Faces of Mumbai

During my short business trip in Mumbai, I had the good luck of finding the time, in between meetings and monsoon showers, to stroll around South Mumbai's sights. People always make the best pictures. Here are a few I took on July 20.

A not too comfortable and rather dangerous spot to have a nap ... but this man does not seem to care ...


In the middle of the esplanade between the Gateway to India and the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel, a middle-aged man was roasting peanuts ... a dark snapshot of this poor man's life ...


At the front desk of the Taj Mahal Hotel, another picture of India, the successful, growing Indian middle class, is represented by this charming hostess.


I was not too sure whether this man was a customer or a fixture of the Taj Mahal Hotel, but he certainly had an interesting face and a remarkable hat.


Five-star hotels such as the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi are symbols of the growing Indian economy, open to the world and to the modernizing influence of trade. This is why they were targeted in the murderous rampage conducted by a band of terrorists on November 26, 2008, which resulted in 166 deaths. In the lobby of the Taj Mahal, an impressive memorial had already been erected a few months later with the names of the 31 people murdered here inscribed on a stelle.

Scenes on Chowpatty Beach at dusk, a popular Mumbai attraction.

Rain

Monsoon rain in Mumbai ... a constant drizzle, and heavy showers. From the lobby of the Oberoi, buildings across the bay are a faint line of ghosts shrouded in low hanging clouds.

High tide ... Under sunlight diffused by the leaden sky, a violent wind drives a cavalcade of frothing rollers to crash on the breakwater. Spray flies over the parapet and lands on the pavement, now a black reflecting pool. The monsoon's only colours are shades of grey.

In the short intervals when rain stops, a cloak of tepid air heavy with moisture still hangs about, fogging glasses and camera lenses fresh out of the cool hotel lobby.

On sidewalks, dark-skinned emaciated souls sit under flapping plastic sheets, precariously stretched over temporary stalls.

Back in Singapore this morning, the plane lands under heavy rain ...

Rain, non-stop tropical rain, I have not seen the sun in three days.

The Attraction of Punggol Beach

Punggol Beach lies on the Northeastern coast of Singapore. It is one of the sites where Japanese massacred Chinese thought to have anti-Japanese sentiments, at the beginning of their occupation of Singapore during the second World War. The Japanese military chose remote places such as this one to perpetrate these crimes. On February 28, 1942, about 400 Chinese men were shot on Punggol Beach by a Japanese firing squad. It is now a National Heritage site.

I had seen on the Internet striking pictures of sunset on Punggol Beach. The colors had obviously been manipulated, but the photographs nevertheless created in my mind a vision of Punggol Beach as an idyllic place, where I would like to take pictures some day. I decided to go there late afternoon yesterday to catch the sunset.

Punggol is not so remote anymore. Thanks to the highly developed freeway and road network, no point in the island is at more than a 30-40 minute drive from any other point. After a fast ride on the Central Expressway (CTE) and Tampines Expressway (TPE), I reached Punggol Road, which runs straight North to the coast. Like many other spots in the island, signs of construction were everywhere, and Punggol Road is lined with new, dense, HDB flats. Only the last kilometer or so runs through an undeveloped wooded area, but even there I drove past a fenced-in construction site ... the Ministry of National Development must be working on a new project.

The road ends at a spot on the coast where there is a small jetty. Across the Johor Straits, the highly industrialized Malaysian coastline looked very close. I parked my car and walked along a path running left on the low dam lining the very narrow sand beach. After a kilometer or so, I found a spot where black rocks, almost level with the dam, provided an easy path stepping down to the beach.

The view across the Johor straits was depressingly industrial, from the right ...

to the left ...


If you keep your eyesight low, you can believe that you are in a place that deserves to be called a beach ...


Undeterred by the scenery, a man, perched on a rock, was fishing, but I wonder whether he would eat anything caught in these waters ...


A bride and bridegroom arrived with a photographer to take wedding pictures in the day's waning light.


Starting at 6PM (the sun sets around 7PM everyday in Singapore, since it is almost on the Equator), the place became almost crowded, as more and more photographers equipped with tripods were gathering in this spot to take pictures of the sunset.


I talked to a young man and commented that this was not much of a beach. He agreed but immediately added that the sunsets here were very beautiful.

Except for its luxuriant tropical vegetation, Singapore is devoid of natural beauty, and it is sad to see its inhabitants flock to places such as Punggol Beach to catch a sunset. But these amateur photographers are well versed in the wizardry of digital photography and can create computer-aided beauty more striking than natural beauty, and post it on the Internet. This is how I was snared into visiting this barren and ugly beach on a late Saturday afternoon.

Luck was not on my side; the sunset, which looked promising since clouds were at the rendez-vous, was not spectacular, and here is the best I could do, since I have not learned any wizardry ...