Mumbai's Energy - Boon or Bane

Wednesday 13th July 2011 is a date that not many are likely to forget, as it joins the growing list of dates that serve to remind India of her weaknesses and vulnerabilities. That we don’t seem to be doing enough to curb the scourge of terrorism is evident to even the most unlettered Bombayite, for despite all assurances, it is this city that appears to be bearing the brunt of terrorist attacks. While other cities in India have also faced terrorist acts, it is only Mumbai that has had to repeatedly deal with this mindless violence that targets all communities.
Why is it that this city has become a happy hunting ground for terrorists and why is it that successive governments are unable to control this menace. It is not that the central or state governments are not making efforts or do not have the funds to purchase equipment. It is not that the police do not have their intelligence network. Then why is this network not effective when it is known that law enforcement agencies have to succeed every time while a terrorist has to succeed only once. It is this truism that Rahul Gandhi was trying to articulate, unfortunately he did so rather clumsily at an inopportune moment.

Mumbai is and has always been a city in a hurry – “Bai bai, Mumbai mein sabko hich ghaai”. Nobody walks leisurely in this city, everyone is trying to get somewhere quickly, trying to swing a deal, trying to get there first. People have configured their home and work environments to complement each other and small businesses have sprung up to meet the felt needs of the bigger businesses. This is why it is so easy to do certain things in Mumbai. The city’s competitiveness ensures that it never sleeps. Nowhere else can you order a meal to be home delivered at midnight. Nowhere else does the system of hot food being delivered from homes in distant suburbs to offices in the city, work so effectively. The range of support one can get for one’s work is superb – documents picked up from your office for photocopying and delivered back neatly bound instantly, quick service from the nearest courier agent, cups of hot tea and coffee delivered through the day, cash picked up from the office for depositing reliably and regularly, cheques sent for cashing through the enterprising youngster earning a decent salary running oddjobs, the list goes on and on.

The city’s legendary energy has attracted businesses of every kind and has led to a number of similar industries being set up in their own distinct areas of operations – the financial district around the Reserve Bank and the Stock Exchange, the diamond and gold trading area in Zaveri Bazaar, the electronics market on Lamington Road, shipping and ship repair in the docks area, Bollywood in the suburbs and so many others.

The competition to attract buyers is intense, with each trying to outdo the other. Competition spills onto the road as well with temporary stalls set up on the roads and pavements outside the regular shops offering a cut price bargain for the same goods being sold inside. This is why it is such fun to shop in Crawford market area. Not only can you buy virtually anything under the sun inside a 1 km radius, but you can actually go shopping with Rs 100 and come away feeling pleased. Within that cheerful cacophony of people buying and selling are cars, scooters, cyclists, handcarts, roadside tea stalls, vendors, delivery trucks, buses, taxis, even the occasional cow, buffalo or goat and all the while, people and more people everywhere. Cars are virtually jammed next to each other without wasting an inch of space, bikes are parked right outside the shop and the van delivers your goods at your doorstep. No one minds if the road is partly blocked while the van unloads, which in any case is done deftly and quickly, because he has to go further for another delivery. In Mumbai, time is money. Wonderful for business.

But from the security point of view, this is a disaster waiting to happen. Large congregations of humanity and densely packed roads with no room for maneauvre do not support security and emergency imperatives. It is physically impossible to go through the process of stopping, scanning, searching and clearing thousands of people and their bags in a short time effectively, given the masses of humanity that throng these popular business destinations and the numbers of police and trained security personnel available. Even CCTV cameras installed in large numbers cannot prevent a terrorist strike unless there are sufficient personnel trained to sift through the mind numbing sea of faces that a single day’s video recordings would throw up, even if aided by face recognition software.

The people of Mumbai have become so used to constant and continuous motion that they simply do not accept any delay in their movement. All security initiatives in this city sooner or later fade away, either through a political lack of will, bureaucratic red tape, lack of interest by a corrupt police force, or a stubborn unwillingness to accept any curbs on personal liberty by an obdurate citizenry that regards it a birthright to demand safety and security from the government on the one hand while refusing to shed their blinkers on the other. Safety of the community depends on how much each person is willing to cooperate, which means, how much is each person willing to sacrifice so that everyone can benefit. That ‘how much’ in Mumbai is woefully small and can be judged from the fact that the diamond traders were unwilling to shift to newer and better facilities in BKC, citing one reason or another. On Wednesday it was the diamond traders in Zaveri Bazaar, the next time it could be the equally crowded financial sector around Dalal Street, or the popular and equally congested Linking Road, Bandra. Frankly it wouldn’t be a surprise if an IED was found smuggled into the docks either.

Given the sheer numbers of people packed into small spaces, there seems to be no alternative other than to decongest crowded areas and move some of these industries along with their supporting businesses into more organized zones built for the purpose. Undoubtedly, business deals would be interrupted for a while. Street vendors have to be cleared permanently and more effectively than the BMC’s eyewash exercises presently being conducted. No doubt it would make the street look rather dull and devoid of ‘chehel pehel’ but there is simply no option. When we allow new stalls to come up, it certainly adds to the colour but also adds new security challenges, when even the old ones haven’t been solved. The spread of stalls on Fashion Street is a case in point. The spillage of slums onto the land adjoining railway tracks is another. There have been cases of train commuters being hit by stones thrown by people walking or living nearby. The next time it could be a grenade.

I am not aware if there is any technology available that can scan the teeming humanity at Churchgate Station, for instance, automatically see through their metal tiffin boxes, sniff through briefcases, recognize suspicious faces, and indicate targets all in a jiffy, so that anti-terrorist teams can zero in on the likely hotspot efficiently and accurately without disturbing everyone. Till then, or till someone cracks the whip really hard, and areas get decongested and vehicles are parked in designated areas and people agree to stand patiently in queues, Mumbai’s famed energy will work against its own safety and security.

THE PROBLEM WITH FORWARDS

As any cellphone user and internet user with an e mail account will tell you, it is rather difficult to keep an inbox clean with the amount of rubbish that floods in every day in the form of unwanted mails. While one can sift through the chaff and consign the usual offers for credit cards and bargains to the trash bin, there are also a large number of mails sent by known people in the form of ‘forwards’. Usually, these over-zealous people trying so hard to be friendly, fail to appreciate the nuisance value of these mails. As a member of an e-group comprising a large number of members, I am privileged to receive various forwards, sent by one or the other member, however it has to be said in all fairness that it is only a few who have cultivated the habit of sending forwards into a fine art.

While it can be argued that this is one way of keeping in touch, the base issue here is that senders of forwards invariably fail to appreciate the attendant problems. The headaches start when people send forwards without thinking. “Forward bombing” is perhaps a close description of what happens when you receive a deluge of mails in your in-box all from the same sender. Senders fail to realize that when the recipient finds too many e mails from the same person, all of them forwards and completely irrelevant, the sender’s credibility takes a beating, something like another person talking too much whenever you come across them. Makes you want to avoid them.

Most forwards have gone around so many times that they are like the same stale jokes rehearsed and trotted out by the wannabe life of the party. You smile politely and even try to cough out a light laugh, while inwardly you groan at the inflicted punishment. Let me run through some of the commonly observed nuisance perpetrated by forwards.

Hoaxes. So many forwards are pure hoaxes which can be ascertained in a jiffy if the sender would only take the trouble. A few days ago I received photos of a Flying Hotel, the Hotelicopter. All that it took to see through the hoax, was to open another tab and google hotelicopter. The same photos that my friend had sent me, appeared along with the words Hoax. How come there’s no site for online booking of suites for a weekend stay in the flying hotel. Did it not occur to the sender that a helicopter can’t fly very far and has to come down to earth every hour or so. Some stories like those of exploding cellphones have been doing the rounds for years. Despite the myth having been exploded publicly, people still try to circulate photos of milk guzzling Ganeshas. There was even an alarming message that did the rounds recently and was circulated on mobile phones through SMSes that the Sea Link had developed cracks. Fortunately that hoax was exposed quickly. On another occasion I received a message advising me not to travel to Mahim as riots had broken out in that area.


Unverified Information. Another favorite is to send info without bothering to verify the authenticity. A few days ago I received a forwarded mail with some remarks ascribed to Chester Nimitz, the great American wartime Admiral. A quick search of Nimitz’s quotations revealed that he had never made such remarks and it was probably someone trying to create a newsworthy story. The story had done its rounds and was available for anyone on the net to “Copy & paste”. Shortly after the 2G scam had been exposed and the minister of telecom A Raja was arrested, stories of his amassed wealth began to circulate. I received a mail with photos of Raja’s fabulously luxurious villa reportedly built on the outskirts of Hyderabad. While I had no doubt that Raja could easily afford a house as expensive as that shown, somehow I could not link the style, the elegance, aesthetics and taste, so evident in those photos, with Shri A Raja. That house just wasn’t him. Sure enough, I came across those photos again but this time in an interiors magazine, in a photo shoot credited to a house in Montecito, California.

Repeated To Death. While once I sincerely read the presentations on self improvement forwarded by friends, but over a period of time I find myself reading the same thing over and over again. By now I must have viewed the series of photographs titled “Inside The Tube” a half dozen times along with so many other “Simple Joys of Life”, “The Beauty of Nature”, “Earth at Her Best”, “Wonders Of The World”, “Temple Made Of Bottles”, “Sculpted Garden”, “Lifelike Advertisements”, “Amazing Bridges” and so on. I would love to download some of these beautiful pictures to use in my presentations, but they are invariably in ‘.pps’ format and one can do nothing but gaze at them vacantly. Naughty pictures too, like the one of ‘Eye Catching T Shirt Slogans’ and other eye candies, have also been circulated ad nauseum and now seem juvenile. Well certainly no one’s getting any younger so perhaps they really are kiddish now.

I made the mistake of mildly suggesting to a regular sender of forwards in my e group, that he could consider sending more ‘real’ photos one could relate to, like pics taken during our training days, places served, important occasions etc rather than those taken of unknown places by professionals. I was ticked off rather stuffily that of the more than 300 members of our group, many had appreciated his forwards and that I was free to press the ‘Delete’ button if I didn’t like them, but don’t dare suggest that these forwards were anything but the best. Wow, what a mouthful! What part of the delete button didn’t I know about? I don’t think my reply, “Ok, cool” went down too well.

Jokes that once seemed priceless now appear silly, having read them so many times over. No doubt the limitless expanse of the net is a fertile field for jokes and I do marvel at the ingenuity of people who can come up with such priceless gems guaranteed to make you crack up. But still, everything must run its full circle. In this case the circle of life goes around many times.
Senders of forwards would do well, at the very least, to delete names and details of earlier senders and recipients, lest their e mail ids be trawled by marketing companies trying to push everything from low cost holidays to credit cards. I have seen mails with complete details of earlier senders, their names, addresses and telephone numbers, including some addresses from the defence services. Placing such details in an unrestricted environment is not the wisest thing to do. You never know when someone may use those details for malafide activities like phishing.

Surely all internet users must be aware of the problems of virus, cookies, spyware, worms and other creepy crawlies that abound the net. No prudent internet user would open an attachment unless sure of the sender and the contents of the attachment. If not, its time to wake up and smell the coffee, the net is not as safe a place as one might imagine. Nor is the information one reads on the net as authentic as one would like it to be. It is not the purpose of this article to do down those who send forwards in good faith, rather to make them aware that like in any other interaction, there is a measure of etiquette involved and one must be aware of the nuisance it causes when one breaches that fine line crossing over into the realm of boorishness.

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A Short Summary Of India's Martitime Heritage

This was originally written as the foreword of my book on the dockyard, and was later changed. However it remains a fair summary of India's maritime past. For those who are interested . ..  .

India’s maritime history predates the birth of Western civilisation. The world's first tidal dock is believed to have been built at Lothal around 2300 BC during the Harappan civilisation, near the present day Mangrol harbour on the Gujarat coast. Modern oceanographers have observed that the Harappans must have possessed great knowledge of tides in order to build such a dock on the ever-shifting course of the Sabarmati, as well as exemplary knowledge of hydrography and maritime engineering. The earliest known reference to an organization devoted to ships in ancient India is to the Mauryan Empire from the 4th century BC. It is believed that navigation as a science originated on the river Indus some 5000 years ago. The very word, "navigation," comes from the Sanskrit navagati, meaning "to travel by boat." According to Sardar KM Panikkar, the well know historian and India’s first ambassador to China, Hindus in the Indus Valley Civilisation used the magnetic compass (matsya yantra), and ventured far into the distant reaches of the Indian Ocean.

A fourteenth century description of an Indian ship credits it with a carrying capacity of over 700 people giving a fair idea of both ship building skills and maritime ability of seamen who could successfully man such large vessels. Another account of the early fifteenth century describes Indian ships as being built in compartments so that even if one part was shattered, the next remained intact, thus enabling the ship to complete her voyage. This was perhaps a forerunner of the modern day subdivision of ships into watertight compartments, a concept then totally alien to Europeans.  

            Through the 5^th to the 13^th centuries, Indian mariners from a series of dynasties, Maurya, Andhra, Pallava, Pandava, Chalukya and Chola, established close links with a number of foreign nations like Java, Sumatra, Siam and Cambodia. The kingdom of Vijayanagar had as many as 300 ports, while the Vijayanagar Emperor Dev Raya II, even assumed the title, “Lord of the Eastern, Western and Southern Oceans”. Sea trade flourished during the Hindu Period which ended around the fifteenth century after the fall of Vijayanagar. The presence of large number of merchant ships had attracted a number of pirates in the Arabian Sea and to ensure that their trade was not hampered, a number of Indian states maintained strong navies.

Indian sea power began to decline in the 13^th century when the Hindu Kingdoms of the south went into decline due to their own internal rivalries. Another factor in the decline of Indian sea power was emergence of the caste system which forbade high caste Hindus from venturing out to sea. Delhi came to be ruled by the Central Asian Dynasties, for whom sea power was an alien concept. At sea, there was a mad scramble for monopoly of the sea trade, which was eventually taken over by the Arabs, keeping India’s traditional trading partners out of the scene. On land, Muslim invaders from the north-west effectively cut off trade with Central Asia. The result was that India became isolated, with only the Arabs providing contact with the outside world. Meanwhile, the west had made significant scientific and technological advances which enabled them to navigate far beyond their shores and were therefore seeking to turn their scientific achievements into profits through trade. Till then, trade with India had been conducted only via the overland route, dominated by the Venetians, and it was only a question of time before the sea route to India from Europe was discovered.

The Portuguese had navigated as far as the Cape of Good Hope and it was a Portuguese merchant-sailor, Vasco da Gama who discovered the sea route to India. There was a brief resurgence of Indian maritime power in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, with the Zamorin’s admiral Kunjali Marakkar putting up a stout defence and even warding off the Portuguese for a while, followed by the Maratha Navy under Kanhoji Angre and the Siddis of Janjira. Success at sea was on account of quality ships being made by a well developed shipbuilding industry. However, it was the endless squabbles of the numerous states that did India in. Thereafter it was left to the Portuguese to demonstrate the ease with which Indian coastal states could be subjugated, by using a well trained navy capable of sailing long distances, armed with guns and cannon.

British travelers who visited Surat, saw for the first time, ships of a tonnage and size under construction, that they had never before seen in Europe’s yards. Although they came ostensibly for trade, most western powers had formed public-private partnerships, where joint-stockholding companies were floated. These companies were allowed a measure of free hand where it came to maximizing their profits, given the internecine struggles of countless local rajas, including the use of force. Eventually, the British managed to oust the Portuguese, the French and the Dutch from the main stage in the Arabian Sea. It is no accident that the rise of the British coincided with the ascendancy of their navy, and the simultaneous decline of the other European powers along with their maritime capabilities. The British also realized as had the Portuguese, nearly a half century earlier, that the key to sustaining their maritime dominance and thereby their grip over India, was a well established and professional dockyard, capable of maintaining and building ships. A dockyard was therefore a strategic asset, to be carefully maintained and developed with the latest technology available.

That the Dockyard proved its worth several times over is a recorded fact, obvious to any reader of history in the subcontinent. The Yard had a role to play in almost all wars fought in Asia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for that was when Britain was consolidating her colonies using the might of the Royal Navy. The British also realized, in later years, the folly of ignoring the Yard’s development, as happened at the outbreak of both world wars. The British reigned supreme in the Indian Ocean for well over a century, till 1941 when they had to contend with the Japanese. Fortunately for India, the British left a few years later.

The Yard’s modernization and expansion began only after Independence and being a long process, it continued in stages till the seventies. Since then, realizing that the nation faces multi-directional threats, additional dockyards have been created. Despite the additional infrastructure created from time to time, the dockyard continuously faces the challenge of technology as newer ships are added with state of art weapons, sensors, communications, missile and electronic warfare packages and propulsion systems. New roles for the Indian Navy are defined at an increasing frequency, with terrorism raising its ugly head and taking on new forms.

The coastline has changed vastly over the years, however the Arabian Sea continues to wash the rocks at the entrance to Mumbai harbour, as it has done for generations. While it is for the Indian Navy to ensure that the lessons of the past are not forgotten, at the very core of India’s maritime aspirations lies the Naval Dockyard at Mumbai, the history of which remains intertwined with the city of its birth.

Book Review

Obama’s Wars

By Kris Tee

Obama’s Wars

By Bob Woodward

Simon & Schuster

Price: US $ 20

Pages: 441

President Obama had the unenviable distinction of inheriting a war in which their main ally in the region, Pakistan, was in fact a dishonest partner. The Americans on their part had little choice but to go along with Pakistan, playing the role of a nanny escorting a peevish child, lest the fragile fabric of Pakistan’s uneasy stability give way completely.

          While one of Obama’s campaign promises had been that he would get the ‘boys’ back, he could not simply order them home, abandoning the sacrifice of so many American lives and giving up the proactive pursuit of the war on terror. At the same time, he had to prevent the situation from descending into another Vietnam. This meant that the aims of the war had to be very carefully scripted and translated into actionable and achievable goals for the military. On the one hand while the military was pushing for a troop increase, the general public wanted the boys to return home.

          This book describes the tightrope path negotiated by the US President in managing the various wars, both physical and virtual. The book has been written as an eyewitness account of the goings-on and deliberations during meetings, briefings and informal conversations. The pace tends to get rather slow and the author tends to pre-suppose knowledge of the US national security apparatus in the reader. Further, given the number of characters, the reader is forced to flip pages to ascertain who’s who. The book could have been made more interesting and perhaps shorter, had the author maintained a narrative form. The book provides insight into the functioning of the American security establishment and brings out many unusual aspects of the relationship between the President, in his role as Commander-in-Chief and military commanders. Post reading, a student of strategic and military affairs could use it as a useful reference book.

The Disappearing Home

The Disappearing Home

Like many of my generation, I grew up in bungalows set on plots that had a reasonable amount of space around the house for a modest lawn, backyard, a room for the servants and possibly a garage. This was more or less the norm followed when our fathers decided to commit their life’s savings to building a house in which to settle down after retirement in much the same way as their fathers had done before them. It was always “building a house” then.

When we left home and started our work lives, those of us who were lucky enough to work in the same city where we grew up, continued to live in the same house that our Dads built. Being independent houses, it was easy to expand them, adding bedrooms to accommodate the growing family. Even if there were no children staying there, it was common for the offspring to add a floor upwards in due course, where a tenant could be installed, with the rent adequately supplementing father’s pension.

The house was where children got married and returned to during holidays, and where grandchildren could run free under the fond eyes of grandparents. There was always room for guests, with everyone cheerfully mucking in. Bathrooms were readily shared and the drawing room was a place where the centre table would be cleared to spread mattresses for children or extra guests to sleep upon.

Having joined the Services I was fortunate to have lived in accommodation that guaranteed me the same space as had been provided to my father, although in my case it was flats as opposed to the bungalows allotted to my father when he was in service. However there was plenty of space available for all my trunks, boxes, furniture and various collectibles accumulated on account of the nomadic life I had chosen.

A few years ago my wife and I began scouting for flats in our maximum city where I was posted. We visited various projects and inspected dozens of sample flats and debated endlessly on the pros and cons of different localities. The plushness and quality of internal fittings was way beyond all that I had become used to after a lifetime spent living in government quarters. One thing became clear very soon, that we would not be able to afford anything more than a cubby hole in this city and that we would have to look elsewhere either in the far flung suburbs or in neighbouring cities for anything that resembled what we were used to.

I remember visiting a sample flat where the bedrooms were so tiny that it appeared unlikely that they could accommodate two full sized beds. The builder informed us that concepts like three foot wide single beds were about as current as dinosaurs and that double beds did not exceed five feet in width. While I was reflecting on how one would accommodate guests, the builder as if reading my thoughts unveiled his piece de resistance, a service flat in the building where one could accommodate visiting house guests and even a common servants toilet! I wondered if I needed to give my relatives a time table to visit depending upon availability of the service flat. But that was six years ago.

Today with bungalows in the major cities becoming unaffordable for most but the very rich and flats becoming even more compact, we are witnessing the phenomenon of the disappearing home.  Apart from the fact that rooms sizes being what they are in the modern flats being offered, where it is no longer possible to accommodate a mattress for an extra person to sleep on, the drawing room where one could earlier easily make space for two or three people to sleep, has also become impossibly small. Besides, the main door in most flats opens directly into the drawing room and it would be unseemly to open the main door early morning for the newspaper or milk and allow curious strangers the view of sleeping guests.

The puja room has disappeared, having been replaced by a mandir in the complex for those lucky enough, while in other cases the family deity has been relegated to a small alcove built into the wall of a passage. While once the balcony was a place to set a couple of chairs and enjoy a hot cup of tea with the newspaper, today the balcony is either occupied by the washing or has been covered and enclosed to create some extra space in the drawing room. In fact the ‘H’ in BHK which stands for ‘Hall’ is a complete misnomer. The daily washing has infact been ejected from the dwelling, strung up on lines outside windows. So now you can’t use that ‘lakeeron wala kachha’, it has to be a designer label. After all what would the neighbours think? It gives the phrase ‘washing your dirty linen in public’ a whole new meaning.

Six years ago, the tiny toilets required me to walk all the way in before I could shut the door, today’s builders have eliminated the door altogether, making the bathroom cum toilet an integral part of the bedroom. The logic touted is that doors take up too much space and besides since the bathrooms are lavishly done up with ornate fittings, one would like to show them off. Yeah right, and what happens when you are having a nice conversation with friends or family in the bedroom and someone decides he or she wants to go?

Built in cupboards have shrunk to a size where they will not accommodate more than half a dozen clothes on hangars and a few clothes and linen on shelves. So where do you put your woolens and other clothes that you don’t use regularly? Where do you store old newspapers, magazines and children’s’ school books before you can dispose them off to the kabariwala. As such where do you put your collection of books and mementoes? Even shoes are stored outside the house. The society understands perfectly if you have placed a shoe cupboard outside the main door. We are Indians you see, we like to keep our houses clean and pure. As for the outside . . .

With the drawing cum dining room having shrunk to a size where four people are a crowd, kitchens have also reduced in size and you cannot work there without bumping into the maid. Ah yes, needless encumberances like kitchen doors went out long ago. The problem of cooking for guests has been solved by ordering from the friendly neighbourhood take away. In any case it is far easier to entertain at a good restaurant nearby, since that eliminates the problem of clearing and cleaning up afterwards.

Builders are especially considerate to the needs of children and have provided play areas populated by Disney characters. Some builders are particularly sensitive and have even provided study areas for children, so that they don’t disturb their parents at home.

What it finally boils down to is that the modern flat is not so much a home as merely a place to sleep. All other functions are being performed outdoors and in other locations. The home has begun to disappear.

Delhi vs Mumbai - The Eternal Debate

A debate on the better and not so good aspects of Delhi and Mumbai is a rivalry as old as time itself. Recently, I chanced upon a series of posts, not nearly bringing out the better points of each city as much as trashing the other. I was quite surprised to see the emotions running so high on either side, including some pretty spicy गाली गलौच.

To some of my fellow citizens of this great metropolis who may say I don't know this city well, let me put the record straight at the outset. I live in South Bombay with my office in Cuffe Parade and have a breathtaking view of the sea. I live in a great area with access to some of the, greenest areas close to the sea. In short, it doesn't get better than this. I have also lived in both cities extensively so I know both well.

Bombay has a great work environment and people are very professional. Its indeed a great place to work, but as I said I live and work in SoBo so my view may be coloured as any true blue SoBoite regards anything beyond Bandra as another town. The cosmopolitan culture of South Bombay cannot be found anywhere in India, certainly the energy of this city can't be seen elsewhere. 


However beyond Bandra and Chembur is another matter. Navi Mumbai is in fact a different country and has very little connection with the Bombay that I know. Believe me I am not unique in this view. Traffic in Andheri and beyond is lawless, going to Powai is a pain as there is none of the ordered traffic one sees this side. Driving in Vashi is a nightmare as the roads are so choked with arrogant autos, careless bikers, barely literate SUV and heavy vehicle drivers trying to show who’s the boss and who's the  भाई. The beautiful Palm Beach road sees frequent accidents due to the high speeds and lack of traffic sense. I don't know how many of you have seen the port areas.

I was transferred to Delhi in ‘95 from Bombay and we drove down in our trusty old Maruti 800 with suitcases on the roof rack. Yes it was a culture shock and I was nervous driving as everyone seemed to be overtaking from every direction. But gradually I began to like the place and the five years that we spent there were wonderful in all respects. My wife worked in two different places and yes while one had to be careful it wasn’t as though there were people waiting to attack her the moment she stepped out of the house. We worked out a system and followed it carefully to our advantage. In 2000, I returned to Bombay, now Mumbai.

I still travel frequently to Delhi and I am amazed at the positive changes there. For one, the traffic has become a lot more disciplined. I think the Delhi Police is to be complemented for this. They are far stricter on traffic violations there, than in Mumbai.

Secondly, the Delhi Govt introduced some sweeping changes - introduction of CNG compulsorily for autos and buses (before anywhere else) brushing aside any objections has made the air more breathable (lately I believe it has slipped back to being the most polluted city) - construction of a series of flyovers on the ring road and outer ring road is another. The good thing is that they finished these projects in a finite amount of time. And no, the Central Govt didn’t hand it to them on a platter. Like in every other government procedure, the Delhi Govt made a bid for it justified the expense and followed it up dealing with audit queries along the way. No doubt the Central Govt being located there, helps in following up cases.

On the other hand, I am appalled at the deterioration in Mumbai. The cops don’t seem to be able to control traffic any longer. Its usual to see motorists jumping red lights and halting in the middle of the road, instead of at the zebra crossings. Law and order in the suburbs is bad. If women think they are safe there walking at night, think again. They are no longer safe in the local trains either, where once everybody helped everyone else.
Yes one does feel a little more free in Mumbai and we still go out regularly for the 11 o’clock show, but only to INOX, the other halls are not worth it.

My son had to take a train every day to Andheri and had to return home at odd hours depending on his shift. We were tensed whenever he had a late shift and I would invariably drive to Churchgate to pick him up, because even SoBo has its share of druggies, goondas and other weirdos who will not hesitate to attack a lone person for a few rupees or a cell phone. I absolutely forbade him from leaving his hotel near the Int Airport after 12 or so at night for neither were autos easily available, nor was any sane person on the road at that time.

Mumbai however has a great work ethic and is an excellent place to work. The kind of professionalism one sees here, is difficult to find elsewhere. That is not to say anything against Delhi's work culture, for there are equally committed and dedicated professionals there too. However, there are more obstacles to achieving better quality work output. And one cannot deny that the sight of peons and junior staff basking in the sun on the lawns of India gate during the winter months is completely off-putting. However the enterprise and energy of Delhi's traders, craftspersons, skilled workers and shopkeepers is to be seen to be believed. Shopping in the markets is a delight and the street food is something to die for.


So while I continue to enjoy and take pride in this great city, the kind of politicians we have in this state, completely distresses me. We can’t seem to get our projects completed, the metro is taking forever, our roads are pathetic and people are only getting choked. We have to stop trashing immigrants and pretending that we are the step children of the Govt of India, when our own Chavans and Deshmukhs are buffoons. Don’t blame Biharis and UPites for taking over jobs when our own Shindes and Kambles don’t want to work. Any local taxi operator will tell you that he employs the so called bhaiyas as the local men don’t work as hard, want higher pay, more holidays and are hopelessly unreliable. Fortunately, the local women are the complete opposites of their menfolk and are extremely hardworking and honest. 

So lets not be judgemental when considering the two cities. To people of both cities, I say that you live there with an open mind, and very soon the place grows on you. You’ll enjoy the experience. Have a nice day.