Friday, February 06, 2015

Alas, my Mumbai, alas...

I am, in some ways, a hopeless optimist - some might suggest that, given my philosophical beliefs, that's a necessity - but Mumbai is enough to cause even the most rose-tinted spectacles to turn as black as the fear-sensitive sunglasses in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

The air pollution is positively hostile, littering is an epidemic, not a problem, government is either incompetent, inept or both, and islands of immense glamour are surrounded by a sea of slums enough to make one wonder how such huge wealth can allow you to glance out of your penthouse window over such dire poverty. And yes, the city works, after a fashion, and yes, it may be true that life on the margins in the City of Dreams is still less awful than it is in the rural villages, but that says very little, I'm afraid.

Mumbai is a city where a dozen or so people die on the suburban railway every day (yes, really), where human life appears to have little value - even crippled beggars are abused for their nuisance value. And yet, it aspires to be a world city.

But perhaps what is so depressing is that, for the most part, its citizens accept this. Yes, the middle class protest about corruption - it makes their lives more complex, even as it throttles initiative and creativity - but the environment is a disaster, the city is in gridlock most of the time and you wouldn't even know where to start in terms of street cleaning. The scent of raw sewage in the air is, in a hot climate, merely a hint as to the quality of life for those unfortunate enough to live in the slums.

It is perhaps nostalgic to look back to a time when Bombay was somewhat gentler on the senses, before the streets filled with cars and the gutters with dirt, and perhaps time and memory give the city a sense of better days past, but until government and the people come together as one to reclaim the city as a place to live properly and well, rather than somewhere to inhabit, Mumbai will be a place which fails to live up to its ambition.

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