"Mayanagari" Mumbai

I still remember the curiosity I had before embarking the flight to Mumbai for my Summer Internship. After the 3 other metros that I have lived in for small time periods, this was the only metro left to be conquered or rather explored. I had a pretty decent plan in terms of the places I would visit inside the city and the fun I wanted to have here. Ironically, the “maya” also deserted me in this famous Mayanagari by way of meagre stipend. A lot of people whether they had visited the city or not talked a lot about it……But the only different thing, forget about the value judgement right now, was that everyone seemed to be in a hurry here.

Now let me compare it with the city of Bangalore and Chennai where I have lived the better part of my life…When it comes to cleanliness, it is horrible…..I don’t think there is any comparison between Mumbai and Chennai –Bangalore. Traffic is messy…..Thanks to the ‘local’ that people don’t even care about the road transport else the city would have got clogged to death. But it is said that people make places…. So lets see how it fares on that count….People here feel that speaking is sheer waste of energy….The first day when we visited our company we asked so many guys about the direction….and the common response was the finger they showed for the direction……good thing was they showed the direction with the right finger.

Few good memories that I have of this city are of the “Posh” areas where only 0.0000001% of Indian population can afford to live (areas like Colaba, Nariman etc…). I wish I had a room in Hotel Hilton facing Queen’s necklace…Lovely…Few things that I really loved were the Gateway of India, the ferry ride in the Arabian Sea, some naval installations, The Taj Hotel, BSE, Churchgate Station and the surrounding areas. Some of that appreciation was because of the fact that I had read a lot about JRD and the Tatas and I was able to see some of the masterpieces that they had built… I was able to see the history that the Tatas had created…

Apart from that tiny area of richness, the rest of the city is comparable to the shanty towns or tier-2 cities of India. More than anything else I found it to be a city of paradoxes; one where you can find the super-riches of the country in Nariman Point or Bandra-kurla and at the same time Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi not more than 2-3 kms. away; the glamour world of bollywood and the middle-class suburbs of Bombay; the multicultural and multi religious society of Bombay and one of the most hard-line Hindutva party, Shiv Sena. All in the same place.

I don’t think any of us can make a sweeping conclusion about the city per se. It has been home to great minds of the countries, great business tycoons, great cricket players, great institutions. But as a middle class person I think I would prefer cities like Pune, Bangalore, Chennai than Bombay.