Mumbai
another perspective
By Pranav Upasini
I look out beyond my desk, not less
than fifty times a day, everytime I am bogged down by an irritant who comes
to me for the want of everything that I can’t give him. Beyond my desk,
not more than a couple of feet away is a window an opening, a puncture
in the wall that gives me an opportunity to look beyond the confines of
the people around me and initiative a new hope to survive. Survive in this
maddening world and from all those who make it maddening (for me). When
I look out of the window, every time, every day, it is a new picture. A
new picture, a new scene and a new story.
Fat in the background are a few people,
never the same, always afoot in different paces, walking and running from
now end of my perspective to other. These people moving on a street seem
to me like a world of derelicts in random motion gathering means to carry
on, persist and drag life at their ends much like those tiny ants dragging
grains over their heads.
To such a scene, that is always thought
provoking. I have as an interesting backdrop to my perspective, the background
of an outstanding skyline that induces into my mind the concept of a hybrid
metropolis. A Roman Catholic Church with an admirable Architecture that
is still down to earth and quite friendly with the people who move next
to it everyday, without caring a bit. Occupying the central part of the
frame of my perspective there are a couple of early twentieth century works
in Architecture, which are in a badly, maintained state yet so beautiful
that I seldom stop looking at them. Foremost is a building, one whose original
form was ought to be different from what it is today, with an amazing variety
of signboards, painted and glowing from a Hindu hotel to a general stores.
What guides my perspective to the right is a late 20s
Architectural work, but you can hardly
say so with so many additions and modifications and a multinational corporation
working in it that cares a little about its identity. On the left is a
very interesting building that diminishes my perspective a little left
to the tower of church, that rises above all else, silently yet significantly
divulging the dominant status enjoyed by our religious and displaying the
association of power with religions. Though tall and imperative, the church
tower fails to retain my sight over it an ultimately the built form that
diminished on to the left attracts much more attention than any other site.
This building is a typical of those hundreds in out metropolis, declared
by the municipal corporation as “dangerous structures”, yet housing at
least a fifty odd people into what could be a very worse stating of living.
“Worst” for those like me and you, for whom life is not as hard as it is
for those hundreds of thousands who live on the streets, next to the railway
tracks, over the rocky shore and into open unused drainage pipes lying
everywhere in the city.
Mumbai, Bombay, Bambai or whatever
it may be, the place is forever a “Metropolis in transition”. A city that
grows everyday, where life never remains the same, moment after moment
changing to a new state. Mumbai is not just a city, but a phenomenon !
The street that I see from my window
with all kinds of people traversing up and down is much like any other
street across the city. Forever changing always in motion, in an indefinite
transition just as if a motion picture is projected over the screen of
my window. When I look at this street, I see it as a series of continuos
process. I see it not just as a street that is a corridor for people to
necessary transcend, but as a live system that in itself is complex integration
of hundreds of complicated systems put together.
Every time I see a man, I remember the
lessons that I had learnt early on in my biology classes. I remember all
those systems of respirations circulation, digestion and so on, altogether
embodied into human being. Each human being is like an integration of several
systems working in close co-ordination to each other and consequently
generating human systems together as a part of the society create another
integrated set of systems that are interdependent in a large way. Imagine
a hundred men waking over a street at any particular time, together making
a hundred integrated systems endlessly working together, thus making the
street a carrier of lives. All this really makes the street a very lively
space in itself, a space that is alive and that allows several other lives
to budget through it.
A street is not just a channel, but
a stream that flows through the channel an as it flows though the channel
and as it flows characters change. So does the street, Colaba causeway
today shall never be the causeway of tomorrow D.N.Road of a day before
it. S.V.road changes every hour as traffic conditions change. The street
that I see everyday from my window similarly changes very moment as I see
a man walking next to the church who takes hardly a minute to go out of
my sight.
People are a part of streets and in
fact people make streets what they are My window is a kind of kaleidoscope,
that gives me the images of our city. Whenever I look out, I see Mumbai.
Most happening most lively and most unique. The opening in my wall helps
me carry my imagination out of the suffocating enclosed air-conditioned
space adulterated by the presence of unwanted visitors and their unwanted
idea.
Outside in the open environment though
filled with a lot of pollutation these days, lies a spectrum of vivid cultures
represented by diverse sects of the society. Sometimes it is the young
director of the MNC stepping down of a shinning new Benz, where at the
opposite end is an edged porter carrying a ton over his head, perspiring
in the scorching heat, helpless and disgusted.
The street remains busy with business
all though the day and sometimes when I stay up a little late to finish
with my work, I see the same street turning into an altogether different
place, where people flock from everywhere to enjoy some of the most exclusive
meat preparations preclusive raw flesh available in the city. Splash contrasts,
contradictions, diversities and extreme polarities are all characters of
our city, yet bound together by a rich cultural heritage and the exquisite
traditions of a legacy that any other city of this size in the world lacks.
Our city is a city of paradoxes and
is that makes the city so special as it is ! From slums to skyscrapers,
from bicycles to BMWs, wada-pav to McDonalds, Mumbai is a home for everyone.
Be he a beggar or be he a business tycoon, Mumbai is life for a ten million
! It is that dream destination in the heart of every Indian child. Which
gets him here and which also gets him to what makes a millionaire! Every
aspect of Mumbai, the contractions and the polarities, all of them all
through my window. I see them every time that a man or a woman comes to
me. My work is to better the lives of people live, the way people live,
the way people work and the way people enjoy. I work on Architecture and
Architecture is about people! People who comes to me say the want to make
a building, build a house, construct a factory of renovate an office. They
rarely know what I am supposed do ask me to keep on doing everything that
I’m not supposed to! They are ignorant and this irritates me!
I continue to look out of the window
beyond my desi and by the end of the day I land up being in an living out.
This absurdity, the antilogy between ideologies and realities, the difference
between Utopia and Myopia is what bogs me down. It disturbs me, but in
vain, because there is hardly anyone to whom I could complain and that
too the objection about how the world is and is to blamed. The frustration
is similar to that of many other men, who have so many things to condemn,
yet the can’t and don’t since people always feel that they shall be unheard.
Mumbai which is a happening in itself,
is mad so by the lives of the millions who live in it, millions of frustrated
lives living with high hopes, dreams and fantasies and am aspirations for
a better tomorrow amidst a world of inefficient systems, improper organisations
and inadequate resources. Be it Dharavi, Asia’s largest scatter settlement
or be it downtown Cuffe Parade, we always lack that what makes a perfect
scene. All our systems, our resources and our organisations are examples
of imperfection – the very essence of our being. Yet amongst such miserable
conditions, time never suspends the cycle of days & nights and with
everyday that passes away, arrives the dawn of a new day as a fresh new
start, a rebirth and with the hope of a new prospect and the probabilities
of a better being. And it is this makes us live with all the obnoxious
pressures that make life unbearable, the hope of a renaissance and the
revival of predicaments. I see this hope in the glimmering eyes of every
man and woman moving on the street in front of me and in sanguine eyes
of all the people hanging in and over the trains, rushing across streets,
clocking over bus-stops and waiting fro an opportunity, one for betterment,
and in the hope of an ascent.
This is an anecdote that illustrates
a play, a performance, where the stage is Mumbai and there are ten million
people performing to the best of what they can.
The street that I see through my window
and every other street across the city join up top from of network, a network
of systems ceaselessly working imperfect inefficient and chaotic ! yest
in this chaos a “Virgin chaos”, lies a beauty, an imperfect elegance that
needs to be discovered. We need to explore the exquisite essence of our
city and unveil the splendor that is hidden beneath our systematic and
scientific way of living. We need to look beyond our systematic and scientific
way of living. We need to look beyond our perceptions of a city as an assembly
of places to live and work in, extending our vision to understand that
the city is life in itself.
Mumbai with all its imperfection, diversities
and polarities is one of the finest cities that I have ever witnessed and
it is this, city as life itself that makes me live it ‘I love Mumbai not
just for its variant and splendid Architecture and the character of the
city as a moneymaking resource, but because I have discovered in it a life
and a phenomenon.
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