___________________________________________________________________________

                     🇮🇳 TRIP TO MUMBAI WAS FANTASTIC!
                                                             5th January 2025
  ___________________________________________________________________________

  After finally pooling together all my 2024 holidays, working weekends etc. 
  I'll finally get the chance to visit Mumbai again after 1.5 years. My parents
  have been quite eager to meet me as have I been to meet them. Leaving the 
  States this time around turned out to be a bit of a toss up due to me
  travelling a day before Thanksgiving and there being a mountain of work 
  needing to be done before I left so I did not have to open my laptop during 
  OOO. I was able to finish up most of my tasks, I threw together a bag of 
  semi-decent clothes and made a dash for the airport in the afternoon for my 
  flight. Airport was fine, I really wish airports just standardized the 
  Smith's new CT scanners everywhere so people did not have to remove all their
  electronics in a tray every single time. Especially when you're carrying 
  multiple laptops, phones and other gadgets. Finished some last minute work 
  items after all the security check and passport control business and then I 
  hit the bar for some vegan burger and ginger ale for lunch. Was very happy 
  to see that I would be out of the States before the winter blast hit the 
  northern states for the Thanksgiving weekend. Not that it'd affect me, happy
  for folks there. Good chance they'll have a white Christmas.

  My first leg of the journey was fairly uneventful, seats were kinda shit but 
  that's what I get for booking them at during holiday season a month before 
  the flight. Landed at Frankfurt airport around 7, right on time. The air has 
  a familiar winter morning chill. I love this weather so much. There I go 
  again, missing Chicago. My connecting terminal was quite a ways away from 
  where they dropped us off. Had to take 2 buses to reach there but, ample 
  markings everywhere to know exactly where you're headed. Frankfurt is one of 
  the better designed airports, part of the reason why I like travelling by 
  Lufthansa. At the connecting terminal, I met up with my cousin sister Ishi, 
  she's travelling back home too for the holidays. She had already arrived from
  Virginia and was waiting for me at the gate. Was really nice to see her after
  so long. Soon enough, there's a very good chance all of us cousins will be 
  living/working in the States. Moving my parents closer to the extended family
  was the right choice. It will be difficult, given they have lived in Ghatkopar 
  for all their lives at this point but, family being close by should make 
  things a lot easier for everyone in the long run. I chatted with my sister for
  a while, enquiring how her grad school was fairing. Then I video-called my 
  parents and it was time for the next connection to Mumbai. The gate was jam 
  packed with fellow travellers trying to reach Mumbai so we waited outside the 
  gate until there was some space to stand. Aaaannnndddd they close the gate on 
  us. Had to wave to get their attention to get them to open the door to let us 
  in. The connecting flight was uneventful too, crying babies here and there. 
  Glad I was carrying noise-cancelling headphones. Put them on and focused on 
  getting through Writing To Learn. Need to figure out a way to get these 
  highlighted notes somewhere so I can skim through them in the future without 
  having to re-read the entire book. What a gold-mine!

  We had landed in Mumbai before I knew it. It felt really good hugging my mum 
  and dad. No matter how much you grow up, I am really glad that the instinct 
  of happiness you feel when you meet your loved ones still persists. We would 
  be lost without it. A bunch of our relatives had come to pick us up(well 
  mostly my cousin since this was her first trip back from the States). We got 
  into two cars and my uncle dropped me and my parents off to our new place. I 
  haven't been in this apartment since my parents moved in only a couple of 
  months ago. First impressions, the building looks a lot more complete than 
  when I last saw it on the video calls, GO FIGURE. The apartment looks really 
  good, mum and dad put a lot of thought and effort into renovating the place 
  to their liking and it shows. Feel peace here. Well, it is 3 AM IST, time to 
  hit the bed. The true worth of showers is only realized well after an 
  intercontinental trip.

  The whole of next week sort of flew in a blur, it was composed of mostly 
  shopping for clothes for all the upcoming weddings that were taking place 
  while I was there. Buying new clothes has to be one of the most loathsome 
  activities one has to do regardless of how dapper they end up looking in new 
  clothes. This was followed by my cousin's wedding which had 3 ceremonies, 
  pretty much the standard these days to be honest. They were quite fun, I met
  a bunch of my relatives who I hadn't seen in years. One thing I have noticed 
  is that, increasingly, it has become the case that I can no longer recognize 
  a lot of the people attending these ceremonies despite them being fairly 
  close to my family. Part of this has to do with the fact that I have been 
  living in the States for the last 6 years and before then, most of my time 
  was spent either studying or with friends. This doesn't strike me as a regret
  if I am being honest, more like a fleeting observation. All in all, the 
  wedding #1 was quite the blast.

  In between all of these weddings, mum and dad also decided since I was here,
  it'd be a good idea to have a housewarming celebration at our new home so 
  that I could meet more people. This ended up being fun, one thing I do regret
  is not being able to talk to everyone I met who came home because of the 
  sheer number of people we ended up inviting. Also, since this was in the 
  middle of the wedding season, a lot of the folks had other wedding 
  ceremonies to attend right after they visited so everyone seemed to be in a 
  rush. Rush, I'd say has become the common theme across lives of Mumbaikars it
  seems over the last 3-ish years at least. No one really wants to(or can) stop
  to smell the roses which saddens and worries me a lot for my parents. I wish 
  they would take back more control of their time and how they spend it. Or 
  maybe it's all in my head, since I am the one who's on vacation and not them.

  The 2nd week was full of wedding ceremonies for 3 different weddings. My 
  cousin brother got married, one of my best friends got engaged and another 
  one got married. The cup runneth over when it came to December 2024 weddings 
  in India. Part of the reason is that December - January are the 2 pleasant 
  months out of the year that Mumbai experiences anymore. And all weddings 
  usually can only happen on certain days. This inadvertantly results in 
  multiple different ceremonies for multiple different people being held at 
  multiple different locations all over Mumbai. Fun :). So week 2 was running 
  around everywhere and dancing to Bollywood tunes I no longer recognize all 
  day. Honestly, I think I danced more in this one month I was on vacation than
  I have in the last 3 years. It was a ton of fun.

  Week #3 was spent travelling to Gujarat, my origin state. This is a yearly 
  pilgrimage we try to do. Although, over the last few years, we have optimized
  it quite a bit so that we can be in and out in 3 days max instead of the 
  entire week. Partly because if you can travel faster in hot places, you 
  should and partyly because we had my 83-year old grandma accompanying us so 
  we had to make sure all places we went to were wheel-chair accessible and 
  that all arrangements were in place beforehand so we could tackle any issues 
  that might occur. We were quite skeptical about taking her along on the trip 
  because my family went through a fairly bad car crash a month before our trip
  and granny had to go through elbow surgery for her injuries. Luckily things 
  were fine and the trip was a success. Glad she could be there. She really 
  wanted to come along.

  I spent my final week in India essentially chilling at home, meeting marriage
  prospects, setting up my dad's new desktop config and reading when I could. 
  The first 3 weeks of my vacation had been quite hectic so I was trying to at 
  least have some amount of rest because otherwise I would just end up coming 
  back to work more wound up than I went out. So I tried to go on dates and 
  talk to people to see if I could establish a connection that could survive 
  long-distance for a few months. Might delve into all of this later. Setting 
  up my dad's desktop and printer was an epic quest. I tried to setup a dual-34
  inch monitor setup with the Dell XPS I got for him but, LG is such a garbage 
  company that their monitors could barely hit 30Hz refresh rate all the while 
  promising 160Hz. Tried to tweak and hack a lot to get them to work but in the
  end just returned them and replaced them with a single 32 incher from Dell. 
  Identical to the dual 4ks I run at my place so I at least knew that it 
  delivers on the promised 60 Hz. Then the rest went fairly well. Dad's really 
  happy from what I can tell with the new desktop setup and the printer works. 
  For now at least. Out of the 3 books that I carried with me with the goal of 
  being able to read at least 1, I managed to read 0 because I picked up 2 more
  books from my dad's library and managed to finish one of them: The Richest 
  Man In Babylon. It's a collection of ancient Babylonian parables that were 
  discovered in the 1900s on cuneiform tablets. The book itself will be a 
  century old next year which is surprising. I don't think I have ever read a 
  more sound wealth-management book with a higher signal to noise ratio. I 
  don't know how this is not required reading in schools. I will make a 
  separate blog post reviewing this book and everything I learned from it.
  Look forward to it!

  And just like that, my month in Mumbai was over. Like always, saying goodbye
  to family is bittersweet and never easy. Lots of hugs and promises to visit 
  more often and sooner. More recently I have been pondering if there is a 
  better way of doing this entire immigrantion thing. Don't have any concrete 
  ideas just yet but, the value proposition keeps slipping away slowly out of 
  favor. Well, we'll see how the future pans out. For now, I am back in Miami. 
  Glad to back at work, it's just too exciting to be away from for too long. My
  brother also finished his graduate studies in finance and is living with me 
  while he looks for a job so that's going to be fun. At least I'll have 
  someone to annoy with my insanity. Until next time, Godspeed!
  ___________________________________________________________________________

  © 2024-2025 Shreyans Devendra Doshi. Everything including any source code 
  on the website is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
  ___________________________________________________________________________