MUMBAI,MUMBAI.......

Nearly two years back, I posted a blog about Mumbai after having taken my family there to experience one of the largest Metropolises of the world. The action city of Mumbai has always been very fascinating, for the right and for the wrong reasons.

What comes to my mind whenever I hear of Mumbai is the title song in the old Akbar Khan movie (Hadsa), which goes something like this:

Eh Mumbai shahar, ek sundar Shahar hai
Yaham roz roz kahi mod mod par
Hota hai koi na koi
Hadsa, hadsa………

Translating the same in English, it reads:

This Mumbai city is a beautiful city
Here everyday, at some places
Something continues to occur
A new incident or a mishap…

One couldn’t agree more!

Mumbai is again in the news. President Barrack Obama had landed there yesterday. He, of course did all the right things to appease the Mumbai crowd. Visited the Taj Hotel where the 26/11 carnage took place, went to Mani Bhavan, the museum on Mahatma Gandhi, met with the industrialists to sign billion dollar deals for the business houses of his country whose chieftains had travelled with him to India, so on and so forth.

Day before yesterday, Mumbai Stock exchange celebrated the bullish high of crossing the Sensex mark of 20000 during the famed ’Diwali Trade’. Mumbai, the financial capital of India, would not have a better reason to rejoice.

A week back, the Adarsh Housing society scam exploded in the news in Mumbai shaking up the political bosses, not to mention the Military brasses. As a result, the Chief Minister is counting his days in the office and the Army Chief is sulking after returning the ownership documents of the flat to the Housing Society. Two or three former chiefs of Army and Navy have come into the news for ‘unnecessary’ reasons, as they say. The funny party is that the plundering and loot of government land and the defying of all building laws of the country, was to bring up private housing society named as ‘ADARH’ meaning IDEALS, the highest virtue that man can have!

As is said, Mumbai is a happening city. It is also a city very famous for crime. Most of the Indian mafias have its head quarters in Mumbai. Many of the Bollywood flicks had eulogised crime and made those villainish heroes the sweet darlings of the masses, worthy to be emulated. The city which is the engine of growth of the country, because of its loose social controls and due to the indifference and anonymity of its denizens, spew out many criminals. So congested is the place that lack of social and recreational support systems give births to many gangs of the underworld.

I had always seen Mumbai as a city of slums. And the shanties are only growing rapidly, to the extent, the Mumbai statistics shows that sixty percent of the population of Mumbai city live in slums and chawls! What a quality life that is……

Many historians and sociologists had termed India as a land of contrasts. Mumbai manifests this thought at the highest level. A city, where unequitable growth in wealth continues to flourish with the rich and the famous, the chasm between the rich and the poor is widening every day. Inclusivity is the last thing that can happen in Mumbai.

However, with all its contrasts and vagaries, the city continues to be a bewitching urban sprawl. To experience it, one has to be in Mumbai, to live it out. With all its ugliness, no mumbaikar would ever want to trade place with any other city of the country or the world.

And that is the charm of amchi Mumbai!