I was scared to go to Mumbai, almost a year after I last went there. That day was July 26th - when the famous cloudburst took place. That day I spent 17 hours in a taxi, without a drop of water to drink, nowhere to piss and nothing to eat. That was perhaps the most taxing day of my life, but I couldn't help but look at with awe and more than a bit of shame (cos I was gutless!) as millions of people waded in waist deep/chest deep water with dead snakes and buffalos for company to go home to their kids and ailing parents!
Mumbai's infrastructure was woefully exposed, nowhere more so than the airport, where I spent a further 12 hours sitting on a trolley - stinking like the dead buffalo I saw floating on water some hours back.
However, the airport today has undergone a reasonable transformation. The departure gates look swanky, an Internet cafe actually works, there is choice for food and coffee, and it does not look like a cattleshed anymore. So well done, whoever was responsible. I had read somewhere that no more work would be done on this because they had given out the modernization rights to an international consortium. Evidently not, and thank goodness for that.
Even the roads were much better than I last saw them - no traffic jams today - and I travelled from the airport to Colaba and back twice over. Mumbai seems to be slowly but surely getting its act together again - or did I compare today with perhaps Mumbai's WORST ever day last year?
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