71 - WHY ENDURE ? JAPAN'S IDEA IS A SOLUTION.

Every year Mumbai gets flooded and people suffer.  Then they forget all about the situation when the season changes.  It leads to leptospirosis and death.  After the water recedes, mosquitoes breed and it leads to chikungunya, malaria, dengue, and typhoid.  Besides the ground floor houses that get flooded, suffer sewer water enundiating their homes, furniture and electrical appliances like fridges, TVs, ACs , washing machines, getting defunct.  It is beyond my thinking, as to how they manage to answer nature's call for so many days, when the toilets are flooded too.  I have witnessed a ground floor home getting flooded.  The bedroom had soaked mattresses and the toilet had excreta floating up and into the other rooms.  Sic.  So it should be the priority of the concerned municipality to take proper precautions to prevent the flooding.  But they blame it on the high tide and the insufficient and outdated drainage systems.  Okay, so if everyone is aware of the problems, then why is there no effective solution? 

But obviously the high and mighty in this land are not affected directly and so they don't seem to care about the common man's plight.

National Geographic has done a review of the underground 'temple-like' storage tanks of Japan, that help to keep the city of Tokyo, free of flooding.  In 2001, Tokyo suffered severe flooding due to heavy rain.  And so they built a system of giant underground tunnels, six and a half kilometers long.  Each tunnel is ten meters in diameter and it allows the rain water to collect into this space and then be drained methodically into the Edo river. 

Our prime minister, Mr.Modi, should borrow this innovative idea from Japan, instead of the Bullet train technology.

19 - A DIFFERENT PEOPLE

In the far east,  is this achepelago of 6,852 islands, in the Pacific Ocean, called Japan.   My son was adamant that he wanted to visit this country and for three main reasons.  Being a sushi chef at the Trident Mumbai, he wanted to achieve his best and get the over achiever of the year award, by doing his all to do his best in the field, and so he wanted to see the authentic Japanese chefs.  The other reason was to visit Jiro Ono's sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro at Tokyo, which has a 3 michelin star rating and has been featured in the awarding winning documentary by David Gelb.  And the final reason was to visit and witness the auctioning of Tuna at the ksukiji market.

The first visit that we completed on our own, was to visit the Ksukiji tuna auction.  We took a taxi, to the market at 2 am.   Only limited onlookers are allowed to witness the auction, on a first come basis.  So people come early and wait for the 6.00am auction.  Each person gets to don a green vest, and then we are allowed 15 minutes to observe the auction of frozen tuna.  What was the difficulty here was that from 3am, when we reached, upto the time that  our turn came to witness the auction, that is 6.30am,  we all had to sit on the floor and wait, in the room assigned, and the other negative was that, to reach the place and return, the taxi fare turned out to be exhorbitant, because in Tokyo, taxi fare starts at 730 yen.  Of course, it is an AC cab and the driver wears a blazer and uses google maps for directions.

We tasted a lot of sushi and bento box meals, and noodles and octupus balls and all sorts of fish on a stick, especially at the Nishiki market area.  This area is aka Crawford market of Mumbai, with a maze of narrow lanes, lined with shops and restaurants.  But it has a skyroof and so we were safe from the rain, while we walked along the lanes.  It is a strange phenomenon in Japan, that restauranteers post volunteers on the footpath, with large placards, displaying their menu, to pull customers into their foodplace.  The other strange phenomenon is that their restaurant windows display plastic replicas of their dishes, sushi or noodles with egg etc.

Very few people can converse in English, so maps are very important to be able to find your way back to your hotel.  And so finding the underground restraurant of Jiro Ono, which boasts of having had Barrack Obama as a guest,  was very tricky.  But my son had only that on his mind and he was even wanting to dine there, no matter the cost.  Unfortunately, when he went to the place, he was shooed off and lost face for all his endeavours to be at the sushi place of his dreams, for which he had travelled from India to this far eastern island.

But whatever was taken away from his self esteem by this rebuff, was made up by the serenity and beauty of all the shrines and temples that we visited, and of course the view of mount Fuji.  A volcano that looks mystical, with its smoothly ascending facade, tinted blue, with the virgin snow at its upper layers.