Andy Hoffman
Deb arranged for us to tour the Bombay Stock Exchange, with Bharti, a friend she had made while speaking at a convention in Singapore. (Read Deb’s entry.) A stock exchange anywhere represents both the promise and the threat of capitalism: people start companies with the dream of making something new in the world, and they invest in those companies with the hope of making both money and change. But in the end people cash out, taking their profits with them, either because the dream concluded, or had saturated its market, or people lost faith. A stock exchange looks like capitalism run amok, and perhaps it is, but it is also a place where we expose our essential humanity. We dream, we hope, we have faith and trust, and we lose them. As a serial entrepreneur myself, I have dreamed these dreams and willingly threw myself into the jungle, gaining and losing faith with my changing fortunes. At the Bombay Stock Exchange, beneath the sheen of computer screens and passionate transfers of rumor, knowledge, and money, we see essential humanity. Perhaps even more than at the more famous cousins like NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, because it’s so close to the surface.
After the tour, Bharti took us to a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant around the corner, the place had perhaps six tables. Clearly customers came and went quickly, probably unwilling to leave their computers unattended for very long. We allowed our host to direct the ordering, since she knew the restaurant and the foodways. Soon, plate after plate emerged from behind the counter: fluffy round bread, freshly made; idli, saucers made of sticky rice, used for dunking; sambar, the spicy sauce ubiquitous in Mumbai; and a couple of other unfamiliar but tasty curries. Just when I was ready to resign, some new intrigue landed on the table, redolent with seductive steam.
We left mountains of food behind, testament to our own weaknesses. We walked out into the street, more like an alley nearly devoid of traffic, defeated by the limits to our appetites. That’s when I looked back at the front of the restaurant. It was called The Modern, just like my favorite breakfast place in Rhode Island, fully half a world away. The two places had so little in common – dozens of tables in one, exposed kitchen in the other, and virtually no overlap in menu – but they shared more than a name. Both provided a retreat from the world of dreams and allowed the woken dreamers to focus on the immediate, the sensual, the hunger we share with one another and our nonhuman fellow travelers. For people, though, both Moderns provide a place to return to our dream worlds, renewed for another round of hope and profit-taking. I want to go back to my Mumbai Modern and dunk my spongy idli in the sambar again and find myself back in a dream from a different age. Perhaps, with a little luck, I will find the hidden connecting door that will allow me to pass from one Modern to the other without having to dream in between.