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NauenThen

Mumbai

This goes back close to 20 years: I met a guy from India & asked where he was from. "Mumbai," he told me. I politely said I had never heard of it. "It's the most populous city in India." Really? Wow, what a hick I am! He finally relented & mumbled that they had just changed its name from Bombay. Oh, Bombay!

For some reason, I was adding cities to my weather app the other day & found out that Mumbai is on a different clock. If it's 3:30 p.m. right now in New York, it's 1 a.m. tomorrow in Mumbai. Why? India & a dozen or so other countries or areas (Newfoundland, for example) around the world have nonstandard time zones. India, despite its size, only has 1 time zone in the whole country. They were trying to make the trains run on time, so they standardized the country's clocks.

The weather report for Mumbai was something I had never seen before: Smoke. It seems that breathing the air there (& in most or all of India's big cities) is the equivalent of smoking five packs of cigarettes a day. I remember being in Mexico City in the mid-1980s & the air was so acrid I couldn't get used to it. Dang, is this yet another reason to stay home in the East Village?
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