And that is not a cheery greeting to my lingerie drawer, I promise. What it is, is the 50th death anniversary of BR Ambedkar, the man who is said to have been part of the drafting of the Indian Constitution. We in Mumbai take him very seriously, especially those who are part of or are sympathetic to the great horde of masses commonly known as Dalits, part of the class conscious population that is Indian society. For years now, Ambedkar has been glorified, made a hero, almost deified for his role in promoting the rights of the poor, the downtrodden, the millions of people who are considered somehow lower than “us”, the “us” being the small stratum of elitist “Brahmins” who are allowed privilege because of the accident of their birth rather than their deeds. Be that as it may, this is not a tirade against class inequality or equal rights, trust me.
This is actually about today, the day that it is, what it means to the average resident of (well, almost, since I actually live outside the island city) Mumbai. It all began for us a few days ago, when a mini-uprising shook the general calm that prevails in our burg. There was arson and looting and stone throwing and assorted other violence, all of which resulted in an atmosphere of stressed wariness. But the story actually started a while ago in a small town, where a small group of Dalits was brutally killed. Foment simmered, as it tends to do, and then finally burst into rage with parts of our city being badly shaken by it. And the fallout – over the past two days, there has been extra vigilance and a wee bit more paranoia than Mumbai actually engenders or deserves. Today, Mumbaikars are almost manic in their watchfulness – it is the day when millions gather to pay homage, as the Indians love to say, to the man who fought for their rights. They have been arriving in the city on foot, in buses, in trucks…any which way they can get here and any which way their can be got here by the politicos who are stage-managing the affair.
I am one of the lucky ones who lived on the wrong side of town and thus manages to avoid this time of the year quite neatly. The crowds and confusion tends to teem in the West of the city. Which means that since there is little depth to our metropolis, traffic zips – or tries to – from one end to another in a nicely linear fashion, with few cross-linkages that can add to the chaos. But when we do chaos, we do it very nicely indeed. Yesterday, for instance, there was all the traffic from the western suburbs filtering through a narrow stretch to the eastern side, bogging up both the connecting road and the main highway I take to go home. So instead of zipping along at our normal 70 kmph, the driver, car and myself, accompanied by what seemed to be a ton of just-bought cat litter and a few kilos of biscuits for the feline devil, chugged solemnly along as if we were part of a funeral procession, making slow albeit steady progress all the way home. My boss, who is curmudgeonly at the best of times, was positively nasty-minded by the time he got to work, his normal journey of about 40 minutes taking him two-plus hours as he sluggishly navigated the crowds, the arrangements to cater to them and the police to control them.
But traffic is the least of the problems that Mumbai is facing today. There is the influx of people who don’t belong to the city and so do not have any idea how to function in it. There is the debris that will collect as they exist in a comparatively confined space. There is the flashpoint beyond which tempers will erupt and violence burst through the veneer of peace. And there is the over-preparedness of the police, who have advised the people to take a day off, to stay home, to avoid the centre of the activities like the proverbial plague. Are we perhaps going a little overboard here? Do we need to be so careful? Is the warning to stay indoors not in itself a means to unrest? Is this what BR Ambedkar had in mind when he demanded rights for those who didn’t have them? I wonder…
No comments:
Post a Comment