Mumbai !!

It has been more than two years now I have left the place, but it seems that it was just yesterday I was traveling in an overcrowded BEST bus struggling to get to the door, pushing everyone aside while my stop arrives, many a times I had missed the stop and had to get down at the next one and walk back.

It’s not that I was born and brought up in Mumbai, but yes I have been visiting it every year for my whole life, it was called Bombay back then. And when I joined college here, the city took me as if I was never an outsider; I was treated as its own. All those years of college and then a year of job made me a mumbaikar by heart and whenever I got a chance I travelled to the city.

But now, sitting in New Jersey, when someone asked today if I would like to settle down in Mumbai, my answer was ‘I don’t know’. I never thought of it. Heart was always in dilemma, whether I liked the city or I did not. Once a mumbaikar, always a mumbaikar, I used to hear this a lot in Mumbai. May be dilemma was the result of this saying.

The city definitely is different from others. It has its own aura. As soon as you enter the city, you can feel a blow of hot wind; your lungs will tell you that you started inhaling air which is heavier than outside the city air. It is so damn humid that your skin becomes advertisement of fevistick, extremely sticky. If you have never been to Mumbai, it will be difficult for you to believe this, but yes there is a particular smell of the air. Only place where the air itself has its own smell. A true mumbaikar can always identify the smell. Good or bad depends on many things, like how late you are for your office or how long you are stuck in the traffic while going back home or how you have run through a red signal and no traffic police has caught you.

I always wondered why my friends looked darker in the pictures they posted from the Gateway of India. But then I got to know the reason, they travelled on bike and the complexion was just a layer of carbon.  But then you are at Gateway so it doesn’t matter how much carbon is on your face and how much in your lungs.  You forget all those as soon as a huge waves from the sea hits the wall, you just feel like heaven. A ride on ferry to elephanta, especially if you are on the open deck, anyone hardly forgets.

One of my friends recently visited Girgaon Chawpaty with her husband and was telling about the romantic water fight between them. I was not able to control my laugh and said I have seen people pissing, vomiting and spitting on the same Girgaon chawpaty and not even that, every morning, nearby people use it as free public toilet. She said I will call you later, going for a bath. Well, so it happens.

You can see people running to get in the local train before the train has even hit the platform, so that they can get a window seat and catch up on their sleep. You can always hear lot of people shouting the same thing when the train stops, ‘let the people get down first’. A human wave gets out and other human wave gets in. leaving few inside, who wanted to get out and leaving few outside who wanted to get in. God forbid if you are traveling in peak hours, trains are so packed that your legs are not properly on ground, but you still find yourself standing, you feel someone trying to pick out your wallet but you cannot even move your ass to avoid it. But still millions of people board it and they don’t even complain about it. They say, if you have survived in Mumbai local trains, you can survive anywhere, I believe it.

From a sweating panipuriwala, whose sweat is an integral part of the panipuri, to a millionaire in an AC luxurious car, all you can find on the same signal. And surprisingly there would be more who will know the panipuriwala by his name, maybe the millionaire too. This is how it works. All are accepted, all are accumulated, like sugar in milk. But then if you look closely, none of them are selfless. They all are driven only by one thing, Money.

I am not saying that outside Mumbai people do not get driven by Money, they do, but in Mumbai it’s different. Money has taken place of God, highest priority in their life. An average Mumbaikar has stopped thinking beyond Money. Their only thought is how to earn money, more and more, and in the process they are slowly forgetting how to live. They are running so fast that they forgot they have left something behind, themselves.

Mumbai, in spite of its lack of emotions, its mechanical life, its money mindedness, its huge gap between poverty and luxury, its overcrowded population, its dangerously increasing temperature and pollution and many more its….I still find it attractive, and whenever someone asks about it, I say, ‘there is something about Mumbai…’

Make History....

Walking briskly in his room, he was worried about the outcome. Lines on his forehead were not allowing him to think. He walked to the window where his men were trying to calm the beast. ‘How is he now?’ Rana asked, concerned.  One of them, who was also chief medical officer looked up to the window and said, ‘I am afraid sire, he is not responding to the medicines.’

Without replying to the officer Rana went back inside and started gearing himself for the battle. There was no time left. He saw his army commander Jhala, in corridor, coming to him. Before Jhala could even greet him, he said, ‘Nathak is not well’. ‘I know my lord. This is why I have come here. Now when your best horse is out, we have no other option but to go with the second. I have asked men to bring him here. You can see it and then we can decide’

He thought for a moment and said, ‘prepare the army for battle, I will ride the one you chose for me, my friend’ without a delay Jhala left the room and Rana was left alone on the window, geared with battle cloths, watching his best horse struggle to stand.

They say, soil of the battle ground turned red with blood of thousands. Rana was trying to stop the blood drift from the cut on his shoulder when Jhala came rushing on his horse. ‘My lord, we won’t last longer, their army is fierce and unending. We are no longer…’ he left the sentence incomplete and waited for Rana to reply.

‘I will kill their chief commander’ he replied tying the knot of cloth on his cut. Jhala smiled, he knew Rana very well, he was not the one who will take defeat so easily. Before he could say anther word, Rana was already on his way, like a hurricane cutting the flesh all along, making way towards enemy commander. ‘Who could say this horse of him is the second best’ he thought watching the beast at his best.

It was a fierce jump; the horse drifted itself so high that for an instance Rana was face to face with enemy commander who was sitting on an elephant. That was the moment. Rana shot his sword to him, right on target. Cutting the head of the elephant driver and wounding the commander on his neck, unfortunately the wound on his neck did not prove to be fatal and the elephant swung his trunk and hit Rana’s horse, the sword tied to its trunk had cut a chunk of flesh from horse’s leg.

Jhala came running to Rana and snatched the royal insignia and wore himself. Rana heard him shouting, ‘if we want our land back, you must be alive’    

It was running like a wind, carefree of the stream of blood from his leg. How can he think about his wounds when his master’s life is in menace. It had a task of taking his master away from enemy and he was doing it with all his dignity.  Just crossing the canal will insure the safety he knew and it crossed, a jump even Nathak would have hesitated to take, but it did. Rana was across the canal, safe.

As the horse fell on the ground, Rana knew the horse had made history. He wiped the tears from the eyes of the horse as it died. Took his knife and scratched name of the horse on a stone, ‘Maha Rana Pratap's Chetak’.

Nobody remembers ‘Nathak’, though he was the best always. So if you are the one who has not been number one always, well it doesn’t matter. What matters is how you perform when you get a chance to do it. ‘Chetak’ has become a part of history in spite of being number two, because he performed when it was needed the most. Life is full of chances and opportunities, what matters is how one performs, you never know when the number one gets sick and it is you facing the race. So to make history, give your best shot, no matter you are number one or number two.