The Paradox City

Mumbai, a historically insignificant and neglected area of seven vaguely distributed islands, had its first share of global importance when the British decided to build their first port of the sub-continent in Mumbai, one of the finest natural harbours in Asia. Later, with the completion of the ‘Hornby Vellard’ project in 1845, the seven islands were amalgamated into a single city that was to host millions of people in the next few centuries.

In the 19th century, Mumbai started hosting many modern improvements such as India’s first railway and soon became the economical backbone of the British Empire, spread over the huge Indian sub-continent. Mumbai’s economical and populational growth was a natural outcome of its stature of the world’s leading cotton trading market in the mid-nineteenth century. Mumbai was once known as the ‘Manchester’ of India.

In the next 150 years, Mumbai has transformed into the 5th most populous metropolitan area in the world, hosting around 19 million people in its vast variety of sub-regions.
In fact, there is a lot more to the city than just outrageous statistics and a dramatic historical growth. ‘The Paradox City’, as I often call Mumbai, has, consistently, hosted all possible kinds of emotions, people and events. The ‘standard deviation’ of income in Mumbai is one of the highest in the world. There are people in the city who earn billions of rupees by signing a single contract; and on the contrary, there are people who, regularly, beg around traffic signals, craving for a single meal. There are those who stay in skyscrapers or in their own lavish bungalows, having huge golf courses, sports clubs alongside for their evening entertainment; and there are also those who, along with a ‘joint’ family, stay in 10’ X 10’ rooms that don’t even allow fresh air to come in.

Mumbai, also, hosts plenty of immigrant dreamers who come to the city to actualize their dreams; a few of them taste the success they dream of; whereas the others get lost in the darkness of the city, never to be seen again in the fresh light. Amongst the failed, some join the underworld, some start intoxicating themselves with drugs, whereas some join the lucrative yet harassing business of prostitution to become a vital part of the city. The optimists keep waiting for their chance to come for eternity and end up living a life full of unsuccessful struggle and die a disgraceful death. The hardcore pessimists, on the other hand, surrender after repeated failures and end the life that they had never imagined themselves to be living. The best practical implementation of the proverb, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ can be experienced in Mumbai, where the possibilities are endless and the city’s mystic can beat even the best imaginative brains in the world.

Although, it has got much more opportunities than the lower class, the ‘middle class’, a supremely significant factor in the city, too, has to fight its way out to both commercial and mental success, competing against a huge amount of deprived people, desperately trying to achieve the same. The ‘rat race’, as they call it, does not permit a sabbatical to its participants. As a result, depression can often be spotted in the city’s youth as many fail to cope up with the excessive mental stress that they have to bear continuously. The middle class tries to find a specious solace in various means of entertainment such as sports (mostly Cricket), movies (Bollywood and Hollywood), various art forms (theatre, music, literarture, etc.), clubs, restaurants, beaches (Marine Drive, Worli Sea Face, Bandstand, Juhu Beach to name a few), lounges and several other things that, again, exist in this city, in sheer abundance and in a plethora of variety.

Amongst the dreamers, to the successful few, living in Mumbai is living the sweetest dream; to the others, ‘Mumbai’ can very well be a nightmare coming true. The ‘Upper Class’ is, supposedly, the only set of people who prefer Mumbai as their home, according to recent statistics. So, do all the people who are not fortunate/ able enough to be rich not have a reason to love Mumbai?

The question sounds interesting to my brains but my heart answers it rather rapidly. I, for one, regardless of the comparatively poor infrastructure than the other Metros of the world (for instance, New York, London, Tokyo) can never fancy staying away from the city, purely because I, modestly, don’t think that Marine Drive is any lesser than the Mahattan Island when it comes to beauty neither do I think that the train journey from Goregaon to Churchgate is lesser eccentric than the journey from King’s Cross to Barking. Well, Mumbai has given our country so much in every which way possible that it’s natural for a quintessential ‘Mumbaikar’ like me to be biased towards the city. Nonetheless, I’m a realist and am well-aware that common man’s life style would be far better in the cities that I mentioned earlier. They are commercially and technologically way more advanced and they have an infrastructure that is far more reliable, to say the least.

So, do you leave Mumbai if you get a chance to move to any of these cities? Well, I won’t and I have a humble question as the reason for my decision.
‘Do you shift to someone else’s house if you find it attractive; or work towards the betterment of your own?’




- Mihir Chitre
mihirmumbaikar@gmail.com