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How the city of dreams is becoming the global metaphor for an

urban nightmare—and all that’s wrong with India.

urban nightmare—and all that’s wrong with India.**

16 July 2011

16 July 2011

Here is a question and a proposition rolled into one: is Mumbai the new Calcutta? And the choice of the new name for one and the old one for the other is deliberate. There was a time when Calcutta was the globally celebrated metaphor for all that was wrong with India. In depictions like Dominique Lapierre’sCity of Joy, the poverty, the dysfunctionality of that city, was the benchmark for all that could go wrong with Third World urban sprawl. Rajiv Gandhi brought the decline of the city to national consciousness by proclaiming that the city was dead. Now, not only has Mumbai become the new Calcutta, it also does not have the comfort of having Mother Teresa’s touch.

Check out the signals from popular culture. Four of the most prominent recent books centred on Mumbai (Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra,Shantaram by Gregory Roberts, Suketu Mehta’s

aximum City and most recently Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower ) have each drawn from the seamier underbelly of India’s clichéd city of dreams. Two of the most celebrated India-themed foreign films,Slumdog Millionaire andSalaam Bombay, have followed the same pattern. Not to be left behind, Bollywood is also back to its old pessimistic view of its own city, as the success ofOnce Upon a Time in Mumbai (with a sequel in the works) shows. In fact, today almost all that is optimistic in popular culture is north/Delhi-based, from Band Baaja Baaraat to Rab Ne Bana Di

odi. Even the new bestselling chicklit is based in Delhi, Anuja Chauhan’s Zoya Factor and Advaita Kala’s Almost Single. And this, in a city with a well-earned notoriety for being wildly unkind to young women.

Repeated terrorist attacks and bombings are only the most visible symptoms of Mumbai’s decline. The boast of developing it into Asia’s new financial centre, a new Shanghai, is now an insult to India’s fastest diminishing city. Its policing is a disaster, the underworld is making a comeback. It has lost nearly 400 lives to terror attacks in five years. And the answer to the question ‘Why Mumbai?’ may lie in the fact that here more than anywhere else do terror modules find refuge in the underworld. A flourishing underworld and sprawling slums provide Mumbai a unique sanctuary for terror. And

hat do we have to fight them? A most politicised and faction-ridden police leadership. And a police rank and file which, if it is fortunate, finds shelter in one of the city’s rotting chawls. I invite you to visit any of these. How can a man living such a poor quality of life with his family have a sense o pride in his city, or his uniform? It is still a marvel it manages to produce heroes like Tukaram Omble

(who died clutching Kasab’s AK-47).

This is further compounded by the fact that the police reports to R.R. Patil, Maharashtra’s home minister, whose first holy objective is to fix Mumbai’s ‘rotting’ morality. So he would shut down

dance bars while the larger underworld and terror modules flourish and his police force gets more divided and demoralised. Such is the paralysis that most of the purchases planned after 26/11 have not been made.

You cannot build a global financial centre in a city whose law and order is so uncertain. Nor can you do so in a city which is adding no new and modern schooling and higher education facilities. Deepak Parekh, one of the most respected residents of Mumbai, speaks with great pain that he has so few seats in the reputed Bombay Scottish, which he presides over, that he has to deny admissions in its Powai branch to the children of professors from the neighbouring IIT. There are too few college seats, too few engineering and medical colleges of quality and repute. No surprise then that some o the most important figures in the financial and corporate world are now relocating to Delhi. Just over the past year, two of the shiniest stars of global banking have moved to Delhi, harassed by the nightmare of traffic, infrastructure and possibly a sense of insecurity. Most of Mumbai’s infrastructure decisions are lost in some kind of a dreaded politico-bureaucratic orbit. The city took a decade to build a tiny sea link at a time when the Chinese build one fourteen times its size in four years and

make no song and dance about it. What kind of a commercial capital can it be if it does not even offer its residents one air-conditioned train seat for their daily commute? (Delhi now has 2.5 million, and Calcutta, 600,000.) Can a city with just one north–south artery be Asia’s financial centre? Not when ust one strategically parked and booby-trapped truck can slice it neatly into two, snapping all contact between its only airport and downtown.

For a long time every decision taken by the Maharashtra government was presumed to carry the stink of corruption. Now we have a chief minister * whose personal honesty nobody questions, but

ho does not take any major decisions. Preventing corruption by not taking any decisions is a bit like banishing AIDS by banning sex.

There is, however, an essential difference between the declining Calcutta of old and the Mumbai of now. Unlike Calcutta, whose residents always maintained their love and loyalty to the city and resented any criticism of it, Mumbai’s residents are now among the angriest Indians. A desperate sullenness has replaced what used to be eternal optimism once upon a time in Mumbai.

These bombings will surely hasten some decisions. But that will not be a solution if Mumbai has to survive as a self-respecting modern city and not degenerate into a Third World equivalent of what New York was before Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned it up. The new Shanghai is a dream that never

ill be. It can, however, be redeemed only in one way: if we can free Mumbai, and other major cities (like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta), from being colonies of their state-level politicians. Can we at least get the two-dozen-odd infrastructure decisions fast-forwarded in Mumbai, some decongestion