For a Mumbaikar, crowds and Mumbai are often mentioned in the same breath. But sometimes, and I must admit here that such times are very rare, the sheer crowd volume can shock even the most die-hard Mumbaikar as I found on August 14.
I had a friend visiting from Delhi and she was rather keen on seeing the Gateway of India. So, after a morning spent wandering around Ballard Estate, Kala Ghoda and the Fort area, we arrived at the Gateway of India to see this.
It was chaos, pure and simple. The area around the Gateway of India had turned into a giant picnic spot for the hundreds of people gathered there. To help make the picnic a success were bhutta walas, chana walas, photo walas, bhelpuri walas, etc. It was so crowded that even the Gateway pigeons did not have the space to go about picking grain, and flown up to perch rather unhappily on a stunted tree !
In spite of the vast open space, the crowds had reached claustrophobia-inducing volumes. And this was enough to send my friend and me running away almost as quickly as we came. 😦
Mumbai Lens is a photographic series which, as the name suggests, is Mumbai-centric and is an attempt to capture the various moods of the city through my camera lens. You can read more posts from this series here.
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i do not know if this is an indignant indication of our exploding population, or just a coincidence that so many people flocked down there on the eve of independence day :P. Years ago, when i visited the same spot, it was serene and much less crowded….
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Or maybe it was because it was a Sunday and a long weekend at that. Whatever the reason, there were just Too. Many. People. 😦
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Ha ha… I can relate to this Sudha. Crowds are everywhere… there are scores of heads wherever you see… The Indian population loves its steep graph. 🙂
Lovely post!
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The Indian population loves its steep graph. Unfortunately, the Indian population also loves to travel. Not a good combination at all, I can tell you. 😦
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Nice
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Thanks 🙂
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I agree there is no fun when you are surrounded by crowds &cacaphoney
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We could not even get close to the Gateway, Arnavaz. It was so crowded 😦
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so true. i too dont like crowd. but there are some people who love to be surrounded by crowd. n u can find it anywhere in INdia after we are the second most populated one. he he
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Thanks for stopping by and commenting, Anu. It is one thing to be surrounded by crowds, and another thing to be overrum by them.
And you can find places without crowds, in fact without anyone there. Earlier that day, my friend and I were in Ballard Estate and it being a Sunday, the whole area was deserted. We were the only ones around.
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Local train is better representation of chaos I think
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Perhaps. But I was at the Gateway of India and when I saw the crowds the first word that came to my mind was “Chaos”.
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There is no longer a thing called ‘non-peak’ hour in Mumbai! Good observation and a nice pics.
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Non peak hours? What’s that? 😉
Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
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Well you can always expect such places to get crowded on Saturdays. It does come as a shock to people who are used to living in moderately populated areas.
Nice post 😀
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I am a Mumbaikar and I am no stranger to crowds. But what I saw that day was beyond anything that I have seen, even for a weekend.
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Was it an Anna Hazare support campaign or something?!
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No Richa. These were just people who were out on a Sunday.
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European friends who come back from India say that never found any tourist place that was not full of people. Friends from India who come to Italy to visit us and when we go out of city anywhere, often ask, where are all the people here, why is it so empty! 🙂
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I can understand that. When I used to send photographs to friends and family back home in India, the only comment I would get was “But where are the people?” 🙂
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This is where all the people are !!
Baffling and brutal,
this is Bom..(oops) Mumbai in total..
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But
BombayMumbai is still meri jaan … 🙂LikeLike
Properly stated & with glorious timing
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