Category Archives: Mumbai
Taking a Breather from Maximum City
What’s happening to Mumbai?
Leave it to Pritish Nandy to elaborate in his inimitable way. His post on this topic, published in the Times of India, is very well written and says it all. It’s called (in it’s tongue-in-cheeky tone) Why I love Mumbai.
Just in case there’s not enough of an incentive for you to read it, I have included an excerpt here:
“….
Muslims have got Satanic Verses banned. Hindus have banned Husain. So no gallery dares to show the art of the city’s greatest son. You can’t show sculptures with genitals, not even Michaelangelo’s David, though you can see any number of genitals on the streets where people openly pee. You can’t watch The Dirty Picture on 9 pm TV. That’s outlawed though it won Vidya the National Award and every kid has loved it. You are lucky Donald Duck ain’t banned because comics and cartoons in text books are banned. My Savita Bhabhi is too. So are, sneakily, many websites.
…..”
Read more here. Now you will, right? [And how do you like all that genuine purple prose? 🙂 ]
This write-up by him was followed by another article of the same ilk (by Nandy again) a day later – Don’t you dare sing, dance, eat out, watch films. Welcome to Mumbai in 2012. Obviously he has strong feelings about the new era of moral policing that is emerging here. As he should.
I mean, this kind of stuff happens only in cities like…Bangalore, right? My intuition tells me that the people of Maximum City will not stand for it and sooner or later, it will be nipped in the bud.
Combine this with the despairing populace of India who are wondering how and why India Shining got so tarnished, so quickly.
With a government that is called paralyzed yet is able to introduce funky finance “reforms” (retroactive taxes, anyone?) while taking the country back to the low days of the early 1990s, with inflation that doesn’t seem to have a cap in sight, with foreign investors intent on fleeing, and the light at the end of the economy’s tunnel nowhere in sight…why, America looks downright luminous! 🙂
All of this combined with the city’s inherent humidity that gathers even more steam (literally!) in anticipation of the grand entry of Monsoon-2012 and I decided – what a wonderful time to break away, even if it’s just for a couple of weeks!
To break away and escape from madness by heading home – to my modest-sized, quiet, pristine, lovely city in the southern United States. It’s where a bright and sunny Summer, as well as friends and family await me with open arms (I hope!). And it’s where I certainly won’t get busted by the moral police if I decide to go out for a late night drink. (Chill already, Mumbai!). Far from it.
What a welcome change it will be to go from the mega-city that never sleeps (or used to not) to one that is quiet and peaceful, if somewhat sleepy at times. The yin and the yang. 🙂
So, home sweet home, here I come!
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P.S. As I was reviewing the post, I noticed that I have three of these 🙂 (this makes 4) embedded in my writing. That’s unusual for me…must be something about my mood as I head home, eh? 🙂 (and that’s 5)
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P.S. #2. As I make my way out of Mumbai, it appears….ah yes, I hear it. The monsoon of Mumbai has arrived.
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Photo Credits:
Mumbai Skyline at Night: By Cididity Hat (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Smalltown USA : By User:Anivron derivative work: Spyder_Monkey [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Safe and Warm in the City of Mumbai
Call me Pollyanna if you must, but I believe that people are generally good until proven otherwise. However, it’s very difficult to stick to this truism in many places around the world, especially the very large metro areas. It’s not that people are not good there, it’s just that we see very few demonstrations of it.
Either its a New York City where you are invisible – just one of the multitudes lost in the crowds, or it’s Los Angeles where again you are invisible – in the vast expanse of neighborhoods. Actually, I take that back, in NYC, sometimes you are not invisible but you wish you were, because someone else was rude to you just now…:)
I do see a difference in some of the southern US cities, and I see a difference in smaller towns, wherever they may be.
Not that it’s a small town by any account, but that brings me to Mumbai. I’ve compared its similiarities to NYC in another post but there are a couple of major differences.
Safe and Warm in the City of Mumbai!
For one, in Mumbai, people are warm to others. You may be a stranger or you may be a lifer, whatever the case may be, you are rarely invisible, and it’s even rarer to encounter rude behavior. People generally have a ‘live and let live’ attitude, and they are helpful when you need help. This is why I enjoy taking my visiting friends and showing them around the city. The weather may be unbearable in summer, but its people are not!
Here’s another quality that may surprise you. Notwithstanding all the stories you hear about the Mafia underworld of Mumbai, this is a safe city. It is said that a woman alone can take a taxi at 2 am in the morning and feel safe about reaching her destination problem-free. I have never done that before. But I could, without being overly concerned, since I have heard about Mumbai’s safety so many times from so many different people. I can’t say I’d do the same in New Delhi! And I won’t even feel that comfortable doing so in Bangalore or Hyderabad.
People in Mumbai - Monsoon Sunday at Gateway of India
Now that I’ve been here for a few months, I really believe in these qualities of Mumbai – people are generally nice to you, and it is known to be a safe city for ordinary people. I say this while acknowledging but ignoring some very special cases such as 26/11 and even the most recent bomb blasts that occurred just a few days ago . I relegate those to terrible acts of terrorism by a small fringe element – people essentially not from Bombay but seeking to destroy its very essence.
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So, back to the premise that people here are basically good-natured and warm. What I wonder though is, why is this the case?
Is it simply endemic to the region, i.e., are people from Maharashtra just built this way?
Or, rather, is it because Mumbai is a melting pot of so many different cultures from around the country (and world) that it has become that way?
I really don’t know the answer, but would sure love to hear others’ theories about this. Please, enlighten me!
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Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joezach/90248788/ {{cc-by-2.0}}
Photo 2: Sandhya – June 2011
The Yin and Yang of Life Anywhere 