imagine and empathise with an image or situation. To prompt students to use the senses I would provide them with a striking image on the board such as one of the photos above. They would then look at the image for a few minutes and it would be removed. From that I would encourage the student to describe in a diary format what they saw and what they think it would be like to walk down that street or sit in that area by using the senses.