Rain rain, go away...

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Rains in Mumbai are not what rains anywhere else would be. When I was young and studying in a different city, rains were a welcome break when everything became fresh and clean.

Unfortunately, though I love this city, I have to admit, it's absolutely the opposite in Mumbai. The crowd, the commute, the crumbling infrastructure and the tons of garbage all make the rains a harrowing experience. And it is all the more maddening when you cover every single action being taken by the authorities to solve Mumbai's monsoon problems, but end up getting stuck in unmoving traffic or a train that stops in the middle of nowhere the next time it pours.

Last year, when I was covering the rains on such a day as this, when it had rained throughout the night and all the low-lying areas were flooded once again, I happened to be staying in one of the low-lying areas myself. I stepped out of my building in Seven Bungalows, Versova, in knee-deep water. And for the first time I realised, that if you are not wearing the right kind of footwear, your show might actually flow away and then you would have to choose between getting to office barefoot and fishing in knee-deep rain + gutter water for that elusive shoe!

Being a broadcast journalist has its advantages, so in this case, thankfully, by the grace of being in a waterlogged area, my work came to me. My video journalist reached the spot where I was to shoot visuals. But soon we were told to go to the airport, to check on the traffic conditions and the delays in flights. Now, Versova is ideally a forty-five minute drive from the domestic airport. But forty-five minutes later, we were still crawling on the different roads of an unbelievably waterlogged Vile Parle, which is the suburb between Andheri, where we were, and Santa Cruz, where the airport is. My driver thankfully had nerves of steel and drove through ominous-looking waters at least a foot deep. We managed to finally reach the Western Express Highway after an-hour-and-15-minutes and that is when I realised that we were just getting started. Our car touched the highway and it stopped. And it was only when one stepped out and craned their neck that one could see the traffic jam extending up to the airport signal, a good 3 kilometres away. When we had moved about a kilometre in 15 minutes and when I realised that I had only 10 minutes left to reach the signal from where I was supposed to do a live link, I simply got out of the car and ran. But running with a heavy tripod on your shoulder, with cars honking all around on a highway is not an easy task. I could not do the link.

This was last year, and after this we heard about the BMC contracting new pumps, the work on the storm water drainage system progressing, the drains being cleaned up, the insects in the drains being killed and so on. But last week, when Mumbai finally got some very heavy showers after a delayed monsoon, I once again found myself at the Andheri railway station, waiting for a train that simply refused to come. It had been difficult enough to get to the station, with most auto-wallahs refusing to budge in such weather and traffic. And the sludge around the roads, especially the construction site of the metro near the station had not done anything to improve my mood, though it had lent some interesting designs to my attire. The 9:45 train finally arrived at 10:30. I got in with the rest of the impatient crowd, wiped my face and thought, "If only we had rainy days at work!!!"