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Southern India

This is my third trip to India over the years and it never ceases to amaze me the electrical imagination they have all over the country. Help I think I see the problem.

Homes and laundry business together just outside the Dobhi Ghat along the street

Late morning we returned to a different part of the Train station to witness something we did not know existed. Lunch delivery service. .

Need to have a shoes shined?

Every day in Mumbai, some 5,000 deliverymen called dabba wallahs hand deliver 200,000 hot meals to doorsteps across the city.

Trains arriving and departing every few minutes at the station.

It's an intricate network that requires precise timing and numerous hand offs from courier to courier.

The century-old service is a staple for the city's office workers. But as the city has changed, so too has the service.

After a night of cooking and a morning of packing, each meal is put into a small metal canister, or tiffin, in time for the dabba wallah's pickup. "When he comes at 9, everything has to be ready for him ... because they are on a very tight schedule,

To make sure each lunch pail ends up at the right place, each container has a hieroglyphic-like coding system painted on the lid that is checks before heading outside to load up. The rider clips the containers to the handlebars of his bicycle and starts his 45-minute cycle to the train station.

The lunches are transferred to other trains to go to different parts of the city. Lunches can be transferred three or four times before finally ending up on desktops of customers

There are close to 5,000 dabba wallah deliverymen who ferry some 200,000 lunches to offices across the city. It works a lot like Takeout Taxi. The couriers make 500 rupees, or about $10, per person for a month of deliveries. Talk about an intricate delivery system for lunch.

Close up of the front of the Mumbai Central railway station, Western Railway.

A heritage steam locomotive, a symbol of development and modernity through the 19th and 20th centuries, was repaired and repainted to its old-world glory along with a heritage lawn, outside the Mumbai Central railway station by the Western Railway,

Driving across the central Mumbai with skyscrapers abounding all around.

In the center of the skyscrapers we discover another of the many laundries.

We find yet another laundry in the center of the city.

You would be hard pressed to find another place where the contrasts of modern India manifest as strikingly as in Mumbai. There is, on one hand, the almost shocking poverty. Millions of people looking for work stream into the city from all over India. Most of them end up as ragmen. Then there are the vestiges of obscene wealth in a globalized world. On nearby Marine Drive, dozens of high-end high rises gleam like mirrors in the sunlight. .

Indian society is changing fast, and its heirarchies are becoming more porous. But the caste system still determines the choice of life partner and line of work for many millions of people.

On our last afternoon a few of us visited the home and former headquarters of Ghandi. It is a museum. Very interesting to visit.

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