Mumbai

I’ll miss the sea, for sure. The grey, rippled balm putting together shreds of another working day’s resolve. Kurkure packets, SEC A, B and C garbage bags, plastic forks and plates notwithstanding. The kala khattas, pony riders, helium balloon sellers, shapely belles and their out-of-shape better halves, all.

Media men talk about and dissect the Mumbai spirit. Several carnages, bombs, AK 56s, Pakistani linkages and pathetic post mortems later, life races back to normal. That really isn’t the Mumbai spirit. That’s compulsion. That really is a mechanical servitude that thinks twice before letting go of another Privileged Leave just like that. That’s the stoic that comes with the warm cocoon comfort of knowing that no one in your family was killed, maimed, blinded or paralysed by a terrorist’s gun. Collateral damage is someone else’s spill to clean up. So, one giant rally with candles and slogans and life’s back to Sex and the City and the weekend boogie at the Hawaiian Shack or wherever.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against a show of solidarity or a quiet protest march. But my point is save the fact that apart from getting a few media people scurrying with their cameras, microphones and dictaphones, it’s just a colossal waste of collective effort. I’d rather park my time for a pressure group, or a Public Interest Litigation for NSG-like bodies playing vigilante rounds in every metropolitan city, or anything that measures up to something.

As for the spirit of Mumbai, I guess it’s summed up no better than the thousands of suburban families that turn up on Marine Drive or Juhu Chowpatty on Saturdays and Sundays to do their weekly quota of romance, iced golas, sev puri or horse rides. From miles away they come, so that their kids can see what the best of Mumbai is like. Where investment bankers, private equity moghuls, diamond merchants and Bollywood heavyweights go back to after a hard day’s work. So that the kids can aspire and work towards that.

The spirit of Mumbai is two hundred men in a crowded train compartment traveling thirty kilometers from Borivali to Churchgate so that their sons can go on to become fine engineers and doctors. The spirit is a taxi driver returning a Hidesign bag packed with 500 rupee notes, left unwittingly by a customer. It’s 5,000 dabbawallas getting a six sigma and becoming a case study in supply chain precision at the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad. It is letting the young couple canoodling and whispering sweet nothings to one another on Bandra Bandstand and Reclamation, stay unmolested. It’s about the nalli nihari on Id eve on Muhammad Ali Road, with gargantuan rotis, topped with firni. It’s the sky on Marine Drive on Diwali eve bursting with rockets in a million hues, dying like a million stars. It’s the joggers in countless parks smiling to strangers as they all aspire to a longer youth. It’s the soft hello to the Parsi septuagenarian who mans his counter as I sip my tea and brun maska. It’s the sum of all our social graces, however soft and hidden.

Inflation, recessionary trends, political brouhaha, corporate shams, scams, they all come and go. They’re the cyclical nemesis of a peaceful equilibrium we all take for granted. We see them coming, yet we stay peaceful till we are disturbed.
We the people, exist, because sperm met egg. We become when we choose to be. Mumbai became Mumbai because we made it so and because it chose to be so. I will miss it sorely for a year. But most of all, I’ll miss the sea.