Featured image: Claude Monet, Arrivée du train de Normandie, gare Saint-Lazare
If you’re an average human being (or a below average one, quite like me), you’ll never have deep, lofty thoughts when the environment is most conducive for them. If, for example, you’re at the beach, staring at the vast sea stretching all the way up to the horizon, with its roar in your ears and a zephyr grazing your face, you won’t ponder over the greatness of mother nature, the seeming insignificance of humans in the grand scheme of things, or the life blooming and thriving under the grey, watery sheet before your eyes. You might mull over such things for the first ten seconds of your entering the beach, but not more than that. Instead, your mind will turn to stuff like why the place smells of fish so much, why that little toddler running around you has no underwear on, how you’re going to get all that sand off your feet later, etc. That, or you’ll keep on looking at an airplane flying overhead till it finally becomes an indiscernible speck, then take up the office of staring listlessly at the sea and so on.
At least that’s what I was doing when I was at Juhu Beach yesterday.
Juhu Beach. Chaat. Bombay. Mumbai. Marine Drive. Victoria Terminus. Churchgate. Bandra. Sea Link.
If you’re not local to Mumbai, the neurons in your brain that have anything to do with your picture of it have fired a series of impulses since the moment you read the words ‘Juhu Beach’ and have pushed such words as the ones listed above into your working memory.
So.
Mumbai. Mumbai. Mumbai. MUMBAI. MUMBAI.
Nah, no font or stylizing can do this word justice.
[To those of you who call it ‘Bombay’, because “Mumbai is a city. Bombay is an emotion.” and all that, please bear with me, because I’m going to call it ‘Mumbai’ – not because I think you’re wrong, but because I don’t know the city enough for it to be an emotion for me.]
Q: Why a blog post about it all of a sudden?
A: I went there with a cousin of mine this last Friday and stayed at one of my grandparents’ and aunt’s place for a couple of days, finally returning yesterday evening. So my visit is fresh in my memory right now. Perfect condition for a blog post.
Q: Why now? Haven’t you been to the city before this?
A: Yes, but always with prejudices against it. Not this time, though. This time I went with an open mind – a clean slate for forming unbiased opinions. Again, perfect condition for a blog post.
I won’t bore you with a description of my itinerary there. Suffice it to say that I shopped a lottt (street shopping, duh), took the local and the bus a couple of times (Mumbai’s public transport system thoroughly impressed and excited me, especially because I’m from Pune, and PMT’s are the closest thing to decent public transport we have around here), was mesmerized by Marine Drive, gawked at the Gateway of India, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Asiatic Society Library and Victoria Terminus, ate fancy as well as simple food, and was hosted and chaperoned in the best and kindest possible way by my relatives there.
Q: So, what was your take on Mumbai?
A: Ahh, that’s a tough one to answer articulately. I’d say Mumbai is a patchwork. A big whole made of a little of everything, of somethings and nothings. A bundle of contradictions.
Wow, such eloquence, Einstein. -_-
Okay, let me have another go at this…
Mumbai is crowded. AF. Around 2.2 crore people live there – live in every kind of place right from footpaths to buildings like Antilia (that’s Mukesh Ambani’s … umm… “house”). Plus hundreds more are added to the city every single day.
If this huge mass of people, the vehicles, public and private, used to transport them, and other resources exploited to sustain them aren’t enough to make the place hot and stuffy, the fact that it is an island does the job.
The air is sticky and has a pervading smell (of different magnitudes in different areas) of what seems to be a homogeneous mixture of the smells of fish, sweat, salt, water, saltwater, food and talcum powder.
Oh – while we’re talking about talcum powder – I learned its true importance as well as that of handkerchiefs, deodorant sticks and water bottles during my stay there. I’m not going to fail to have any of these on me ever again. Ever.
I was in the constant fear of being pick-pocketed. I was wrong on that count. Such occurrences are not as frequent as I had thought them to be. Thank God and thank the human conscience.
These are the very reasons behind the dislike I had taken to Mumbai a few years back, up until a couple of months ago.
What’s surprising is, they are also the reasons I find the city as wonderful and amazing as I do now.
I find it truly, truly amazing that any city can survive all of this, take it in its stride and keep functioning, keep moving forward, keep going on without collapsing into a vast pile of disorder and chaos.
26/11. Blasts. Attacks. Riots. Protests. Mills. 26 July. Beggars. Millionaires. Reclamation. Trains derailing. Residents railing. Murders. Thefts. Births. Deaths. Page 3. Cricket. Slums. Politics… All of this involving 2.2 crore people, tens of religions, hundreds of nationalities and thousands of ethnic groups in an area of not more than 603 square kilometers.
The city takes it all, and just goes on.
Mumbai is a city where an old invalid can just about survive playing old Hindi songs on a flute at a minor railway station (that music was one of the sweetest I have ever heard, by the way), where women can buy clothes and accessories from a street and look just as chic as a celebrity, provided they have the right fashion sense (which many young working ladies seem to possess here), where friends congregate, people jog and walk their dogs, kids play, and couples sit hand-in-hand in one single necklace-shaped area, forgetting the old Indian worry of log kya kahenge, where one can find the world’s poorest, and the world’s richest living just meters away from each other, where, where, where… ah, a thousand other things!
That brings me back to what I had said in the first place… Mumbai is a patchwork. A big whole made of a little of everything, of somethings and nothings. A bundle of contradictions.
It is, therefore, majestic.
Let me end this post by duplicating a few lines from a popular Hindi song (the very song that this post is named after)…
Ai dil, hain mushkil jeena yaha.
Zara hat ke, zara bach ke,
Ye hai Bambai, meri jaan.
Sanika MN Joshi 
Leave a comment