Running in Mumbai

The car driver turns to me and says, “Sir, can I tell you something?”.  I say sure, please go ahead.  He says, “Sir, you are a very good person, a very good human being”.  I don’t quite feel that way but say, “thank you very much”.

India is a place that just breaks your heart and leaves you breathless, not in a good way.  The disparity between five-star hotels, customer meetings, industry presentations and the surrounding life  is so enormous that it is enough to move anyone beyond belief.  Unless you can somehow separate the two realities.

After giving my presentation at the 3G Summit here, I have hired a hotel car to take me back to my hotel before getting ready for the plane ride home.

Even though the two hotels are only a few kilometers apart, the car ride is more than forty minutes.  Looking out the window and pondering the world around me is what I do.

And the abject poverty is immense.  I can’t help but look into people’s eyes on the bus, on the street and everywhere.  I can’t help but think how lucky I am.

The driver wants to talk and I’m willing to engage.  He asks me where I’m from and what the temperature is in the US.   He asks why it is so cold in New York and so warm in California.

So I try to explain that.

Mumbai (Bombay) is a city of around 25m people.  The population of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Singapore all together in one sprawling place.  The traffic reflects the same.

We’re tooling (dragging) along and suddenly police surround the car and tell us to pull over.  He apologizes and gets out of the car.  He reaches into the car’s center divider to get some money and it does not take a genius to figure out what is going to happen now.

I turn around to look out the back window and the police officer glares at me so I turn back the other way.

When the driver gets back in, I ask him how much it cost.  He says 100rp (around $2USD).

I ask him if the company will reimburse him and he says, “no sir”.  Obviously no receipt.  I ask him if he does not mind to tell me his salary.  He says it is 6500rp/month (around $130).   A month.  Minus police payments.

We talk some more and he makes the “good person” comment.  I just continue to look out the window and try to put it all in perspective.  Every time I come here, it’s the same.  Most of us do not realize just how lucky we really are.

We arrive to my hotel and I give him a tip that’s more than 10% of his salary.  And I don’t do it because of his comment.  I do it, well because, it’s the right thing to do and somehow feels like a karma payment.

I think that tomorrow night, I’ll be looking out the window while crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and trying to make sense of a world where half the population lives on $2 a day and the well off people make $5.  We can’t change the world, but we try to do good things every day and make a difference in one person’s life.

And the 6.5k of running I did in the hotel gym yesterday seems a bit meaningless in the overall scheme of things.  But, all we can do is keep running.