The city on-the-move is digging in its heels

By Roshan Abbas

“If you want to produce the news, stay in Delhi, If you want to be the news, go to Mumbai!”

As I landed here 12 years ago, having freshly uprooted myself from Delhi, the advice from a friend had rung clear in my head. With jus a smattering of  entertainment programming coming out of Delhi, there was no more left to do there.

As I stepped out of the airport, the smell of the sea and the humidity hit me square in the gut. By evening, the buzz of the city had got to me, it throbbed and pulsated with life never-ending. The morning had sucker-punched me, the evening weaved its spell and as I walked at Juhu beach, the waves whispered secrets hidden in their depth.

The next morning, I was out on the streets shooting and noticed something strange. A TV or film shoot in Delhi would have attracted curious onlookers in droves, but here it was another part of life. Nobody cared a damn or even seemed to mind too much unless you tried to stop them. Everyone was too busy getting somewhere.

This need to ‘get somewhere’ in a sense, exemplified the Mumbai of the nineties.  Your surname didn’t matter. Nor did your address. Talent was your only calling card. Yet the same time, the shelf life of talent was always under threat. For, on the road to success, there was always a queue ahead to break and another forming behind you. Those who fell by the sidelines drowned their sorrows in bars, while others celebrated their successes in the latest ‘hip place’ which changed every three months. Mumbai was a Manhattan with skyscrapers of emotions and achievements.

In a decade-plus, this city has given me everything I desired. I have worked in and won awards for TV and Radio, set up an education institute, sold a company, made a movie. Like a true Bollywood blockbuster, I have found true love and got married here and had two lovely children. I bought my first house here and filled it with friends and memories.

I have learnt that this city salutes the rising sun and the dynamism of youth. One has to reinvent oneself to stay relevant. And with Mumbai’s doors still open to new talent and ideas, it requires a lot of reinventing.

When I had first come to Mumbai, I interviewed Sushmita Sen for a TV show. Sush was the toast of the town that evening, having won 2 awards for best supporting actress. Emotional and expressive, the lady summed Mumbai in a sher (couplet) I still remember:

Koi haath bhi na milayega Jo gale miloge tapak se Ye naye mijaaz ka shehar hai Zara faasle se mila karo

As time has gone by, I have seen the bear hug between people evolve into a look over the shoulder to spot someone perhaps a little more famous. Yesteryear stars are a faded memory and a 15 second sound-byte. A short obituary. Promises are made at every meeting to catch up, but the catching up never happens.

We know of the welfare of people through their status updates, because they live too far for a visit. We now know people who have moved to Navi Mumbai to seek a better lifestyle, a place unheard of when I first moved here. Addresses such as Upper Lokhandwala and Lower Parel are passed off as the hip new Mumbai to hordes of fortune seekers arriving here daily. Attempts have been made to build barriers to entry on a linguistic and jingoistic platform. But thankfully they have largely failed.

A residue of those attempts do remain. Today tempers flare without pretext, people are less tolerant, the skyscrapers get higher, the moral standards get lower, children are less healthy, the elderly more fragile. Egos have gotten bigger, attention spans shorter. The original Mumbaikar scoffs at this and goes about life with a stoic resilience that holds the fragile peace together.

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A TV producer from the West was down here selling a reality series. He was bewildered by the jam-packed trains, the street vendors everywhere, the teeming, sweaty multitude that makes up Mumbai. While driving through the streets later that evening I told him, for you Survivor is a TV show; for a Mumbaikar it’s a daily commute to work and back.

Mumbai has always attracted attention. In the recent past, a lot has been of the negative kind. Even terrorists seem to realise that if you want to be the news, Mumbai is the place to strike. Multiple bomb blasts and with an attack on the very centre of civil society, we still play Survivor everyday. Life here has become so fragile and living so precious that the weekends are spent living it up, living it large. Weekdays are spent cursing the lack of infrastructure, battling the traffic snarls, grumbling at the lack of governance while eking out a living.

Beneath the clamour of business deals and the glamour of Bollywood however, the city has lost a bit of its sheen for me. I fly out of Mumbai often and as one takes the aerial route, the city, to borrow a phrase, looks “like a patient etherised upon the table,” left to languish with its arterial roads semi-constructed, metro lines stretching like a exposed central nervous system. The headlines are filled with some expert or the other, discussing the next steps in trying to resuscitate it.

From the aircraft, the car lights traversing the highways show there are still signs of life here but most of Mumbai seems shrouded in a haze. The city which was always on the move, ambles along while it largely seems to have dug its heels in. Nowadays, someone is constantly digging here. For the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, for a solution or to find the secret the sea waves still whisper to everyone who lands on its shore.

Roshan Abbas is a media entrepreneur & film director