Boxes, Boyle and Bent Bobbies

Mumbai

Countries driven through to get to India: 12

Officials' signatures required to drive Penny through those countries: 6

Officials' signatures required to drive Penny out of Mumbai port: 23

India loves her paperwork. Every hotel or hostel, for instance, since the passing of the Foreign Visitors Act of 1939, requires each person staying to fill in a page of information about themselves, where they live, where they've been, where they're going, and sign it - even the children. The simple process of getting a refund from the YWCA for a couple of nights I'd paid for in advance but then didn't need, required a meeting with the manager in his office, and then the writing of a letter explaining why we needed the refund. On checking out, several different breakdowns of our bill were produced for us to keep, and then as I turned to leave, a flustered cry - "Sir! Wait!"

Another piece of paper was being handed to me. It was a hand written slip, although I couldn't read its scrawl.

"What's this?"

"Your clearance pass", explained the receptionist. "You give it to the security man outside as you leave."

"What will he do with it?"

"He'll file it."

I wouldn't be surprised if the security guard had a boy to file these pointless slips of paper. Job creation schemes like this appear abundant in India.

But nothing I've ever seen can compare to the unfathomable process of releasing a vehicle from India's customs authorities. I could write a book about the intensely complex, bewildering and comical procedure overseen by a myriad of self important egos in uniform. It would be a short book, like The Little Book of Calm, but called The Little Book of Fury. It would have far too many characters, incomprehensible dialogue and a mind boggling plot that went round in meaningless circles until finally proving utterly pointless and leaving the reader exhausted to the point of tears. I should probably pitch it to Dan Brown.

The entire 3 day process of reclaiming Penny, 2 of which I spent at the port, was surreal. My clearing agent, John, repeatedly begged me to complain to my Embassy about the process, in the hope that one day it might improve.

"No one sees how ridiculous this has become", he would moan. "Because no one person is overseeing the import of a vehicle under Carnet, it is falling to many many people, none of whom sees the full procedure. If you drove the car into India," he went on, "one man would stamp the Carnet and you'd be through. But because it comes on a ship, we have all this."

'All this' involves running around and between 2 large buildings at the port (each a tuk tuk ride apart, just to make it more of a challenge), persuading a total of 23 people to sign various forms, each in the correct order, and almost all needing to be told why they have to sign it. My agent was a trooper - I don't know how he keeps sane. But isn't any of this system computerised? you may ask. Yes, it is! One vital part of our 2 day marathon involved visiting an office where we were to hand a floppy disc to a man who attempted to load data from it onto a computer programme written in MS-DOS. For our younger readers, MS-DOS was what Bill Gates wrote software in before he invented Windows (late 1980s), and a floppy disc is...well, just ask your parents. People who remember The Early Days of the Home Computer won't be surprised to hear that the floppy disc didn't load, so we had to go to a different building where another man could access the data and adjust it so the DOS programme on the first computer could read it properly. It's computer nostalgia heaven, and all to the rhythmic whine of dot matrix printers!

The only reason the entire pantomime only took 3 days rather than the threatened 4 or 5 is because my agent used my white Western face to push us past crowds of other clearing agents and get to the front of the queues - "If they see a foreigner they will deal with us quicker". He also knew exactly who to bribe along the way (most people, as it turned out - more on India's corruption in moment), and when no one appeared to be taking the promised action of finding our container and delivering it to the customs inspector, I went and searched for it myself.

"Where will it be, roughly?" I asked John. "If I can find it maybe we can get things moving."

"Oh God", he held his hands to his head. "It'll be somewhere over the back".

'Over the back' was an area of open desert behind the main massive storage warehouse at the Speedy Container Shipping Terminal. (I know, 'Speedy'. The irony wasn't lost on me.) An area of about 2 square kilometres was home to a few thousand containers piled 3 or 4 high in rows, squares, random stacks, all over the place.

"Yeah, but there must be a system, right? A grid system or something so they know roughly where my container is."

He shook his head.

"How do they find it then?"

"The manager will radio his junior supervisor, who will send men out to look for it."

There's that job creation scheme again. A plethora of cheap manpower compensates for a complete lack of order. It's the Indian way.

So, at the risk of putting several men out of a job, skipping an entire layer of bureaucracy and therefore bringing the whole house of cards crashing down, I strode out into the dusty heat to "find my own flippin' box". And in a surprising triumph for a man who can't even find a jar of Marmite in the cupboard - "It's in there! You might have to move something!" - I stumbled across UACU3222307 after about 10 minutes. Many, many pieces of paper later I was opening the container, Penny started first time, and eventually we were free to leave and drive wide eyed and sweating through Mumbai's rush hour traffic at nightfall - a modern and convenient way to reduce your life-span by several years without the costly need for cigarettes or drugs.

*

Before Christmas I promised to tell you about the Dharavi slum. This is the triangle of land between 2 of Mumbai's major railway lines, the same size as London's Hyde Park, that is home to 1 million people and was made famous in the film Slumdog Millionnaire. 'Reality Gives' is a local charity set up by a Brit - Chris Way from Birmingham. He realised while staying in Mumbai that the Dharavi slum, which long before Danny Boyle's film was already famed as India's biggest slum, was misrepresented. Keen to show it for the positive people and values he found there, he gathered the various 'tribal' elders from the different religious 'districts' within the slum and proposed Reality Tours. These small, unobtrusive tours offer tourists the chance to explore the slum and meet the people, while profits are ploughed back into the community. Since they began in 2005 Reality Gives has paid for a kindergarten (and the training of 20 local pre-school teachers), a high school with 33 pupils and a community centre where computer skills are taught.

The dilemma about taking the tour was obvious: It's a very fine line between 'expanding your social awareness' and voyeurism. The fact that cameras weren't allowed (I didn't take the photos you can see here), and that a few articles in Indian newspapers seemed to back up the charity's claims about the way the community was benefitting, eventually justified the visit.

There were only 3 on my tour - 2 Australian women and me plus our Indian guide, so we didn't stick out too much in the throng and were able to spend 2 hours winding our way through the slum, seeing and smelling slum life close up. In some respects it was exactly as you'd imagine: Cramped, dark dwellings line a maze of endlessly twisting alleyways and cut-throughs. Smoke fills the air and you have no idea what you might be stepping in. Yet in other ways it was full of surprises: Industries such as pottery, clothing manufacture and leather tanning thrive. Plastic and metal recycling occupies another quarter. Beneath the corrugated metal rooves and plastic tarpaulin shelters is a hive of productivity. Dharavi's commercial output stats. are astounding - the annual turnover of the slum is about 650 million US dollars. Its social statistics also confound expectation - 80% of children go to school. That's significantly higher than a lot of the villages in Rajasthan we were talking about with UNICEF.

The most surprising discovery of my visit was how happy everyone was. I had naively associated slums with misery, yet Dharavi is anything but. In fact, it turned out to be the least threatening place I've been to in my month in India. No one was begging - something impossible to consider outside the slum where, from Delhi to Mumbai and in every town in between, there are beggers at almost every corner. It was a genuine shock, and demanded a mental re-adjustment, when children ran up to me and didn't ask for money by putting one hand to their mouth to mime eating while the other palm is thrust towards me. Instead they wanted to talk. They are all taught English from the age of 4 and are thrilled to see a white face they can try it on.

"Hi! What's your name?" is the chorus as they offer to shake hands, a gaggle of grinning faces. The first child I saw in the slum wasn't interested in me, she was a girl of about 6, neatly dressed in a smart school uniform and she was dancing and skipping through the alleyways ahead of us. She swung every corner knowing this gloomy alien world like you know your own neighbourhood. She stopped at a door, shouted up to her mother and quickly scaled a ladder to reach a single room on the second floor. This was home, and this girl was as happy as any I've ever seen. If a group of 10 year old boys approached you in Delhi, you'd brace yourself to march through a barrage of begging and sleeve pulling. In Dharavi a similar gang surrounded me...to show me their toys - a wooden spinning top expertly propelled into life with a leather cord was the current craze. They insisted I had a go - laughed at my efforts and held out my hand so they could place the quivering top in my palm, as if to show how easy it was. Imagine that, I'm the white guy in the slum and I'm holding out my palm to them.

It wasn't without its poignancy. My spinning top tuition took place at one edge of the slum in the shadow of 2 high rise concrete towers built by the government in the 90s to rehouse some of the slum dwellers. Our guide had been there in 1995 when Prince Charles had officially opened them.

"This area," he remembered, "was a beautiful playground. The grass was like The Oval."

Now, it was a rubbish dump.

"The Governement tidied it up for the Prince, but now they just send a truck every few months to collect the rubbish."

As he spoke, in front of us a young girl of about 4 was hitching up her pretty dress and defecating on the litter. Even this space wasn't wasted though. Behind the preoccupied girl, spread across the mounds of waste, were animal skins drying in the sun. The output of these leather workshops is exported to Europe, and at least 2 major Italian fashion labels use their hides. I'll smile the next time I see one of those designer leather jackets, its owner unaware of the prestigious garment's humble beginnings at the little girl's toilet.

The streets, by the way, aren't awash with sewage. Since Dharavi was made a 'legal slum' in 2000 the Government pipe in mains water for 3 hours per day, (and most dwellings now have electricity), so although raw sewage is still around, you're not up to your ankles in it. However, only 1% of homes in Dharavi have a toilet. Most people use communal facilities, which are massively over burdened. I don't know what the ratio is in your house of people to toilets, but if you live in Dharavi it's 1,500 people per loo. Even with those conditions, though, Dharavi comes with a price tag. Dwellings are rented for the equivalent of about £28 per month, and people can only get them if they know someone living or working there who can vouch for them.

Even in India's biggest slum, demand has out-stripped supply and capitalism has been the result.

It was a fascinating day which my tour buddies and I agreed had been essential in getting a better understanding of the city. It took me about a day to let the onslaught of sensory overload sink in, and the overwhelming feeling I had when I left is the one that stays with me now - that contrary to the menacing squalor of Boyle's Slumdog, Dharavi slum is one of the most uplifting places I've ever had the pleasure of spending time in.

*

Right, before we head off to Goa, here's a quick word on Christmas. As you know, we 'd planned to stay at 'The Y' (as the YWCA is known) for Christmas day and head south to Goa after that. We'd even sourced a local caf that was offering a turkey dinner for those die hard Brits growing weary of curry. At least part of this plan was altered in the nicest possible way by a generous gift. We had an email on Christmas Eve from some great friends in the UK telling us they had bought us all a night in a 5 star hotel on Christmas night! So we started the day in our decorated room at The Y (Ella had drawn a Christmas tree to put presents under), Beth and Edie had planned a Christmas service with carols, a bible reading and a sermon from Edie(!) after which we all opened the gifts we'd bought each other - typically 'budget' and very Indian - tops, sandals, a fake Rolex for me (from the woman whose father worked for Trading Standards) and the surprise hit - traditional string puppets from Rajasthan. Ella and Edie love them! I can't believe we bought Beatles Rock Band for the Wii last year when a puppet would have done.

We asked a splendid Canadian woman we'd met at The Y called Marilyn to join us for lunch and had a slap up feast of turkey, mash and sprouts! What a result! Then we drove for a couple of hours (about 10 miles, then) through Mumbai's terror-traffic to our swish hotel near the airport. We only encountered 2 impacts on the journey, which locals assure me is a remarkably incident free journey through Mumbai. One bus simply changed lanes into the side of us scraping our plucky wing mirror all the way down his side, and a dozy driver in a surprisingly new car pulled out behind us, got his timing wrong and scraped the back of the van...the same panel that had been repaired after the bus incident in Jordan! There's simply no point stopping to deal with these minor scrapes - no one has any road insurance and I've witnessed a few much worse bumps than that always result in a shouting match in the street before both injured parties simply accept they must drive away. It's knock for knock, or rather dog eat dog out there. 

The only other interesting aspect of the journey was our realisation that India's police really are as corrupt as several newspaper articles claim. Actually, corruption in India is so rife that you see signs asking you to report corrupt officials. (But how would you trust the people you're reporting them to?)

We crossed a busy junction along with lots of other cars, tuk tuks and cabs and a traffic policeman blew his whistle and waved at us. We were lost, so pulled over to ask his for directions. He looked at the map and told us the way before telling us he needed 500 rupees. Why?

"Penalty" he smiled. "You crossed a signal. Dangerous driving."

"Er...it was green, and we crossed with everyone else."

"No, no, no. 500." he insisted.

I remembered something my clearing agent John had said as I drove him back into Mumbai that first time. As we approached a police check point he'd said "Stick close behind a truck. If they see a foreign car they'll pull you over."

Jill stopped me arguing with the bent copper and offered him a hundred (about £1.40), which he took happily.

A little while later, while driving through the suburbs in a line of traffic a police motorcycle pulled along side my open window.

"Where are you going?" asked the young officer. I genuinely couldn't remember the name of the hotel, so simply shrugged.

"Dunno!"

"Pull over!"

"No thanks!"

And still he stuck with us.

"Pull over up here!"

"I haven't broken any law!" I insisted. He dropped back but then re-appeared.

"Pull over!"

"Stop distracting me!" I calmly instructed. "I'm trying to drive!"

At which point he dropped away, turned round and headed back to his territory.

A third traffic cop tried to wave us down as we pulled across a junction with all the other traffic but we just ignored him.

The only trouble, of course, is that with all this corruption around, how will we ever know if one of our wheels is falling off, or if we have an angry monkey on the roof? No amount of waving and whistle blowing is stopping this big yellow bus. Next stop - Goa.