Saturday, February 9, 2008
mumbai
in my opinion Mumbai is a cultureless city. a typical case of too many cooks ending up with stone soup. when will the senas stop screaming about its non existant individualistic identity?
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7 comments:
Hey take it easy on mumbai. I'm not sure what you have in mind in terms of an 'individualistic identity', but the city does have a certain pulse and a definite vibe that sets it apart. Mixed metaphors do not a great sentence - or soup - make. What makes you the arbiter of what is or is not cultured, after all. The whole point of the city is that it allows you to leave a lot of your social and cultural baggage behind, hold on to only that which you want to, and have the freedom to define who you are independently of what culture and society necessarily dictates that you should be.
exactly my point everyone there seems to have left their social and cultural baggage behind. and as to mumbaikars having defined themselves independently: i would say they are each a dot in the mad crowd there. from even a little distance u cant make one out from the other
I'm not saying that they have all already established themselves - but that's just the edifying thing. They're all willing to slog it out till they or their kids or their kids' kids finally makes it. As for not making them out from a distance - I suppose you could claim that in another city all those mad dots would fall into little clusters of their own, but at that distance, I'd say you'd be running the risk of stereotyping them. You'd say that because they're a particular type of dot, they ought to behave in a particular way. And they'd be too scared and too distrustful (mis-trusting?un-trusty?) to venture out of those clusters. that's precisely what I like about Mumbai - there's a certain optimism and a lack of fear or extreme self-consciousness.Admittedly not all Mumbaikars feel lucky about being in Mumbai, but that's not the fault of the city as a whole, is it?
i fail to see that optimism in that city that ur talking about. all that occupy minds in that place are train timings, the technique of pushing through crowds, possibly the names of weekend hangouts, and how can i forget - movie theatres and malls. all those people collecting on weekends to rub their frustration onto another saturated being. what is special about mumbai or its people? only the continuity of day after day of fighting with the city. do u see optimism and lack of fear in that? i see a laidback attitude to never want to change anything for the better. in the effort to never complain, they reconcile with all misfortune and give in shamefacedly. instead of preparing to avoid a repeat disaster all the city can do is brag about how many came off alive and reached office the next day!
what do you think they're all slogging through each day for? It would be a whole lot easier to give in. Optimism isn't just about looking cheerful and slapping each others' backs and saying what-ho or whatever. It's about believing that no matter how bad things get, you're going to keep going out there and doing everything you can to make each day a little bit better - if not for yourself or for whoever it is you care for. Bombay is far from perfect. On the contrary, what's so amazing is that it gets so far on so little. It's one of the few places in India where people are not going to just throw their hands up in the air and blame eveerything on the government or expect the government to take care of everything for them. Civic sense is anyway something that's uniformally abysmal throughout India, so holding that against Bombay is a little unfair. As for laidback, hey, laidback is when you're a pseudo-commie in Kerala who'll crib against any sort of development purely for the sake of cribbing while having your whole way of life subsidized by someone working his backside off in some laissez-faire capitalist hell-hole in the 'Gelf'.
so they don't complain nor do they work at improvement. nor will they ever move out (because of their 'mumbai is the only heaven on earth' attitude the rest of the country is not worth living in for them. god knows what is the basis of that comparison) only those who have suffered the city from its beginning start beating out the life out of people who belong there as much as they do. right
also there is something like positive criticism in this world. until the people raise a voice against deteriorating conditions the govt will never bother and things will get from worse to intolerable. but no,mumbaikars specialise in taking in all that is undesirable
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