Thursday, November 30, 2006

A city of same old

They call it the City of Gold. The city that never sleeps. The city of opportunity. El Dorado. But Mumbai is a city that is a lot more than that. It is a place where dreams can come true. But also where dreams can be easily shattered, where dreams can die too young. And it happens, too often to make life happy, fulfilling, on even keel, satisfying.

It’s happening again today, even as I write this. The city has started burning, once again, as it has done every few years…even months. This time, it all began with the desecration of a statue of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar in Kanpur yesterday. Last evening, local Dalits objected and started getting violent to express their displeasure. Traffic was stopped, the police came out in force and the mobs took what they fondly considered to be just revenge.

Today things have become even more tense. Roads are being blocked. The defense forces are out en masse, trying to protect the innocent. Vehicles are being stoned, buses burned, cars overturned, crowds lathi-charged and the deaths have begun to be listed. To appease the community, a new statue of the creator of the Indian Constitution has been installed in Kanpur. But, at last count, two young men have died in this city. The Deccan Queen, the well-known luxury train to Pune, has been set on fire and all rail traffic to that city has been stopped for the time being. And more violence is expected.

Why? How does something done in a city so many miles away matter to people here in Mumbai, a city so famous for its anonymity of people, its commercial attitude, its money-mindedness? The community as a whole wants its voice to be heard – that is a primary reason – and it cannot shout loud enough except through violence and destruction. The people who make up the community have been oppressed and discriminated against for so long that they crave any opportunity to make a noise, to be heard, to be seen, to be noticed. And there will be what the press fondly calls ‘vested interests’, just waiting to foment trouble, to make that voice louder and rougher than it really needs to be. Added to this, of course, is the incendiary nature of the noise – it doesn’t take much to stoke the fires and even less to keep them going once they are lit.

So what will happen next? The riot police will step in to control the mobs. More people will die, even more will be grievously injured. The government will claim that it is working on palliative measures and make sure that its voice is heard doing so. And everyone will settle down…but the undercurrents will continue, the anger will simmer, the voice will be temporarily quieted, until it is fuelled enough to make itself heard once again.

This is my home. This is our city. Yeh hain Mumbai, meri jaan!

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