Mumbai means madness. A cacophony of sights, sounds, yells, honking, lots of drama, Bollywood, hopes and dreams, and oh so many broken hearts. Add to that monsoon, and you have a whole different mood altogether. A lot has been written about the fabled monsoon here. A lot of songs, a lot of poems, and a lot of news reports as well. But you have to physically experience it for months on end to really understand the sentiment. It’s a real force to be reckoned with. It’s mayhem.

Monsoon brings with it a tremendous dichotomy in a city like Bombay. It’s like when an unstoppable force meets an object that loves moving but is rendered immobile thanks to the weather! Everyone knows that this city is perpetually in motion. Be it the morning struggle to commute to work with the streets flooded with cars and buses and rickshaws with a steady downpour adding to the collective agitation of the multitude, as well as the trains running late.  Or the evening frenzy of living your social life, when you are rushing from work to work it at a snazzy new bar with your friends. It could also be the crazy chores that you need to do where you have to run all over town (and boy does it take time in Mumbai!), the point is you’re always on the go. But when monsoon arrives, like hell, it rains on your parade.

Movement comes to a standstill and hailing a cab or a rickshaw becomes a farcical exercise in masochism. Honestly, there are few things as infuriating as being splashed with puddle water as a cab driver blithely dismisses your request for going from point A to point B or an Uber cancelling on you. So the best thing is to romanticize it with some cliched music, this being the land of Bollywood after all, and stare haplessly outside the window while it pours, from the sanctity of your home. Or if you are feeling adventurous (ambitious more like) you can go for a long drive or plan a monsoon getaway (we recently did a staycation and will write about that soon!)