The city of Mumbai does NOT welcome you

North-Indians unwelcome.
South-Indians unwelcome.
Muslims unwelcome.

Singletons unwelcome.
Couples unwelcome.

Artists unwelcome.
Drinkers unwelcome.

The City of Gold, blessed land of Mahalaxmi that was once given as a princess’s dowry is a treasure no more.

I’d like to say the average man on the street doesn’t carry these notions but the scary thing is that he does. This isn’t anymore a blamegame between politicians. Sure, every one of these acrimonious, poisonous beliefs have been seeded with a blatant political agenda. But this city and its inhabitants have lapped them up voraciously and the hatred is bearing fruit, the bitter fruit of intolerance.

The real trouble is that it can afford to stay this way since there aren’t any real options. Bangalore, Hyderabad and numerous others once held the promise of new cities. They’ve all sunk into oblivion or inflated beyond the reach of the common man. Delhi continues to grow at a monstrous pace and accumulate as many rape victims, cadavers and tales of debauchery as crores.

If you are a professional with an education, where can you hope to live and build something strong, positive and sustainable? If you’re not, the staggering poverty will make even this hellhole seem like heaven.

Perhaps Mumbai has been a cashcow for this country for too long. And we’re now a society that has successfully slaughtered the golden goose. Welcome to the city of gutters, greed and garbage.

A No Entry sign in San Mateo, California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tiny Spaces

The real bitch about Mumbai’s tiny spaces is that there is just never enough storage area. That’s right, storage area.

Human beings may still learn to live in tinier and tinier spaces. But how on earth do you get clothes, utensils, medical supplies & groceries to fit into smaller spaces? By doing without, I suppose.

The BarCamp Mumbai 8 Round-Up

I spent yesterday at Barcamp Mumbai 8. This has been my first unconference in nearly 2 years. My last Barcamp was over 4years ago, overrun by techie discussions and only drew me because it had a teensy segment for bloggers. BlogCamp evolved as an offshoot of that.

Yesterday was a pleasant return. For one, the event that usually struggles on time, breezed through the multiple sessions, speakers and classrooms easily. There were 4 classrooms in the ultra-posh Mukesh Patel ….. The wiki was flowing with colourful post-its even at 10:15 a.m., which is when I got there. And most delightfully, the subjects spanned a diverse range of intellectual tools, hobbies & interests & scientific applications in fun real life ways. One had to be truly ruthless to pick sessions to attend since there were so many good ones, several happening simultaneously.

Off the top of my head, these are the ones I attended:

• Anatomy of a question – Sumant Srivathsan (How to design an interesting question in a quiz)
• Mindmaps – Rehab Chougle
• Kitne star diye? – Manisha Lakhe (on film reviewing)
• The censorship of AMEN, gay community rights – Harrish Iyer
• Comic book publishing for dummies – Aditya Bidikar
• Diagnosing Bipolar Disorder – Anubha Bhat

Interesting titbits from the day:

I entered Rehab’s session late, having misread the wiki schedule. It was interesting and fun, though occasionally highjacked by someone who claimed that genocide made him happy. Quick tip – if you’re demonstrating or talking without a powerpoint, avoid the big conference room. The larger crowd is harder to maintain & engage. Rehab did a great job though and showed off a mind technique that will help anyone from an artist to an executive stuck in a business dilemma.

Harrish is always entertaining and touching in equal parts. His first talk was about the film AMEN being denied a certificate by the censor board and he did a superb job of bringing out the inconsistencies in their policies. His second talk though, was the one that really had people talking. He was speaking of how gay people are treated in India, when partway through, he was interrupted by a very fervent member of the audience who insisted that,

“According to Hinduism, you can only have sex with your wife, inside a closed room. Only after marriage and only for procreation, not for fun.”

The uproar that followed had to be taken out into the corridor to make way for the next speaker. The episode illustrated one of the reasons that unconferences are a great way to seed ideas, bring out thoughts and get people talking, sometimes about controversial and difficult topics.

My session on ‘Social Content’ happened on the fly. It’s been years since I spoke completely extempore, as I did yesterday and it was a great experience. I was actually hoping to create interest for my upcoming series of blogging workshops, beginning with ‘Unboggle The Blog‘. But instead, I found myself naturally touching on several related but disjointed thoughts about this space. My 20 minute, stream-of-consciousness ramble imitated the way we consume and add to social content, on our Facebook Walls, our Twitter timelines and all out other channels of social media. I touched on the artificiality of traditional media, social media as an extension of normal, human behaviour, how trolls are mirror daily social miscreants experimenting in their own ways and that we’re all creators & consumers of social content. Here’s the talk:

I missed the #TWSS talk by Aditya Sengupta since the room was so packed that even the door couldn’t be opened. From what I hear, it was a tongue-in-geek demonstration of an algorithm used to generate and viral #TWSS (That’s what she said). But the geek in me found a corner in Anubha Bhat’s talk on diagnosing bipolar disorders using algorithms.

I’m not going to dwell on how great it was to catch up with old friends again, since that’s a given in any gathering. Yesterday was more than just friends catching up and people networking. It really was a meeting of minds, a true sharing of ideas. A big thank you to the Barcamp team for pulling off such a great day!

Bandra Is No Longer Queen Of The Suburbs

 I remember when Bandra was a sleepy little Christian community. Most of my kids from the little Christian community that I grew up in, went on to St.Andrews. For a long time, the only decent movie theatres for Western suburb-dwellers was Gaiety-Galaxy-(Gemini) off S.V.Road, Bandra. By the late 90s, Linking Road had replaced Fashion Street as the go-to place for us college students’ wardrobes. Bags, shoes, belts, tee-shirts, jeans, shirts, trousers, dresses, skirts, caps, accessories, they were all available on the numerous tables & tiny stalls that spotted Hill Road and Linking Road.

At the turn of the millenium, all of that seemed to change. There was a concerted effort to ‘rebrand’ Bandra. Promenades got cleaned up and beautified. Restaurants popped up. The street market was cleared away and the surviving shops packed into compact ground-floor stalls off Linking Road. That gully that housed the clothes-end of the street market got hip and found itself home to malls, fast food joints and restaurants. Suddenly everybody seemed to be going on about ‘The Queen of the Suburbs’. Bandra was the new it-place in town.

Image via Wikipedia

Over the past few years, Bandra has seen nightclubs, haute cuisine, exclusive boutiques and ‘it’ concept shops. It has also drawn an equally flashy population, ranging from local celebrities to yuppie stars. The old cottages and villas are being fast replaced by high rises and higher prices.

Here’s the Bandra of today:

Every second building is being redeveloped so the air is thick with construction dust and materials. The current Bandra citizen carries what I think of as the Delhi attitude – ostentatious displays of wealth, fancy cars and overaggressive attitudes. As a result the roads are utter mayhem. The above mentioned gully off Linking Road is a nightmare to navigate every single day. Not because its too small for the traffic but because it’s blocked up by overlarge vehicles whose drivers don’t know how to park or drive and will persist in loud arguments when challenged.

Image via Wikipedia

Public transport is the universal nightmare that unifies all of this city, at the moment. But in Bandra, it has reached a point of unrealistic proportions. I lived in Bandra for about 4 months and I lost a lot of weight – because I walked everywhere, rather than spend half an hour arguing with autorickshaws & taxis. I mean everywhere and this isn’t really a great solution to the problem. For one, the construction everywhere means filthy (or non-existent) pavements. The big vehicles make walking on the roads or even the bylanes a tangible danger. Arterial junctions like the end of Linking Road, the start of S.V.Road and the Elco end of Hill Road are all blocked off for digging, construction or redevelopment. The Bandra-Worli sealink has only compounded to Bandra’s woes by feeding in town traffic into what used to be the quieter end of Bandra, without adequate planning on where that traffic would go after. The Lilavati junction is the latest on the list of avoidable Bandra haunts.

Real estate prices are through the roof and for what? The chance to live next door to hip joints. Let’s talk about these places. Every single restaurant/nightclub/hip joint that I went to, was pretentious (even rude), overpriced and had service completely unworthy of the price paid. I can see why menus would need to be priced high in order to cover the rental costs of an expensive place like Bandra. But that doesn’t explain the lack of thought given to hiring proper staff and training them on how to provide service. High prices warrant at least good service, if not good products.

And finally, the actually living in Bandra. You can shut away the boors on the road and the creeps at a fancy restaurant. But what do you do about the poor construction of your own building? The water woes, following all the massive construction everywhere (meaning more people have to share the same water pool)? A friend of mine actually found a mushroom growing under the sink of his Bandra Reclamation flat. Shortly after, he had to move out of his bedroom because the rain entering the room had grown from seepage to bucketfuls pouring it. Monsoon in Bandra was anything but romantic or delightful.

The ostentatious display of wealth everywhere, does nothing but poison the attitudes of every person in its vicinity. Getting help is yet another in the long list of the Bandra nightmares. Maids, dhobis, milkmen, sweepers, every one of these is a potential problem. There is a palpable resentment, a hatred almost, that festers between the socioeconomic classes, especially when the money gulf seems so vast. The watchman of the building I stayed in, slept most of the time, when he wasn’t leching when I passed. We had to take the garbage out to the disposal ourselves each day, to avoid getting into the nasty politics between the sweeper, the secretary & the landlord (all participants in a diabolical problem involving whether to redevelop or not). The dhoban slammed the door on me one day, because I didn’t open the grill before reaching for my purse. Personally, I felt well rid of the hellhole called Bandra, when I moved out.

Image via Wikipedia

A lot of the issues I faced, are borne by tenants all over the city. But to go through all of them together, while also paying through one’s nose, just doesn’t seem to make any sense. I can’t see how Bandra’s growth is sustainable. Already it is too expensive to own a flat in Bandra and I’ve demonstrated why renting is extremely unattractive. It could shift from a residential area to a shopping/nightclub district. However, the service providers don’t seem to have given any thought to how their customers will get to them and where they’ll park. What do they do to make it worth their customers’ making the extra effort of enduring Bandra? Zilch.

The only good thing about the so-called Queen of the suburbs seems to be that it connects Andheri to Dadar. Bandra is dead and I don’t mourn its loss any more than I miss that mushroom under the sink.

Update 1: Yesterday I tweeted asking why Bandra was supposed to be the Queen of the suburbs. Here’s a selection of the answers I received:

@mithunk: because Times of India decided to brand it a few decades ago

@JGhatpande Only people aspiring to live in Bandra now say that!

@hiphophead1985: Because monarchy is a decadent and dead political system

Update 2: DNA featured this article in their ‘Around The Blog‘ section on 9 January 2011.

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Things To Not Do In Mumbai

Inspired by this list, I put together my own things to not do in Mumbai. My list isn’t even remotely as funny as his though I hope it’ll be just as useful. Considering Satish got to 84, you’d think I’d have a tough time coming up with more. But they don’t call this the big, bad city for nothing. So here’s my take. Please do NOT do the following, for your own safety, sanity and that of other citizens of this city:

Trains

Image via Wikipedia

1. Travel by train wearing open sandals. The ladies’ compartment does not include ladylike behaviour, unless that means wearing pointed heels.

2. Travel by train wearing make-up. It’ll get mashed in, rubbed (the wrong way) and put you in spotlight of the squatters on the train floor and make them yell that you should travel by taxi instead.

3. Board the first-class ladies compartment in the middle of the bogey. The station loos are always located right where these stop and it’s next door to the general compartment that houses the besur bhajan brigade. Take the compartments at the ends instead.

4. Cross the Western/Central train line at Dadar. The human traffic is always madness and this is the proverbial LOC of the two lines. No one on either side likes the other and the hapless ones who have to cross over are considered traitors by both sides. Instead use the bridge connecting Elphinstone Road and Parel stations.

Other commuting

5. Get into a bus where you’ll have to stand or sit near the aisle for long. The conductor is a pervert, the co-passengers are perverts, the seatees are perverts. It’s a blanket rule. Trust me, you don’t want to test this one.

6. Tell an autorickshawalla at Bandra station to take you to the landmark that your friends tell you. They never know cafes, restaurants, movie theatres, halls, gymkhanas or colleges. They also don’t know the road names that the signboards carry. Bandra autowallas only know Linking Road, Hill Road, Ambedkar Chowk and Pali Hill.

Image via Wikipedia

7. Take a route you last used over six months back. Account for potholes (of course…think what season this is), sudden one-way signs and the omnipresent metro/walkway dig-ups which will ensure rerouting and increase in fare and time of travel.

8. Promise to get ANYWHERE in this city in less than an hour. It has taken me upto 20 minutes to cross a block and a half from my place. Yes, walking is an alternative. Watch for broken road-bricks, dug-out piles of mud, gargantuan water puddles and dog poo.

Shopping

9. Window-shop in Lokhandwala. It’s bloody Dilli out here with every jerk on the road leering at you and the shopkeepers smiling honey until you turn away, after which they shout venom.

10. Smile at the staff at any of the Fame cinemas. They will take it as a sign that they can rip you off or at very least throw attitude at you.

11. Ask any of the staff at Big Bazaar or Food Bazaar where anything is. If you get an answer at all, it will be a wrong one and will only make you travel from one end of the store to another without finding what you want. (I’ve been pushed around from ‘Dairy products’ to ‘Meat & Poultry’ to ‘Confectionary’ to ‘Packed Foods’ to ‘Jams & Ketchups’).

12. Eat any food in a mall, even a food-court satellite of a popular chain. There’s a considerable drop in quality and even freshness. You’ll get evil-smelling panipuris from Kailash Parbat stalls, mouldy sandwiches by the coffeeshops and muddy-looking watery choley by Only Parathas.

Other

13. Carry a handbag that can be yanked off easily on the traffic-side of the road. Temptation is always indulged in, in PickpocketCity. Handbag on outer-corner and with flap inside.

14. Travel anywhere without change. Coins of Rs 1 and 2 are prized commodities especially if you take public transport. The thumbrule is that no one has them so if someone owes you one, act like the devil till they get it for you. You can be sure they’d do the same if the roles were reversed.

15. Park a nice-looking car in a non-paid-for location and expect it to look as pristine dent-free, scratch-free later. I’m positive there’s an underground nexus to harass carowners to ensure business for garages/repairmen and paid parking lots.

And with that added to Satish’s list, we make a total tally of 99 DON’Ts in Mumbai. *Sigh* This is depressing. It makes me wonder why anybody wants to live in this city at all.

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Ideart: Grand Theft Autorickshaw!

I did this one a good while ago actually but I haven’t had a chance to put up a post about it so far. Twitter tells me that there’s an autorickshaw strike in the city today (again? when was the last time these guys did some work?) so here’s one for the frustrated commuter.

When I first spotted this plain yellow V-necked tee-shirt, I knew I wanted to do something around the taxi/ autorickshaw theme, given its colour. I wore the tee plain for a good few months because its clean, vibrancy added a lot of cheer to my mood.

When I finally got down to paintbrushes, I realized I’d need a number of practice runs to create the image. For starters, I wasn’t modifying an image I’d already seen (as with the superheroes), I didn’t have any earlier references (as with folk art). All I had was a vague image in my head.

Anybody who has been in Mumbai this past year knows that the public transport that we Mumbaikers used to pride ourselves on, has gone to the dogs. The endless metro work has key suburban stretches dug up & cordoned off to the point of dirt trackdom. Meter rates have gone up and so have cases of meter-tampering. What’s more, due to various regulatory dictats, there seem to be fewer autorickshaws & taxis plying on the roads now. And finally, to add insult to injury, these once ubiquitous black-and-yellow guy have turned rude to the point of inhuman (Sick person to be taken to the doctor? Floods & pouring rain? Bomb blasts? Forget about any help from these guys!). New York cabbies probably have nothing on us now.

Anyway, here’s how I chose to relieve my frustration:

Apologies for the not-clear photograph. It was shot on a cameraphone before I had my camera. And unfortunately the tee-shirt has gone missing now! The caption is ‘Grand Theft Autorickshaw‘ and painted on a silver rectangular background, complete with kiss decals to represent the sidey rear-view mirror of an autorickshaw.

Garment: Standard size S ladies’ V-neck tee-shirt

Material: Tee-shirt cotton

Background colour: Eggyolk yellow

Paint colours used:

• Fevicryl no. 21 Sap Green
• Fevicryl no. 30 Flesh Tint
• Fevicryl no. 27 White
• Fevicryl no. 04 Crimson
• Fevicryl no.304 Pearl Green

*Cross-posted to Divadom.

I Style!: The Bird Lady

At the Kala Ghoda Art Festival 2011 this year, where I conducted a session on blogging, I had a chance to meet some new people. One of them was the lovely Snigdha Manchanda Binjola, better known on the twitterverse as @actionink. I, like everyone else in the session was captivated by her bright eyes, her warm smile and her fantastic session about tying in story-telling techniques into business solutions.

Much intrigued, I connected with her later and we had an enjoyable evening chat where we discovered a common love of tea, stories and much else. I cherish the memory of that first tea-date. And here’s what she wore to the meeting (which made me laugh heartily), which gets her on I Style!

Snigdha says the earrings are from Accessorize, the new everyday jewelery store that’s hit malls across the city. Of course, that admission merited a trip and some impromptu shopping.

* Cross-posted to Divadom.

—————————————————————————————————————————

See what I wore to the Kala Ghoda Art Festival at The Boheme At Kala Ghoda.
Catch other people who incorporated fun into their style at the I Style! gallery.

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I, The Offering

So Mumbai kicks off festival season that will last till the end of the year, with Janmashtami. In honour of the birthday of our neighbor state Gujarat’s favorite god, here’s one from the idea-archives:

Inspired by a chat with Srini, who told me that:
Krishna said, “Whatever you do, do it as an offering to me”

Image by soraya nulliah via Flickr

My body is a tribute to life, that grows and endures and generates
The wrinkles on my forehead bear the same patterns as the weather-beaten mountains
My intensity is the fire of disturbed volcanoes
My love is life itself, warm and caressing at times and violent and destructive at others
My tears are as insistent, yearning waterfalls
And my smile reflects sunrise and rainbows
My rebellion is a flight to freedom
My anger is a dance of thunder and stormy seas
My breathing and my heartbeats pound in time to the music echoing through the entire universe
My every happy moment is a celebration of you
And every sad moment is a new understanding of you

Yes, in my every moment, I am an offering to you.

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A Piece Of Sky

Not far from this mausoleum of Mumbai’s textile mills, lies the rapidly growing upper-crust uber-urban area of high rises (and higher prices). They’re shooting up into the skies, they’re advancing rapidly to engulf the hitherto mill belt. I know I’m probably harping on and on about a forgotten age. A city must develop & grow, its older structures, both architectural & social, must perish and be replaced by newer definitions of urban life.

I’ve lived in flats all my life. Staircases, then lifts and now escalators are all everyday things to me. My father who grew up in rural Tamil Nadu himself, used to tell me that when our first flat was under construction, he’d look up at the construction site and think,

“That little piece of sky there, that’s going to be ours.”

Recently I happened to be in Lower Parel. I rode a tiny old-fashioned lift that had probably been added on some years after the building had been built in an additional wing. The flat I visited, was tiny. But the furniture was tasteful, the fittings luxuriant and everything was stacked up, tucked away or fitted at the edges so perfectly, it seemed larger & more opulent than it was. Everything that had gone into that flat, could only have been paid for by someone who had enough money to live in that area. At the same time, it was a flat in a congested, under-redevelopment area of Mumbai so it couldn’t possibly have been any bigger. It seemed like it fit its identity, its space perfectly. If that flat were a person, I’d say it fit into its skin comfortably & well.

Then I stepped out and here’s what I saw. This slice of sky will probably not be seen again for a few generations in Mumbai. In a year or two, somebody will claim it for their own, somebody somewhere will call it home. Security guards will man the gates, landlords & lawyers will brand their names with contracts & leases and residents will glare or protest if you look too hard or too long at them.

But today, this evening, the sky belongs to no one. It’s free to be stared at, to be photographed and to be remembered. This is just me, holding on to fragments of the world I once knew before it vanishes right before my eyes. Goodbye Mumbai, city of my childhood, chaperon of broken dreams, home to everything new & ruthless & transient.

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From Island City To City Of Joy

I paid a flash visit to the City of Joy this month. Kolkata was the only major metro that I was not familiar with (I was born in Delhi, grew up in Mumbai, have family in Chennai and have stayed in Bangalore). Moreover, the artistic associations and all the many people I’ve loved, who hail from that place, beckoned.

One of my first thoughts was, the food was delicious! Everything from the roadside phuchka to the traditional home-cooked meal that I was served, to the maple syrupy pancakes I had for breakfast at a cafe across the street to the pop Chinese fare I devoured at a mall. We Mumbaikers really don’t know much about food, do we? Where’s the time for us to enjoy it when the train is 3 seconds away, when a bratty filmstar may come bearing down on us in our sleep, when terrorists may bomb our offices or our restaurants or even just mow us down on the roads? We live in perpetual fear and worry, a fact that’s glossed over and overglamorized when terror strikes the city with that hated phrase, ‘The Mumbai resilience’. Sometimes you need to leave home to understand where home really is. I don’t know if the City of Joy will ever be home to me but it certainly was a comfortable, welcome haven to me.

I was also delighted at the responses to my saying that I was a writer. Here, in Mumbai, that statement is met with an unimpressed (and disinterested), “Oh. Good, good.” with the obvious attitude of ‘That’s not really a job’. At best, I can hope to be mistaken for a script-writer since apparently that’s the only paying work for a writer and well-paid work is the only kind that matters to the average Mumbaiker. The people I met in Kolkata, instead, asked about my writing, talked to me about literary influences and were genuinely interested in what the world was like for a contemporary writer.

I came back to a birthday and overwhelming gestures of affection from friends and family. For perspective, that very evening, bombs exploded across South Mumbai and my phone, thus far buzzing with birthday wishes was innundated with phone calls checking on my safety. Mumbai, how long can I continue to call you home when I don’t even feel safe here anymore?

Much happened, all of which I’m still processing. But Kolkata gave me memories of a pleasant (well, not literally, the weather was sweltering) laidback city of delicious food and gentle people going about minus the stress I see in my own city.While I collect my thoughts, here are two distinct images I caught on Marvin:

Proudly displayed on the wall of an ice-cream parlour:

Spotted pasted on the walls of a bylane.