Mumbai Experience

Monday July 26th to Friday July 30th, 2010:

It was a very long day of travel for us to get to Mumbai from Ahmedabad, India. We left the MICA campus in Ahmedabad around 4:45am (while the Indian students' rave party was still going strong from the night before!) and drove to the airport. We had lots of security stops and minor delays but finally made it onto our flight to Mumbai. After arrival, we checked into the Taj President Hotel, had a quick lunch, and then immediately boarded a bus for a driving tour of Mumbai. By that point, it was late afternoon and we all had a hard time staying awake for the tour! The poor tour guide was only speaking to half the group at any given point. However, he seemed to be fixated on telling us about the Mumbai bombings that took place two years ago, so most of his lecture was regarding the terrorists, the number of bodies found in particular places, etc. Plus, he went into graphic detail on the way Farsi people handle their dead (they leave them to be eaten by vultures). So, overall, definitely not my favorite tour guide experience of the trip.

Arriving in Mumbai was interesting. It definitely has the largest population (nearly 20 million) and therefore the highest percentage of slums that we have seen in India so far. According to our tour guide, there are roughly 4 million living in slums in Mumbai, another 4 million that are wealthy and living in high-end houses and apartments, and the remaining 16 million are in "middle-class" housing that ranges from old studio apartment buildings (with the bathrooms shared at the ground floor) to low-end homes. The poverty was overwhelming. I can't imagine how the problem can be fixed, when it would displace so many people to even repair or replace the dwellings and land is at such a premium. People continue to move to Mumbai daily, however, because it is the commercial capital of India and there are many jobs to be found here.

We did see some interesting places in Mumbai, however. There is an interesting history that we learned about a man named Chhattrapathi Shivaji, who drove Muslims out of the state of Maharashtra in the 1700's. He was later crowned Emperor by the Hindi people and is considered to be a local hero. The train station (formerly the "Victoria Terminus") and the Museum (formerly the "Prince of Wales Museum") have been recently re-named after him. There is a statue of him near the Gateway of India monument in Mumbai as well. Other interesting sites we toured were the Hanging Garden and Nariman Point.

The next day (Tuesday July 27th) we had two agency visits that took the majority of the day. The first asked to remain unnamed on any internet postings, so although we had a very interesting discussion about Indian culture and advertising and I took several photos, I won’t be able to post them. The second visit we had was with the Mudra agency again, this time the Mumbai office. It was a wonderful visit. We had a presentation by Mr. Arijit Ray (President of Mudra India-West) that would have been a perfect capstone lecture for our Engagement class last semester. He basically talked about the need to create an emotional “brand world” to cut through ad clutter and product similarity. He also highlighted the importance of moving from logic to “magic” in ads, and shifting from a share-of-market (transaction) focus to a share-of-customer (relationship) focus. His keys to a good ad: evocative, emotion-stirring, memorable, distinctive, focused on a key idea. Favorite quote from the presentation: “It’s no longer who we are up against (our category), but who we want to be amongst (idea leaders)”.


Wednesday July 28th was a free day. My roommate and I had stayed up till nearly 2am drinking wine and talking, so we slept until after 11am. We got lunch at the hotel and then spent the day shopping and touring. We had a really fun time shopping for scarves at the Oberoi hotel shops (complete with Kashmiri tea and a potential suitor for Allison!) and then spent several hours at the Prince of Wales museum. It was a fun day, with some very successful purchases made.

Our final full day in Mumbai (Thursday July 29th) included a visit to Reliance Media Works. We got to screen some not-yet-released Bollywood movie previews and received an interesting lecture on the digital intermediary process that occurs on films (including color timing, retouching, scoring, etc.). It was very cool to get a behind-the-scenes look at the Indian movie industry. They had the original chairs from Three Idiots in the lobby, so we were allowed to take photos in them after our meeting. Next stop, Goa Beach!