The New Mumbai

What a find, our new friend "Elroy" suggested we take an Auto Richshaw over to the "controlled" town.  A rich Indian guy built a town consisting of thousands of condos, tall buildings, offices, shopping centres, coffee shops, book stores etc. a new town, the new face of Mumbai.  It was a 20min ride away from the area of our hotel which was what we would call the typical face of Mumbai.  We sat down and have a great Americano will a delicious chocolate pastry, finally , something we recognised.

Even though it was fun to walk around in a clean, new environment you felt more like you were in the Bahamas rather than India, however if you would like to visit India but dont particularly want to stay in the city then this might be the place for you.  We of course had to check out the local book store, just like chapters only smaller and i had to get a new book, where else but in India can you find your "guru" books, there are thousands to choose from, park me here for a week and Id be happy.

This is going to be the face of the new India, no longer a 3rd world country it is growing fast and its immigrant population that left 20 years ago are returning, educated and with new skills to put back into their country.  In the papers you will read that the government is giving Developers the "slums" to develop for free and they no longer have to have the permission of the people living there.  I only hope they give them something in return.  Having to do dealings with the bike gets us to meet all kinds of business professionals and we are learning alot about this country, its not as poor as you might have once thought.

I asked the receiver today what their regular working days were, he said 6 days a week, he said you have to remember that India is not like North America, the people want to work because they need to.  There are many Indians of course, as we have learnt, that have lots and lots of money and that travel often, so much so that we were told that Emirates Air fly 40 flights a day out of India to various parts of the world for families visiting relatives, its all so interesting.  India has the largest car manufacturer "Tata" in the world.