When we hopped on the bus our first day in Mumbai our very jet-lagged crew didn’t know what to expect. Our tour started off with a visit to the Gateway to India, a fitting way to be introduced to India and the city of Mumbai considering the historical significance to British royalty and later other tourists. Our guide also gave us a wonderful introduction to the history of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.
The rest of the tour commenced with a variety of stops, starting with the University. One of the most unexpectedly beautiful buildings we stopped by was the Victoria Terminus, where 3 million people travel through every work day. Other stops included the Hanging Gardens and a rooftop hill view of Malabar Hill. Our guide gave us an interesting perspective on the affluent residential neighborhood as well as the Parsi community, as we passed many temples and religious sites.
Our guide also gave us interesting insights into two unique culture phenomena in Mumbai, the open-air laundry system and the launch pail delivery system. We witnessed the open-air laundry system first-hand with a visit to Dhobi Ghat.
What was fascinating about this site was how the laundry workers had a system for sorting, hanging and redistributing laundry to the right families in a very crowded space. The lunch delivery service is another service that seems logistically impossible, as the delivery team picks up the lunches from the workers homes in the morning and drops them back off in the afternoon, all while weaving through intense Mumbai traffic. However, as our guide insisted, this system is extremely popular and somehow works with a 99% accuracy rate.
Our final stop before lunch was one of my personal favorites from day, the Prince of Wales museum. There were several notable sites at the museum, from the Bhudda head outside the museum to architecture and exhibits inside.
The museum was surprisingly large, so we didn’t have time to explore every area, but some highlights included the sculptures, ornament exhibit and textile section.
From there our tour came to an end with a stop at a lunch buffet, where we had worked up an appetite despite our substantial breakfast buffet. We enjoyed a plethora of soups, curries, chicken and vegetarian dishes and of course, dessert. I noticed that sugar is not in short supply here! Overall, this day was a successful and eye opening introduction into Indian culture and Mumbai.
This article is part of the series describing the Marketing Centers’ International Trip to India in January 2020. The international trip is the culmination of a two-credit course with the overall learning objective of expanding student knowledge of marketing and other facets of running a multi-national brand in high interest markets beyond the U.S. While on site we visit the marketing offices of several companies and receive engaging case studies on the local consumer, company operations and the challenges of ‘local’ marketing outside the U.S. Students walk away from the trip with a different perspective that prepares them further for working in global marketing and general management.
The 2020 course and international trip focused primarily on US based multi-national companies in India.
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