The Spirit of Mumbai…A Bloody Cliche

Am a Mumbaikar through and through and was a Bombay-ite or Bambaiyya before the change in the city nomenclature. Am proud of my city and its diversity but somewhere the above line now sounds so clichéd that it has started rankling. The spirit as it goes started getting invoked from the time Mumbai had been subject to disasters of all kinds manmade and natural. The term first started getting used in the Bomb Blasts of 1993 and then the communal riots that followed. Then there were the floods and more bomb blasts, in local trains this time.

Every time a disaster strikes, it is now expected of the Mumbaikar to get up, brush up the dust of previous disasters and keep walking. Does he really have a choice? He does that too, more out of a dire need to stay alive, than anything else. He lends a helping hand to his brethren in the same city because he knows that the administration is ill equipped to handle any disaster that hits them. He is unprotected and is expected to fend for himself. The representatives he elects, line up their own coffers or prostrate before New Delhi. Then New Delhi takes away the taxes that he generates, to support the Northern states that don’t generate as much. His sweat and toil is siphoned off hence leaving nothing for his security or the infrastructure he requires. Today because of this missing infrastructure he is paying off with his blood too.

Politicians play games or mouth platitudes and the apathy reached a peak when the Chief Minister during the 26th July 2005 floods declared three days state holiday for the government machinery; the same machinery, that could have been used to deploy aid and bring down its severity. Lives were lost and property destroyed. 26th Nov 2008 saw a similar situation where baton holding police personnel moved to handle terrorists with Kalashnikovs. The bullet proof jackets and helmets used by the personnel were so inadequate that they could at the most stop pelted stones. In this the head of ATS, Hemant Karkare, loses his life. The guns with the police are of vintage World War II variety. Lee Enfield .303 bolt cocking rifles, which are no match for AK-47’s and 56’s imagine by the time a policeman fires his first bullet and wants to discharge the second one, elapsed time would be 20-30 sec’s in which he would have died at least 12 times over. Because of this inadequacy more than 130 people are dead and more than 300 injured badly.

The man on the street has to deal with all this. Infrastructure for his transportation is not maintained, housing and his basic needs are pathetically inadequate. His protection is non-existent whether it’s against crime on the street, natural calamity or urban terrorism. He gets short charged badly for his effort and the taxes he generates and pays. This Taj, The Oberoi and CST station episodes have converted Mumbai into Beirut. Yet he is expected to be brave and plod on. It is now too irritating to hear the invocation of the Spirit of Mumbai. Give me a break. Enough is enough. I shall help my fellow man on the street that is humanitarian in its basic definition, but I do not need a politician giving me lessons on how I should be brave and resilient and carry on. The next time he does it, I might just retaliate. I am sick, suffused with an impotent rage of being raped everytime a disaster happens, time and again being taken for granted. As a Mumbaikar and an Indian, I am well within my rights to demand a life of dignity, safety and wellbeing. This is the true spirit of Mumbai; let this spirit not be taken for stoic acceptance.