Reliving Mumbai!

If you would have read my previous posts you will be left wondering about this one... (perhaps you need to be a part of the elite junta that reads my posts as very few really do)as all my previous attempts were with the issue side of Life...so here I go on a trail to catch the other side....a visit to Mumbai.
Well I haven't read Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found” but one thing is for sure I lost myself when I found Bombay! A city which is a utter chaos in a local train turns into a beauty on the streets of Marine Drive. A place where you could easily sense every person breathing his dream!” Never say die!” you take this to Mumbaikars for they epitomize the true meaning of this cliché. Each of them trying to find a place for himself, whether be it in a local train, whether be at the place he works or be it any damn inch of land the city inhibits....here absolutely everyone is trying to fit in the scheme of things, trying to take the system forward....very unlike us (as we keep on groaning even the most dutiful sun in the early morning for the sunshine it brings darts through the window panes and onto our eyes)Bombay has got about itself an aura which tends to get the best out of each one of its inhabitats.The local trains are more of a bio data of the ones traveling thru it....for if one is a stock broker he's got all the financial dailies that he could ever buy(although I’m not very sure how it helps them with their stock picking)...for if one is a employee you will find him dozing off provided he's found a place to sit but its also true that I have seen standing souls sleeping et al...


Each Mumbaikar is trying to squeeze out the maximum he/she can get out of each day...I just wonder whether ppl there have different clocks as they seem to living for more than the 24 hour cycle. One can spend a day with a measly Rs.5/- note while some other may find it difficult to do it even coughing up a green Rs.500/- note. A family from Dharavi enjoys all the festivals with almost the same enthusiasm and joy as does a Mannat residing SRK.Its all very subjective here. There’s no thumb rule here, everthing seems to outlive itself even before it started living. Almost every Mumbaikar tries to be ahead of the curve, for even an iota of a chance lost can be as bad as a fortune ruined. Space constraints galore but then at the same time it has the entire place on this Earth to accommodate every other person who is aspiring to make it big in there! No one spares even a glance leave alone a stare, even if you are being intimate on the streets itself .Absolutely no fuss for being asked time and again to fight it out in the glaring heat that the city wears for almost as long as one lives there. The only reason I find for this is the living hope in the hearts of the millions staying here, the hope to see himself/herself joining the bandwagon of the neo rich that the city breeds at the rate of knots almost every day. And one of the main factors contributing to this hope is the local train, for that is the place which acts as a great leveller, the place where a stock broker earning crores has no issues sitting besides even a cart puller and it is this transition from the echelons to the bottom of the pyramid that lights a hope in the
hearts of the beleaguered worker. Well its really hard for me to truly summarize the aura of Mumbai for it too big to fit into a few hundred words that I’m trying to scribble here. Mumbai is no less than a father figure with arms wide open to embrace all its children and which treats all of them equal and under one roof. I wish I could be Mumbai but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride them!My final attempt of putting Mumbai in words goes as “Some things in life are hard to replace but luckily some don’t need to be replaced”