22 Life in Mumbai

CHAPTER 1 India at Night IT'S NIGHT IN INDIA. OVER 1,000,000,000 PEOPLE LIVE IN THIS GREAT COUNTRY. THEY SPEAK MORE THAN 300 DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. India is a fantastic country with high mountains, big deserts, and many great rivers. The moon is bright over the Ganges River. In India, this river is called "Mother Ganges." About 3,000 BCE, people began to live by this river. Today, millions of Indians live along it. The Ganges is very important to Hindus, members of the main religion of India. Many Hindus travel a long way to see the Ganges or to wash in its waters. It's cold and dark in the great Thar Desert of western India. Life is hard. In May and June, the temperature can be as high as 50 Celsius in the day and as low as 0C Celsius at night. Parts of the desert get only 10 centimeters of rain every year. Not many people live here. A line of hills or mountains is called a range. The Himalayan mountain range is in the northwest of India. It goes through many other countries, like Pakistan and Nepal. The Himalayas have the highest mountains in the world. Tonight, groups of tourists sleep in tents and wait for the sun to rise.

On farms in the central plains of India, the night is very quiet. Many people— about 60 percent— work in agriculture. Soon heavy rains called monsoons are going to come. It doesn't rain often, so the monsoons are very important. Farmers need the monsoons to grow rice and other foods, and to grow cotton to make clothes. The night is noisy in the forests of India. Many different animals live here: elephants, tigers, and rhinoceroses. Some of these animals are in danger, but there are national parks where they can live safely. It's night in Mumbai, but not everyone is sleeping. People are working. It's a busy city. It's the centers of business in India. Over 20 million people live in the Mumbai area. They work in all kinds of jobs. Some of them work in business, or in TV, movies, or music.

CHAPTER 2 Morning in Mumbai FOR ONE MAN IN MUMBAI, THE DAY ALWAYS BEGINS THE SAME WAY... Sanjit Gupta wakes up at 5:30 and takes a bath. It's dark, so he lights a lamp. He uses ghee, a kind of butter, in the lamp. This begins his morning puja. Many Hindus begin their day with a morning puja. It's an important part of Hindu life. 80 percent of Indians are Hindu. After puja, Sanjit eats idlis, small cakes from South India. Sanjit lives in Mumbai now, but he comes from the south of India. When he eats idlis, he thinks about his hometown and his family. He misses them. Sanjit came to Mumbai to work. He remembers when he was a child. He grew up near farms and hills. In Mumbai he only sees buildings and streets. Sanjit's favorite place in Mumbai is the Dadar flower market. Every morning, farmers bring flowers to the market from their farms near Mumbai. People often buy the flowers in long chains.

CHAPTER 3 Getting to Work LIKE MANY PEOPLE IN MUMBAI, SANJIT TAKES THE TRAIN TO WORK. The trains in Mumbai are famous. They started in 1853, and people in Mumbai call them the locals. The trains are often very old and they are always crowded. Sometimes they are so crowded that the train doors cannot close and people ride on top of the train! Several million people ride the locals every day. There are many buses, taxis, and auto-rickshaws, too. They take people all over the city. The streets are crowded because every year more and more people are coming to Mumbai to live. This is a difficult problem for the city. They must do something, but what? Some people think the answer is a different kind of train called a monorail. Monorails often go high above the streets. In 2009, Mumbai started making a monorail. It's going to take many years to finish. People in Mumbai want the monorail today! But for now, they can only ride the crowded trains and buses, and wait.

CHAPTER 4 Working in Mumbai MANY PEOPLE COME TO MUMBAI FROM OTHER PARTS OF INDIA FOR WORK. There are many call centers in Mumbai. In a call center, people answer telephone calls. Often call centers answer calls about problems with computers, smart phones, or other kinds of technology. In the early 2000s, countries like India, the Philippines, and South Africa opened many call centers. In Mumbai, many call centers opened in only a short time. Now some centers are closing. This is because some people in Britain and the US do not like having call centers in other countries. Sanjit works with computers, but he does not work in a call center. He's a software engineer. A software engineer writes programs for computers. Sanjit works in an office with ten other people. They're working on a game for people to play on the Internet. The game teaches English to children. Sanjit likes computers and helping children learn. Sometimes he wants to leave Mumbai and go back to his hometown. But he knows he cannot find an interesting and fun job there.

CHAPTER 5 Home-cooked Lunches for 175,000 IT'S LUNCHTIME, AND SANJIT WANTS HOME-COOKED FOOD. THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM. Like most people in Mumbai, Sanjit cannot go home for lunch. It's too far. Also, Sanjit does not want to ride the crowded locals four times in one day. Many people in Mumbai want home-cooked lunches. Happily, they can have them, and they are not expensive. Every day, people make and sell home-cooked food to workers all over Mumbai. These workers are called tiffin wallahs or dabbawalas, Tiffins are small boxes. Inside the tiffins are traditional Indian foods, like curries, rice, and phulkas, an Indian bread. About 5,000 tiffin wallahs work in Mumbai. They bring over 175,000 tiffins to hungry business people every day. They are fast and very good at their job 99 percent of the time, the tiffins go to the right places. Sanjit can buy home-cooked South Indian food from the tiffin wallahs. The lunch is not as good as his mother's food, but it is better than eating at a fast-food restaurant.