The spirited city

Melting pot or salad bowl? About Mumbai, you never know. Demography does not state beyond the obvious.

Melting pot or salad bowl? About Mumbai, you never know. Demography does not state beyond the obvious. It doesn’t map the intangibles that make the city bigger than the sum of its individuals, the magic glue that holds it together.

Insider or outsider? Unlike other cities, the question does not come naturally here until the idea of exclusion comes into play. For most gold diggers trooping out of all recesses of the country, Mumbai is a state of existence, a manner of being. One becomes an insider upon arriving here and start living it. Maximum City? Minimum City? That’s in the realm of the abstract.

Beyond its everyday visuals, of the moving population resembling a giant queue gone haywire, of the slum spreads and vertical villages, of the chaos on the roads, and of the cheek-by-jowl existence of the fabulous and the wretched — Mumbai is an experience like no other. Every Mumbai experience frames a different answer.

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Arriving here, you are sucked into the city’s rhythm even before you savour its first breeze. It’s fast and it’s furious. Before you make sense of the faceless crowds at the railway platforms, you are a part of it, jostling, running, getting hauled into bogies, getting ejected out of them, getting badmouthed and badmouthing some. Your little ego is efficiently decimated by the time you squeeze yourself into the ubiquitous, aesthetically challenged black and yellow taxi that in some way stands as make-do metaphor for the egalitarian wishes of the city.

Insider or outsider? There is no time to notice. You barely know your neighbour in the apartment, the man who takes the same train as you, the people sharing the table with you at the dingy bar or the woman who butts in, offering company. The city’s a giant treadmill dragging everybody along. Everybody’s running and absorbed in it. You miss your step and unknown hands make you stand up and run. Again, you fail to notice your benefactors.

Movement is the static reality in Mumbai. Blasts happen, city goes under water, intemperate rhetoric threatens to tear its social fabric, but the city goes on. It’s programmed to move. History should stand testimony.

Melting pot or salad bowl? It’s too inclusive to be a salad bowl and too free-spirited to turn a melting pot. Anyway, the city’s too busy for such questions.