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…’