Manas Chakravarty: The warped spirit of Mumbai

WATCHWORD

With Mumbai reeling under a deluge last week, the media has been full of stories about the indomitable spirit of the people of Mumbai. Here are a few more of them.

It's not only in times of trouble that the Mumbai spirit is on display. To take one example, half of the city's population live in slums, which get flooded regularly during every monsoon. Their homes are cramped one-room shacks often located next to garbage dumps and choked gutters. But does that affect the spirit of those who live in these fetid hovels?

Not at all. Every morning, like clockwork, an army of hovel-dwellers goes out to work in the city. Do these people protest? Do they demand better conditions? Hardly""many of the slums are illegal and those who live in them are at the mercy of the local slumlord, backed by politicians. So they work till they drop. That's the gung-ho Mumbai spirit.

Half of the city's population don't have access to toilets, and everybody coming into the city by the morning trains gets a close-up view of their hindquarters. Prahlad Kakkar made a film about it""he called it Bumbay.

The stench of excrement is the first thing that greets the visitor to the city. Does the Mumbaikar complain? Does he gherao his leaders, insisting that the city's first priority should be to provide toilets? Certainly not""he soldiers on, while she gets up early to preserve a modicum of modesty. That's the Mumbai spirit.

In the so-called middle class localities, great mounds of garbage are dumped just outside the housing societies, and rot there for days. The residents may mutter a bit under their breath, but usually they just walk past hurriedly, holding their noses.

After all, why should they bother""their homes are always kept spotlessly clean. This ability to avert his gaze from things he does not want to see, concentrating instead on his business, is another hallmark of the Mumbai spirit.

Yet another example of the Mumbai citizen's ability to brave all odds in his zeal to get to work is evident from the local trains. During rush hour, trains are so crammed that it's almost impossible to breathe, with bodies crushed against each other. Women commuters are among the most aggressive, fighting each other for inches of space.

Does this dent the spirit of the Mumbaikars? Do they agitate for more trains and more tracks? Rarely. Who has the time? Instead, they push and shove, with that quintessentially Mumbai determination to get ahead. Standing crushed against all those sweaty bodies, he dreams of the time when he can afford to give up travelling by train for the freedom of being stuck in a car in one of the city's interminable traffic jams.

The Mumbai spirit, after all, is all about private enterprise""mass action is for the losers, and what matters is not improving your neighbourhood, but your ability to elbow your neighbour out of the way.

That determination has led to several of us being able to climb the greasy pole high enough to be able to live in one of the city's islands of opulence. And from these clean, green, prosperous enclaves, the successful Mumbaikar will sally forth cocooned in air-conditioned chauffeur-driven comfort via sleek expressways to his offices and clubs, and to the airport, which, of course, will serve as the vital link between him and his brethren in a thousand such affluent havens across the world.

Comfortably ensconced in his own little island of prosperity, he can afford to be completely indifferent to the sea of squalor around him. Of course, once in a while, as happened last week, the sea may swell high enough to affect some of us. That's when we start to write about these things.