Couchsurfing Meetups in Mumbai

It’s a city full of dreamers and hard-working citizens, starlets and celebrities, hitmen and organised crime syndicates, homeless and crorepatis (millionaires), and lots and lots of people trying to live independent lives. Mumbai is also home to India’s most prestigious film industry and the financial powerhouse, the center of fashion and apex of religious tension.

Whether you appreciate India’s most dynamic and Westernized city largely depends how well you are able to tolerate the humidity, traffic fumes and congestion. My first impressions of Mumbai was dominated by its chronic shortage of space. It’s technically an island linked to the mainland by bridges and narrow causeways, swept along broad boulevards by endless streams of commuters and hand-cart pullers in the teeming bazaars. Each day, about five hundred economic refugees come into Mumbai from the Maharashtran hinterland, some of them manage to find employment, while many end up living on the already overcrowded streets of India’s most cosmopolitan city.

During my recent trip to Mumbai in mid-May, I had the incredible opportunity to join a Couchsurfing meetup at Candies, a casual dining restaurant located in Bandra West, Western Suburbs. It took me more than an aggravating hour to find the restaurant, and not only did I end up arriving late, but my Uber driver tried driving through a narrow one-way road and blocked the inward traffic. It all began back at my Mumbai hostel when I hailed an Uber through the hostel’s wifi internet, and ever since we began our journey I had no idea where we were heading to, because I was no longer connected to my hostel’s wifi and I didn’t have a data plan on my phone, but then I expected the driver to find the destination address through the Uber app or Google maps. Unfortunately, for some reason the driver’s internet speed dropped and was so slow that he couldn’t locate us or find the directions on the app. We could have made several circles, triangles or even octagons in the horrendous traffic hour.

Then I remembered! A couple of days before I left from Malé to Mumbai, I downloaded the entire map of Mumbai on Maps.me, a free, open source mobile app for iOS and Android that provides offline maps of 345 countries and islands based on OpenStreetMap data. I quickly opened the app and got us located offline, then I got the directions to the venue of our meetup and instructed the driver to follow the map, a few minutes and he starts asking me how I am able to access Google maps without an internet connection. Honestly, the only thing I could tell him was that I had it saved on my phone the whole time and forgot about it. Because I knew that no matter how much I tried to explain it to him, he just won’t understand how it works, and I didn’t have the time and the patience to teach him all that.

Finally, I arrived at the giant bungalow turned kitchy café and soon found myself wandering up a flight of spiral stairs. I wasn’t even sure if everyone that confirmed their presence for the event on the CS website actually turned up or not, or if the event moved to a different location, most importantly I didn’t know who is who and where in the restaurant the meetup was happening. I made a couple of rounds inside the different areas of the café and finally came around a table where a group of five people were staring at me in suspicion, seeing that look on their face made me ask them if they had anything to do with a Couchsurfing meetup and BAM! They welcomed me and promptly pulled a chair for me to sit.

We introduced ourselves to one another and our conversation progressed to the present relationship between India and Maldives which has been deteriorating with the present Maldives government strengthening political and economic ties with China in the region. We also talked about off-the-beaten-track destinations in India and also about other mutual friends we know on Couchsurfing whom we have met at different times in different countries. I also shared some of my vivid memories of a trip I made to Mumbai with my parents when I was 7 years old, and the pace that it has scaled with so much development since then. I told my newfound friends that during my flight from Colombo to Mumbai I watched “Slumdog Millionaire”, a 2008 British drama film directed by Danny Boyle and that Mumbai is so much different from what I’ve used to watch on Indian cinema. One of them immediately told me not to believe what I see in Indian movies, and speaking of Danny Boyle, that he is not an Indian director in the first place and the way he represented India in his movie Slumdog Millionaire as a third world country with poor sanitation and extreme poverty is ridiculous and I can’t agree him more. We spent about an hour at Candies and shifted our meetup to a nearby watering hole where another local joined us for the evening. I was not in my best state of mind due to loss of sleep the previous night, and decided to return back to the hostel to get some sleep since I had an early morning flight from Mumbai to Malé via Colombo. The organizer of the meetup, Anson was very kind and helped me to get an Uber for me to go back to my hostel. All in all, the meetup was fantastic and I am glad I’ve made some friends in Mumbai.