Mumbai is now my hometown – rather, the address that I fill in the Permanent Address columns of a thousand registration forms – both on paper and in the paperless, virtual world - bear Mumbai as the place to which I am permanently tethered to. It is ironic, because I am the aimless vagrant and less dramatically, because I have never really lived in the city. I have lived here as an itinerant, in the interregnums between the established milestones in my life. But it is Mumbai where my parents are, it is here that I did my post-graduation and made wonderful friends to last a lifetime, started off a new phase of life in my first job post my MBA... consequently, the city awakens in me a keen bout of nostalgia and a fair sense of belongingness.
And it is a city that assaults your senses and challenges the person inside you, irrespective of who you are and what your beliefs are. It is a city that is uniformly loved and loathed, but seldom ignored. Simply because Mumbai does not give you that option. She opens up in front of you and shows her myriad colours, much like a peacock on the dusty Delhi-Jaipur highway and you cannot, but be seeped in into her folds.
Its problems are manifold and well documented. Millions travel to and fro in her local trains – serpentine worms coursing through her belly carrying milliards of eggs inside; passengers packed like sardines. Despite having the country's sturdiest mass transport system, Mumbai is crumbling beneath the weight of her freight. The number of local trains are proving inadequate; the roads are permanently clogged with traffic; the pace of new infrastructure is losing the race to the greater pace of an ever expanding population; the local populace is increasingly being marginalized by outsiders and xenophobic demons are rearing their ugly heads; slums are mushrooming all over, disfiguring the face of the maiden and assaulting the dreams of many who want the city to be Shanghai - but proving resistant to half-hearted attempts at demolitions by politicians who peddle the Shanghai dream and look for votes in these very slums simultaneously, without a trace of the inherent dichotomy; gigantic cement-mixers keep rumbling in like military tanks at Tiananmen and crush the dwellings of migrants who have lived in the outskirts since fleeing from the horrors of partition; the custodians of the law are running amok threatening the encomiums heaped on the city as the safest for the fairest in the country; communal politics is seeping into the veins and the arteries, splitting up people, compartmentalizing them into their own burrows; the Mafia may be down, but is not out yet and newer Chhota Rajans and Dawoods are emerging from the shadows of their notorious predecessors.... the list of woes is long and emasculating.
But like Saladdin, Mumbai manages to survive. She tricks her way past the seemingly insurmountable hurdles, faces up to a few and puts off a fight good enough to push Armageddon away by a few light-years and in most cases, she simply ablactates herself from the issues and allows them to mellow and then die down. And she is adept at the art of survival. She has faced the marauding navies of the Arabians, dodged the cunningness of the Portuguese, stood up to the naked ambitions of the British, stoically borne her barter between Spanish princesses and English monarchs, lived through the loss of her mill lands, endured the activism of Datta Samant, George Fernandes and their smouldering armies of plebeian warriors, picked up the pieces after riots that would have shattered the fabric of her sisters and winked at the virulent diatribes of self-appointed custodians of the local culture.
She has fed all who have come to her for nourishment, refusing to differentiate her sons from those of her sisters. Hordes swim to the El Dorado, ending up on pavements, slums, mujra houses, bars, factories, construction sites. A few amass wealth, some find their dreams fulfilled but countless, faceless others struggle on, but with hope in their hearts. A persecuted community from far-off Persia found her to be their promised land and rose to the pinnacle of their success and fame here and shaped many of the things that we like about her. She has embraced all - from the ancient Kolis, Pathare Prabhus and the East Indians to the new converts known as bhaiyyas. Zoroastrians, Syrian Catholics, Bene Israeli Jews, East Indian Roman Catholics, Bangladeshi immigrants, Sindhis and Gujaratis – they are as much bhoomiputras as the Marathi manoos. She dazzled the Europeans with her grandeur and culture, while providing the restless youth of the country with the ideal grounds for fomenting revolutions to unshackle ourselves from them. She has stood up for her daughters when they were violated and ensured that the law did not drag its feet when it came to handing out punishment. She taught her sons that colour, caste and creed are the vices of the pusillanimous. She nurtured an institution like Bollywood, which continues to be the single most efficacious glue holding our nation together and gave us messiahs like Tendulkar who would embody our national pride like no other. She taught us commerce and trade and put us on the path to economic glory.
She is fraying at the edges now and has seen a fair number of sunsets to acquire that aura of one who has been there, done it all. Newer challenges keep coming up daily. But she has taught her children to tide over them. Sunil More was not spared by the law, the common man refused to be a mute spectator when Uzer Patel went on a ghastly killing spree at the Gateway, strangers helped each other stoically through the worst city floods that Mumbai had ever seen, the more radical of its political parties is getting more inclusive.
It is time to raise a toast to her !!
