More mumbai

My most intense reaction in India came as a considerable shock. I was overwhelmed by the immense number of people crammed together in the stinking slums of northern Mumbai. Apart from two relatively quiet hours between 2-4am, every single street in the city is seathing - with lorries, cars, rickshaws, motercylces, bicycles and (fearless) pedestrians, dogs, cows and even one elephant all jostling to get in front. Over a billion people in the country, and 18 million in Mumbai alone. The noise and smell are so intense. What shocked me about my reaction to all this was that I found myself thinking about the people as drones or parasites, rather than as precious individuals loved and cherished by God, just as I am.

My main companions during the WSF were people I luckily met on the plane. When we touched down at midnight on wednesday last week, I had no idea where I was going to stay that night. But as we were preparing to leave the plane someone overheard my conversation with my neighbour about Iraq - the person turned out to be Andreas, an American filmmaker also going to the WSF. So I waited and chatted, for about an hour it turned out because his traveling companion Myrna, an energetic 70yr old Pueto Rican activist, had lost her luggage in transit. By the time all the lost-luggage paperwork was completed, and the clock had passed 1.30am, I had two new friends and a place to stay for the week. Andreas is cheerful, bearded, passionate and wears a distinctive sailors cap. He fasted for 50 days (6 longer than David Blaine!) to try and persuade Bill Clinton to meet religious leaders from Pueto Rica to hear about the suffering of the people of Viequez, the little island where Myrna lives which for 60 years had been used by the US Navy to test weapons. He's also been a tireless campaigner against the School of the Americas (where the US trains Latin American police in torture). Myrna is a radiant and gregarious. She has recently survived a bout of cancer, quite possibly caused by depleted uranium or other toxins from the weapons testing on Viequez. I was exhausted by the WSF, and so I don't know how Myrna, nearly triple my age, managed to thrive in that environment. Both Andreas and Myrna were a barrel of laughs whether we were chewing the cud at the hotel or braving the streets in a rickshaw. The third member of the gang, who joined us a couple of days later, was an Swedish-Iraqi girl we christened "the princess" (al-emira in Arabic) because of her appauled reaction to Myrna's basic hotel room which she was going to share!