Tim Howes | 
11th May 2009 at 15:33 | 22 views | 
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The first thing that engulfs you when you arrive in Mumbai is the smell: it seeps through the air cavities of the walkway as you step off the plane; it hits you flush in the face when you emerge out of the arrivals hall and into the heat of day; it's a heady mix of sweat, spices, car fumes, and 13 million people crammed into one intoxicating city.
At least that's what I was led to believe from reading several travel novels about India. In fact I found the smell much less pungent than I expected. What struck me first as I pushed my luggage trolley into the dazzling yet hazy sunshine was the line of quaint, black and yellow Fiat taxis with bench front seat, waiting hopefully in line for their next passengers.
They are the most quirky cabs I've ever seen and I immediately fell in love with them and what they represent.
Take the New York yellow cab, the London black cab, and the red paintwork and silver roof of the taxis in Hong Kong. Each is the same and they are a symbol of their city. Here, the taxis are also part of Mumbai's heritage, and in a quirk of Indian contradiction, all are the same, yet each is different.
Drivers take great pride in their yellow roofed vehicle, and every single car has a stamp of individualism about it, whether it be the red hub caps, the decorative mud guards over the rear wheels, the swirling pink letters painted onto the side, the fully carpeted interior or the colourful stickers adorning the bonnet.
Some are lovingly held together with brown package tape, either to hold the bumper in place or repair a broken window, but they add to a sense that individualism and creativity must thrive in a city where it would be so easy to blend in and just become a population statistic.
Unfortunately though, thousands of Mumbai residents aren't a population statistic at all. The other day, several journalists accompanied five of the England players to an afternoon of sporting activity with children who live in slum areas of the city.
Nearly 100,000 families live in slums and pavement communities on government port land in Mumbai. These communities are illegal and simply not recognised, even though some have existed for 50 years.
The afternoon was arranged by Magic Bus, a not-for-profit organisation who believe in a child's right to play and who use sport as a means of developing the life skills of children, who might otherwise have no opportunity to do so.
The journey to the sports ground was an eye-opener in itself, as the car squeezed along a muddy, pothole-ridden road, past a never-ending line of huts made of cardboard and hardboard, some with tarpaulin roofs, some with corrugated iron for protection.
We pulled into a dusty field, about the size of a football pitch, with a course covering of grass and a couple of football goalposts. You will hear more about this experience in one of the intervals during the one-day series on Test Match Special.
All I will say for now is that the children were delightful, the players were very good sports, and Magic Bus are doing some admirable, rewarding and much much needed work.
Tim Howes | 11th May 2009 at 15:33 | 29 views | 0 comments(s)
Watching England in one-day internationals away from home is rarely easy but, after two heavy defeats in Rajkot and Indore, the next five games and the long hours spent between games on the train are starting to look tougher by the day.
But away from the cricket itself the first week of England's epic odyssey across the length and breadth of India has thrown up the usual array of the fantastic that tend to become the norm on a tour of this amazing country.
Take my TWO TV appearances for instance...
The first was relatively straightforward. The man from BBC News was so stunned that I had decided to follow KP's troops across the subcontinent in the delights of Indian Railways' Sleeper Class that he came down to film me at Ahmedabad railway station en route from Rajkot to Indore.
Taking a simple snap in India still often draws a sizable crowd so you can imagine the interest that was caused by a TV camera pointing at an Englishman slouched on some baggage destined for a faraway location!
My second appearance was far stranger and completely unexpected.
After a knock at my hotel door the night before England's opening game I was about to open up and tell the chai boy I didn't want another cup of his delicious tea when in burst five Rajkot police officers accompanied by a TV crew!
The hotel manager was with them apologising profusely and explained that they were searching all the rooms in the hotel.
I never got to the bottom of what they were searching for but whilst the entire contents of my rucksack were ignored my Dad's 60th birthday card enjoyed specific attention! What viewers would have made of a senior police inspector opening and closing the card to show an elephant playing a shot with a cricket bat goodness only knows!
Whilst the interest, or more importantly lack of, in India's Test series with Australia has been well documented this definitely hasn't been the case in this ODI Series so far.
In both Rajkot and Indore, and now in Kanpur, hotel beds right across the price spectrum have been increasingly tough to come by.
With many of the venues slated for this tour rarely seeing international cricket fans from all over the respective states have flooded to the cities to completely fill hotels that are already very busy coping with the start of India's traditional wedding season.
As the manager of my hotel in Indore succinctly put it: 'I wish the city suffered from cricket fever more often'!
Interest in the games hasn't stopped at the lack of hotel rooms of course.
Both games so far have been complete sell-outs with 32,000 packing into Indore's fantastic Maharani Usharaje Trust Cricket Ground and, supposedly, 18,000 squeezing into Rajkot's slightly less salubrious Madhavrao Scindia Cricket Ground.
Even in an empty ground the view afforded in Rajkot isn't what one would expect from an international cricket venue.
The bamboo canes and ropes used to hold up the temporary awnings combined with the permanent barbed wire topped metal fence make watching the cricket difficult enough.
But when you add a crowd who have cleverly adopted the 'one-person-out, four-people-in' technique during the first session of play to swell the actual attendance way above 20,000 then watching much of the game becomes virtually impossible.
Mind you, when you lose by a whopping 158 runs maybe that's no bad thing!