How would you feel when a gust of wind brings forth
pomphrets and shrimps? Or walking down the road your eyes catch fish hanging
down branches of withered trees? No, you won’t feel like a part of a sci-fi
drama, you’d feel what any random day in Manori feels like.
Though it’s just an hour’s drive from Mumbai, or even closer
if you take the jetty from Marwe or Gorai, but Manori feels like its nestled in
some other era of technological advancement or consumerism, or lack of the
thereof. The town is divided mainly into the koliwada or the koli village and
the rest. For most people its best known attraction is the water park, Essel
World. However, the best way to start off would be a walk through the koliwada.
Walking down the narrow alleys, you’d have to squint your eyes to confirm if
those are dead leaves heaped up outside every house or remains of shrimps and
fish. Every household is engaged in the same activity throughout the morning.
Men get the fresh morning catch, the women settle down to separating the fish
and put them outside for drying, and some women busy collecting the fish and
seafood that has been drying for a while. The whole village seems like an
assembly line with the usual cow or kids playing with bicycle tires thrown in!
The village is located right on the Manori beach, which
again is a little more of a safe haven from hordes of tourists as compared to
the neighbouring Gorai beach. Though the water isn’t the clearest for a quick
dip or even to get your feet wet, but there’s something about the whole
juxtaposition of dogs sunbathing, carts of shaved ice and families bathing
their horses in the sea, that makes the whole setting so charming and quaint
and pleasing to the senses.
While on weekends it would be next to impossible to get food
at any of the few resorts around, unless you manage to befriend one of the many
20-membered families out there on a picnic. But there are several tiny
restaurants with basic fare, enough to satiate the lunch hunger pangs.
While on one end of the town is the koliwadi, the other end
if occupied by the complete opposite of what koliwadi stands for. The other end
has what they proclaim the largest water park in Asia, Essel World and Water
Kingdom. And right next to it is the World Vipassana Centre Pagoda created a
couple of years ago. Why would someone create a place of worship next to one of
the noisiest places that there can be beats me! Its been decreed as sacred
land, and ,men and women are asked to not stay very close to each other and try
and immerse themselves into chanting, whereas a few hundred feet away men and
women get wet together and howl and scream with adrenaline rush!
Well yeah, as if we did not know already, our country the
land of paradoxes!
But for a quiet Sunday morning by the beach, do come to
Manori and hang out at the fishermens’ village J
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| Dried fish hanging from trees |
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| Dried fish hanging from clotheslines |
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More dried fish hanging from more places
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| Well coz it's sacred land they say! |
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| At the entrance of the Pagoda |
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