Saturday 28 November 2015

The idea of Bombay

People like me, people who came of age in the eighties in middle-class urban India, grew up in a different India. We were something of an in-between generation. Our grandparents lived through the transition from colony to nation; our parents grew up in the years of nation building. We grew up taking independence and a certain degree of development for granted, without having all the gadgets, the conveniences, the consumer goods, and the general first worldness that the young of today were born into.

We also grew up with messages of unity in diversity surrounding us. We were all one, despite our religious and cultural differences, advertisements and pre-movie short films (and when TVs came into our homes, Doordarshan) told us. Ek, Anek, as a particularly cute animated short put it.

And while even our young minds knew there was an element of propaganda here, we chose to believe in it, or at least to subscribe to the notion that that was the way things should be.

To stripling me, Bombay pretty much exemplified this. After living in Visakhapatnam, Secunderabad and Madras, none of them small towns by any means, I was now in a true metropolis. The neighbourhood where we lived, the kids in my school, the markets, the buses, the trains, most of all the trains: all of this city teemed with diversity; it was like living in a Films Division short.

I grew up with more friends whose families had come here from various parts of India—one, two maybe three generations ago—than those who could claim centuries of city-born ancestry. Quite natural in a city that didn’t really exist as a city before hunks of its hills were toppled into the gaps between islands to make new land. We celebrated each other’s holidays and high days with gusto, visiting each other, sending across sweets and savouries to each other to better share the joy.

When you visited relatives back in the ‘native place’ during the summer holidays—in this city of migrants, everyone seemed to be from somewhere else—your Bombayness was acknowledged with gentle proscriptions along the lines of ‘You can’t do X here; this is not Bombay.’

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that the city was immune to communal and religious divides, that caste and class lines did not exist—it would be beyond childishly naive to suggest that—it was just that it felt like we were living in a country that was trying to rise beyond those schisms and, more important, in a great city that was leading the way in that effort, a city that had always been a pioneer in progressive thought. (Remember the Quit India movement? Remember where it was launched?) In Bombay, one could believe, the place you were born in, the god you bowed to, the language you spoke, the food you ate, none of these would stop you from making it as long as you were willing to work hard.

That changed in 1992. The demolition of the faraway Babri Masjid that December brought riots to Bombay. For those of us who lived here through those times, there was a chill in the air far colder than the city’s puny winters could ever bring. Men shaved off their beards lest they be mistaken for Muslims. Nominal Christians who weren’t the most regular of churchgoers made sure their crosses were visible. Nameplates that had names easily identified as being from the wrong community were taken down, leaving behind clean rectangles on otherwise weathered walls and doors. The first mentions of vegetarian housing societies came up. People talked softer in trains and busses for a while. Those riots, the ones that followed in January ’93, and then the bomb blasts that March, they killed many innocents. And they also delivered a mortal wound to Bombay’s belief in its invulnerability from the small-mindedness lesser towns and cities were plagued by. When the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party coalition that came to power in the next state elections renamed the city Mumbai, it was just a literal ending to the idea of Bombay; that city had already become something else.

Mumbai is still a resilient city. As we sprang back from the riots of ’92 and ’93, so did we recover, quickly, from the cloudburst and floods of 2005. We survived the body blows of the multiple blasts that ripped apart local trains in 2006. We got through the full frontal terror attacks of 2008, the seventh sad anniversary of which we marked two days ago. Yes, even then, we stopped what we were doing and stayed home and watched our televisions, but we were soon back at work, a little quieter, a little more thoughtful, a lot more fearful, but what does one do, livings must be earned. Each time, we went back. We regained our swagger and our style.

Mumbai, like Bombay, has no time to spare, where distances are measured in minutes and hours, not kilometres. It is still a place that rewards hard work, where fortunes can be made from humble beginnings.

Mumbai is a more crowded city than Bombay ever was, but that was inevitable; gold-paved streets are magnetic, but an island only has so much space in which to grow. And this has meant that we pay ludicrous prices for the cubes of air we call our homes, that we spend precious hours just getting to and from our places of work, that our open spaces are threatened, that builders can buy politicians and bureaucrats will conspire. (For me, it’s meant that my family had to move out of the city, to its little sister across the creek. Once it was called New Bombay, then the municipal signboards welcoming you to the city were blackened with tar and a new name was painted over it in rough letters: Navi Mumbai. That name become official too. Just history repeating itself in a different geography.)

Mumbai is still a safer city for women, for children, for the aged, than most others in this country. It is still a home to the arts and culture and sport and entertainment and all the fine things that are worth working hard for, the better to appreciate and enjoy them.

We live more comfortable lives, certainly, than most of India. We can take our electricity for granted most of the time. And though we panic about the water levels in our lakes, we somehow make it through each year until the monsoons arrive. Our air is far from clean, but the sea breeze bails us out most days, blowing away some of the smog.

And yes, we’re richer. And yes, we have so much that more developed countries have, the big brands and the High Streets, the glass towers and the luxury cars. Heck, we may not be Shanghai yet, but we have our very own suspension bridge.

But in the Mumbai of today, it has become okay to talk of the Other.

Bigotry is now legitimate; it no longer speaks in whispers, it is loud, it shrieks on our streets, shuts down shops, and sometimes the whole city. It does not want you to live in its buildings, it does not want you to cook your way, dress your way.

In this unsentimental city, hurt sentiments take centre-stage more often these days. (And we, the media, cannot absolve ourselves from blame for providing a steady stream of the publicity to the publicity-seeking hurt sentiment that comes our way.)

Again, don’t get me wrong. Just as it wasn’t a total free thinker’s paradise when my generation was growing up, it certainly isn’t hell in which we find ourselves in our middle age. Things are undoubtedly and demonstrably worse in other parts of India and, yes, the world.

Mumbai still is, and regularly proves itself to be, more progressive in its thinking than most places. In Mumbai, hard work still rules, and good ideas can still find a home. In Mumbai, you can still say what you believe, and be sure that no one will try to kill you if what you say offends them… Reasonably sure, that is. I can still casually call the city Bombay, as an old friend can do, without more than the odd idiot on Twitter scolding me Perhaps one day louts-for-hire may gherao this newspaper’s office if their paymaster’s delicate feelings are hurt by something we say, but this newspaper will still come out the next day, and its journalists will still walk the streets unafraid.

But here’s the thing. Today, liberal voices are more hushed; free speech advocates now censor themselves. This can only be a bad thing in a city founded on free movement: of people, of goods, of money, of ideas.

Bombay was all about differences coming together and somehow working. Bombay celebrated its differences, made the most of them and like some medieval alchemist, it conjured up success and growth. One couldn’t expect any less from a city that was imagined up out of seven islands and lots of swamp and sea.

But maybe that’s a lot of poetic tosh, born of too much brainwashing by the Films Division in one’s formative years.

Perhaps the Idea of Bombay began to die before the name did. And perhaps now, while it still gasps for breath, it’s really past hope and we should let that idea go. That would make me sad.

There’s a part of me, though, that doesn’t want to believe that: the part of me that still calls the city Bombay, as if using that name would conjure it back into existence. Who knows? Maybe there are enough of us, and if we all think about it really, really hard..?

[In the first Mumbai edition of The Hindu]

Saturday 21 November 2015

Published: Forbes India, ForbesLife India

Creature from Another Planet Obituary, Michael Jackson

Rock Show

Gunning For Glory

Book: And Another Thing?

Tip-off: Google Chrome

3 Ways to Build a Stronger Public Profile (With Indrajit Gupta)

7 Social Networking Tips for the Novice (With Elizabeth Flock & Nilofer D'souza

The Teller of Stories Profile, Chetan Bhagat

An Interview with Chetan Bhagat

7 New Words We Learnt This Year (With Shishir Prasad & Elizabeth Flock)

Event: Jaipur Literature Festival

Salman Rushdie and all that - a chat with Sanjoy Roy

(Audio)

Twho’s Twho

Should India Save Its Daylight?

Leaving Home: A Soulful Tribute to Indian Ocean

Long Live Social(media)ism!

From Darkness, Light

To Kill A Mocking Bird: A Book For All Seasons

Twitter Parodies

John Travolta: High Flier

Most Expensive Homes in India

Here's looking @ you, kid - The Evolution of Email

Forbes India Person of the Year 2010 (Podcast; with Shishir Prasad)

5 Gadgets You’ll Want To Own (With Deepak Ajwani)

11 New Words We Learnt this Year

Hope and Glory: Talking to Asha Bhosle

Welshspotting: Ten Minutes With Irvine Welsh

India Would Like to be Your Friend

The Intent Is to Build Communities for Friends of India

Nirupama Rao: We Want to Be Part of the New Media Revolution

The Best of Forbes India Covers - Year 2

Coke Studio Comes to India

Social Networking Site: Google+

Shammi Kapoor - Blithe Spirit

Book Review: Js & The Times of My Life

The Mind of the Indian Reader

Burning Questions of 2012 (Podcast; with Shishir Prasad)

11 Reasons Why the West Should Outsource Christmas To India

Why Sachin Tendulkar Isn’t God

11 Books To Read In 2012

Who will win the DSC Prize?

Elections and the elephant in the room

The Giant Chronicles - Two Books Worth Reading

It’s Love-All for Leander

A Book of Verse and Thou Beside Me

Talent-Spotting at the Jaipur Lit Fest

Jeet Jeet (Audio)

Ashish Nandy and all that (Transcript + Audio)

Rah-Rah Rahul!

Sanjna Kapoor: Sheer Madness Kept Prithvi Going

David Davidar: Aleph Books Will Be Competitively Priced

President Me

10 lessons on #journalism from Twitter

The Olympian Games

London Olympics: Carrying A Torch

The other Olympics

Show and tell: the Films Division’s new film club

Raasrang World Flute Festival

The Olympics: still sexist after all these years

Get to the Delhi Art Gallery Now!

Decoding the North East (with Kathakali Chanda)

Of book prizes and short-lists

Lit season begins

Short short short stories

Helping the police with their duties

Lonely Planet’s India Guides For You

Ferrari, vai a casa!

Duck-billed, web-footed, warm-blooded, egg-laying ... publishers

House of the Random Penguin

Ten very short novels

Facebook Communique

The X Prize Foundation’s India Plans

Prakriti Foundation’s Cultural Route to Charity

Five Years of Mumbai's blueFROG (With Pravin Palande)

Podcast: Questions that need asking (With Shishir Prasad)

The changing face of Indian publishing

Even more books to read in 2013

13 Books To Add To Your Reading List (with Sumana Mukherjee)

The Literary Zoo

Standup Comedy is Finding Its Feet in India (With Shravan Bhat)

Footnotes From Jaipur Lit Fest

William Dalrymple on the Jaipur Literature Festival (audio)

Rahul Pandita On Kashmir and its Stories

Who on earth is Veronica Mars? (Or, is Anurag Kashyap reading this?)

I want to be happy too!

Faster, Higher, Stronger. And Richer: The world’s highest-paid sportpeople

Penguin’s Quick Lit for E-Book Enthusiasts

Art For Uttarakhand - a sale and exhibition in Delhi

The Bastar that was: a unique photo exhibition in Delhi

Rendezvous with Indian Ocean’s Rahul Ram

Aleph’s ‘Short Biography’ Series Has Gems

Son of short-short-short stories

Christie’s has a dream India debut

What 2014 Has In Store For Us (Podcast)

Kuldeep Dantewadia: Managing Waste (with Udit Misra)

Anoj Viswananthan: Helping Donors Choose NGOs (With Udit Misra)

Tarique Quereshi: Fighting For the Homeless (With Udit Misra)

Elections 2014 - The Digital Battlefield (Podcast; with Sohini Mitter & Debojyoti Ghosh)

e-Lections 2014: How Political Parties Turned Tech-Savvy

Social Media: Limited, but ‘Liked’ in Indian Elections (With Sohini Mitter)

Vote for... Start-ups! (with Debojyoti Ghosh)

Elections: Spawning Business Opportunities (With Debojyoti Ghosh)

Case Study: The Dynamics of Mumbai South

Alt+Tab+Politics: Nandan Nilekani on switching tracks

5 People To Impact Our Thinking in the Last Five Years

5 Exciting New Technologies from the Last Five Years (With Shabana Hussain)

Mary Meeker’s ‘Internet Trends 2014’

Theatrical Release of The World Before Her

Old School: Centuries-old Universities

The Sceptical Patriot: Historical Claims Examined, with Affection

Dear Tendulkar-bhakts: how do you solve a problem like Maria?

A run for the money: the world’s highest-paid sports stars

Deep Waters: The Return of Indian Ocean

National Flag: Tricolour (With Prince Mathews Thomas)

National Animal: Tiger (With Jasodhara Banerjee)

What's this .भारत all about?

Validated domains for do-gooders: A registry and a community for NGOs

NGOs can Now Sign Up for .ngo Domains

If you applaud at the wrong time at a Symphony Orchestra of India concert, they won’t be upset with you

Large Bills: The most expensive objects of fancy

Luxury hotels that prosperous travellers love most

Best places for women? India ranks 114th among 144 countries

The Gender Gap: where India stands

All types of economies should co-exist (Ela Bhat; as told to)

The growing up of Salman Khan

Happier endings: Dealing (better) with mortality and pain (Atul Gawande; as told to)

Ice Stupas: Conserving water the 3 Idiots way

Achievable Utopias: What wonderful new things lie just ahead

SocialCops helps tackle big problems with Big data (With Salil Panchal)

Abhishek Choudhary and Saransh Vaswani: A class act (With Salil Panchal)

Alok Kumar: Lightening the load of schoolkids (With Salil Panchal)

Sticking to the basics always helps on YouTube

Video ga ga: The new tube in town

What Mary Meeker’s ‘Internet Trends 2015’ report tells us

World’s first women-only fund gets SEBI nod

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader is worth a read

Women entrepreneurs: A positive change is certain

Ecom Express: A trusted delivery partner

Rupa Publications: Not just Kapish Mehra’s great-grandfather’s company