Once was Bombay

My westward movement in journalism has brought me to Mumbai, the city of dreams and opportunities that travel on packed local trains. From the upmarket Churchgate to the suburbs of Goregaon and Malad, thousands dreams take birth and die simultaneously. Though I never came to this glitzy city with a dream, I am forgetting to dream in this claustrophobic Mumbai. People everywhere. Superficiality abounds. The squalor of slums being hidden by the gloss of high rises. Race to beat time in a frame that never stops. Housing prices defying the definitions of humungous fraud. The changing colours of politics. All voices and projects drowning in the post flood clamour. The alert citizen who is politicaly not conscious, the Mumbai marathon, the Wankhede, the media boom, the Kalaghoda, Nariman Point, a dirty chowpatti, the numerous discotheques, bars and pubs, the Gateway, the bollywood, the Arabian Sea, Gods and Shivaji in the numerous temples, the Maratha chauvinism, the culture police, the outsider feel, bad roads, unrelenting rains, and above all the soft underbelly of Indian globalisation... that's Mumbai, which once was Bombay, for me.... I had grown up seeing Bombay in Bollywood movies... from underworld to the endless romantic scenes, I had conceived Bombay in the imagination of Bollywood... But when I confront the Maximum city in all its gory realities, I am shell-shocked. It's not Bombay, it's Mumbai... the great Maratha shift... the greatest sex change in the history... from Victora Terminus to Chhtrapati Shivaji Terminus, Bombay of my imagination has braved it all.... from a liberal city to a city held prisoner to taboo mindsets... that's Bombay for me...

will resume later....