Posted on Monday, 14th July 2008 by deepu
The Taj, Apollo Bunder, Mumbai
It has been more than 6 months since i came to Mumbai for the first time, without knowing anyone except 1 or 2 friends who themselves came to the city few months back. So i am penning down my tryst with Mumbai after coming to the city without any idea of how to survive at a place touted to be one of the toughest places to live. Before leaving to the city i was told the usual horrendous things people associate with Mumbai. “It is ridiculously expensive” , “the city is full of violence” , “the infrastructure there is crumbling” , “the city is full of people who make a living by cheating others”. While few are true to an extent a couple of problems are exaggerated out of proportion.
The first thing that anyone looks for is a place to live. Before coming here i didn’t make any arrangements. I don’t think it is even possible to arrange for a place to live before coming here unless you are planning to stay with your relatives. Just plan to stay with any of your friends or would be colleagues for couple of weeks. Having been through the hassle of finding a house, almost anyone in Mumbai(for example would be colleagues who you are not friends with yet) will let you stay in their house till you find one for your self. I lived with a good friend of mine for almost a month before i found a flat for myself. Else one more way is to find a PG. They usually doesn’t cost more than 5k a month and don’t ask sky-high deposits. My colleague Ganga who joined us 2 months back took this route and right now we both are flat-mates. So once you come here let everyone of your colleagues and flat-mates and friends know that you looking for a flat. Usually the demand is very high and before long you will be one of the 3-4 guys who are looking to rent a new flat. Don’t even think about renting a whole flat for yourself unless you are born with a silver spoon. A very important decision to make is where to live with mumbai having a lot of suburbs well connected to each other by the local trains(more on these later). Your choice of a suburb also determines your cost of living and how much you need to travel to work. I lived in Colaba (very expensive locality) for few months and later moved on to Andheri(also expensive but less so when compared to Colaba) when i realized i cannot afford the luxury of living in Colaba for long. But now i travel about 40 mins to my work while in Colaba i was just 5 minutes away from office. so make your trade-offs before deciding on where to find a flat. And that’s it really. After that you will call a bunch of real-estate brokers in that area, they will show you the houses, all your would-be flat mates zero-in on one house and before long you will have finally settled down in mumbai 
. A couple of caveats though. Housing in Mumbai is ridiculously expensive when compared to other places. we currently pay around 25k per month for a fully furnished 2BHK which amounts to 5k per person. My parents live in a similar size flat in Hyderabad and pay 7k per month. Also be ready to pay hefty deposit to the tune of at least 5 times your monthly rent. Again there are quiet a few places where rents are much much cheaper. For example in Navi Mumbai you can get a 2BHk for around 10k but then had i been there my travel to office would have been much longer. Ok now it seems like you got a decent overview of how to find a place to live in mumbai. You see it is not as fearful as people outside mumbai fear it is.
Once you have settled down the next important thing is travel. Mumbai traffic is same as, if not worse than, Bangalore traffic. Normally one won’t prefer road travel unless it is within the same suburb. Else people use the local trains which is very inexpensive and has very good connectivity between most of the suburbs. For example Andheri to CST is a 40 minute ride in the local train(around 1.5hrs on road) and a monthly ticket for unlimited travel between the stations cost just 125 bucks. However a lot of people use the local trains and more often than not you won’t get a seat. In my case for the first few days i found the travel very exciting. Then for the next few weeks i found it really hard to travel every day standing and putting up with so much rush at peak time. With the help of my colleagues i got to know about a small book which gives all the details of which train starts from which station and when. Now i catch the 9.45 daily train from Andheri to CST. Since it starts from Andheri i always manage to get a seat. See ? Once you get used to it in the first few weeks traveling in mumbai is quick and inexpensive.
With flat and travel taken care of, the next comes the most exciting aspect of living in Mumbai. Coming to food first Mumbai is know for its restaurants. Be it South-Indian, Gujarati, Kashmiri , be it Italian, French, Iranian, Israeli, from the ubiquitous vada-pav to some very special dishes like berry pulav you will find all sorts of restaurants in Mumbai. I may be a bit biased as i really love having variety of food but it is sheer thrill to be able to taste a different variety of food every week-end and it is a luxury only very few cities like Mumbai can provide. Next, places to hang out. Mumbai being a port city has numerous beaches which turn out to be favorite hang out places. My favorite one is marine drive which is just 10 min drive from the office. So apart from restaurants, beaches and movies the best hang out places are undoubtedly the pubs which are the lifeline of night-life. Experiencing the night-life in pubs is something which i cannot put in words. One has to experience it oneself. Mumbai is not short of artists either. whatever form of art you appreciate painting, music, theater whatever there are numerous plays, art galleries, live music shows happening at several places in the city mostly on weekends. At weekends if you want to go out of city you have so many beaches and places to trek around Mumbai. A lot of people go out every weekend.
As i gave you an account of what i discovered in my few months in Mumbai, you must have realized all the warnings i was given before coming here were about surviving in Mumbai. None told me actually about living in Mumbai. Surviving in mumbai is easy. There are standard procedures which you need to follow as i told in the first 2 paragraphs. My estimate is one can easily sustain here with 15k per month. But then what many people outside Mumbai don’t know about is that mumbai is full of life more so than any city i know of in india. I wrote about few of them in the above para. I know of many people who don’t earn more than 25k per month but still manage to wallow in the liveliness of Mumbai. of course whatever costs i have quoted here is from my brief experience and i am neither married nor do have a girl friend.
Tags: moving, mumbai
Posted in Hiring, Junta Janardan, Un-category-cal | Comments (7)
July 15th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
yeah.. living in mumbai
thats real fun 
July 27th, 2008 at 10:03 am
great observation by the way.hats of to u for giving a such a nice explanation.thanks it really helped me.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:44 am
Thanks for sharing ur experience pal!!
August 30th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
lovely description.
September 8th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Hey thanks a ton dude. Am shifting to mumbai in december n your blog gave me good idea…
September 29th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Gr8 description..While reading the Blog i almost felt tht Deepu has done some telepathy n wrote my own experience in Mumbai apart from the fun part…
September 29th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
glad that my post is of help to some people.
Cheers,
Deepu.