It does not take too long for one to get attached to Bombay. The city is a wealthy proprietor of crime, commerce, cinema, cosmopolitanism, culture, chaos and all these cumulatively give it the vibrant-mutating-inscrutable character that it possesses. It is my belief that many people (and I am one of them) stick to Bombay not because of the above things but despite many other things. I recently read an article by Jerry Pinto which seemed to aptly furnish my thoughts into words:
1. The city which I generously defended in front of my parents once so that my sister could stay out a little longer saw an NRI woman being molested outside one of its biggest hotels.
2. A school kid recently paid back his class bully with a bullet from his father's revolver.
3. As the Mumbai Marathon ended, Modi and his saffron brigade prepared to get polemical on the Shivaji Park grounds. One needn't dial M for Murder anymore
4. If nothing else, a common thread that cuts across all classes is a universal lack of civic sense.
5. Seventy percent of college going youth spend seventy percent of their time in coffee houses and malls. Make way for Starbucks!
6. An urchin merely 5-6 years old comes and stubs its nose to my window precisely when I am on my way to a lavish dinner. And to top it up I can feel nothing but cash in my pockets.
Bombay has none of the imperium of Delhi, the self-conscious stasis of Calcutta or the provincial self-satisfaction of Madras. It is the ugly stepdaughter city but Prince Charming must cut his heels off to win her hand. It is a city in which no one dies of starvation but the vast majority are forced to endure living conditions that no enlightened zookeeper would allow for his animals. Yet the exiles and arrivistes keep flooding into the City imagined, to the Bombay they see as siren and savior. They never leave.Much is said about Bombay's impregnable character with great pomposity whenever a catastrophe like the 1993 blasts or the 26/7 deluge crosses our fate. No doubt, some of these stories deserve to be told; what but unrestrained hope can come out of a peoples' voice which does not have the luxury of a lasting memory! True, like all of theirs, my legs have been anchored to the city how much ever I wish I could leave it. The city that I knew of is degrading slowly and everyday I feel at the end of the candle.
1. The city which I generously defended in front of my parents once so that my sister could stay out a little longer saw an NRI woman being molested outside one of its biggest hotels.
2. A school kid recently paid back his class bully with a bullet from his father's revolver.
3. As the Mumbai Marathon ended, Modi and his saffron brigade prepared to get polemical on the Shivaji Park grounds. One needn't dial M for Murder anymore
4. If nothing else, a common thread that cuts across all classes is a universal lack of civic sense.
5. Seventy percent of college going youth spend seventy percent of their time in coffee houses and malls. Make way for Starbucks!
6. An urchin merely 5-6 years old comes and stubs its nose to my window precisely when I am on my way to a lavish dinner. And to top it up I can feel nothing but cash in my pockets.
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