Time Out Mumbai - Unforgiving City

This piece was published in an edited version in 

Time Out Mumbai, June 20- July 3, 2014, Volume 10, Issue 22

Unforgiving City

Just how far can you go on forgiving the foibles of our city?

In these pages and elsewhere I have defended Mumbai’s dirt, its density, its congestion, its dearth of open spaces, its overcrowding as natural to the processes of the city. I have extolled the virtues of living together messily in those everyday acts that contribute to its vibrancy and richness. But sometimes you come across a sight that makes you feel that your own leniency makes you an accomplice to something inexcusable.

In the back of a fast moving cab, moving from Metro to Flora Fountain, trundling in the left lane of Mahatma Gandhi Road that is filled with competing four wheelers, I see a decrepit old man laboriously pushing a wheelchair with a frail and visibly ill woman. Life does not seem to have been kind to either of them, and, they are very obviously trying to make their way to Bombay Hospital. The man is negotiating the wheelchair with care, right in the line of oncoming traffic that is not accommodating of his presence in a vehicular lane. He and his charge have no business being there.

I wonder too. But, as I pass them and move ahead it is woefully obvious that the footpath where M G Road turns to meet Mahapalika Marg is simply unfit for anyone to safely push a wheelchair. Walking, even able bodied, is something of a steeplechase. There is encroachment and debris, with little space for pedestrians; trees, hawkers and porta-cabins all grow out of jagged and dangerously irregular paver blocks. There is no length of pavement that is level and true. What else could the old gent do, but to throw caution to the winds, risking not one life but two in the maelstrom of rush hour?

This is too much, even for me. What kind of a city is so unaccommodating that even the infirm and the unwell cannot make their way across it? It is an unfeeling and hostile environment that we have become benumbed to inhabit. I’d like to think that the good city is one we can take for granted. My assumption hardly holds when the pedestrian ways of our city are out of bounds for pedestrians. My gripe is not only about the specially-abled, but for anyone, unfettered by any means of transportation, completely vanilla, on their feet being pushed to the very periphery of presence. 

It is all right, I can argue, that Mumbai really has no open spaces in the European mould, no street-side cafes, no buskers, no flower stalls and souvenir stores, no bespoke urban furniture, no streetlights that geo-position you just by their unique design, no useful signage- our piazzas are our streets. Always have been. We live out our lives measured in walking distances, and latching on to the most meagre of landmarks- shop signs, building corners, even compound walls. As Sahir Ludhiyanvi once wrote: ‘Jitni bhi bildingein thi, sethon ne baant li hai/ Footpath Bambai ke, hai aashiyaan hamaara’. The footpaths belong to us. 

When even this is denied, everyone, panhandler, commuter or flaneur are all exiled from the legitimate city, and are compensated with skywalks built to stop jaywalking, at such heights that trucks carrying idols during the festival season can conveniently drive under. Jaywalking, like jugaad is illegal, but fills the vacuum created by the oversight of the state. The old man and the lady were reduced to doing exactly that by the uncaring nonchalance of those holding municipal responsibility. It occurs to me that, if a mishap should, heaven forbid, happen and either of these two get injured or worse, it is they themselves who would be held accountable and at fault for trying to occupy the vehicular road. 

We are losing those streets that traditionally had very little or slow moving traffic that were once populated by the walking public, doing this and that, other than merely making their way from A to B. Streets, where the pace of life was slower, where one could meet, chat, eat, buy, haggle, curse and move along. Nakhoda Mohalla at one end of Mohammed Ali Road once was a street full of fabric sellers where chiffons and chikan were sold with equal felicity. That was completely ruined with the flyover that swept past one edge. Now Mutton Street, the road that transmogrifies weekly into Chor Bazaar is now on its last legs.

Mumbai is probably the only aspiring world city that does not have a single officially designated pedestrian street. What does this say about its inhabitants and those elected to run it? They seem to have, like Pilate washed their hands and sealed the fate of pedestrians, those pesky critters that move in the manner of the pack donkey. Cars, fortunately for them, are not linearly challenged and predictable in their movements. Just the thought of the pedestrian being considered collateral in the larger fortunes of the city, is distressing, to say the least. 

And as for soft spoken me, I feel just like Howard Beale in Network, who pulls his hair out in great tufts and screams : 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' 

Time Out Mumbai- Travel Lite

This piece was published in an edited version in 

Time Out Mumbai, March 14-27 2014, Volume 10, Issue 15

Travel Lite

Those in academic circles probably know this already, but Mumbai has been the international flavor of for quite a few years now. This is especially true for students of architecture and urban design. Each time the monsoon bids Mumbai farewell and her sodden soul slowly dries, cohorts from universities, unknown and ivy-league, travel to her shores for field visits, just like flamingos at Sewri.

After parking themselves in one of the many establishments on or off Colaba Causeway, high-seating Volvo buses are procured and from such rarefied and elevated environments the city is absorbed. Driving down from the Gateway of India (referred to by some as India Gate) to the boondocks of Navi Mumbai, depending on the theme of the semester, the colonial SoBo, the dense inner-city areas of Kalbadevi, Bhuleshwar, the ‘panjra-pol’, the Dhobhi Ghat, the City Improvement Trust precincts of Dadar-Matunga, the former mill and current mall lands, the eastern docklands, the fast-disappearing mangroves and salt pans and ‘slums’ of every stripe are mandatorily observed. Local trains (in non-rush hours) are given custom, the monorail admired, and various skywalks crossed. Getting serious, development plans are procured, Google Maps pored over, terrabytes of jpegs clicked, local colleges of architecture visited and a few brains picked- all this in about three days or so. Oh, of course, Dharavi-darshan happens and 'Kumbharwada' becomes part of international vocabulary. It joins words like 'jugaad', which have already been learnt in advance.

There is quite an abyss between the literature available and the city's reality. In the spirit of academia, much previous reading is prescribed. Suketu Mehta, David Gregory Roberts, Katherine Boo, Dwivedi and Mehrotra, among others form the canon. ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ becomes the visual point of reference. This is pretty obvious when you encounter un-nuanced positions about slums or the role of real estate; cluster housing is fait accompli- a shining pointer to end all woes, after all it is community driven, no? Speculative theories coalesce into New Urbanism projects, learnings from weekend immersions and catch-as-catch-can ethnography informs the iterations of computer extrusions, where high rise developments (the only answer) are clothed with a garb of Bollywood culture.

What does our city offer that attracts so many to it? To be charitable, Mumbai does provide the foreign observer with several contradictions, to paraphrase Whitman, being large and containing multitudes. It is some surprise that trains run on time, but garbage remains uncollected. One family lives in a 2 billion dollar, 20 storied skyscraper residence, while more than half of the city lives in self-built postage stamp housing. The rule of law is indexical of our democracy, but common law applies everywhere. Everyone here walks and talks English, but as a phunny Indian language. However, despite these polarities, true to our common ethos, what you cannot see is vital to understanding and appreciation, but intangibles are often subsumed in the morass of visual documentation. This can lead to some ‘face-palm’ results. Some American students of architecture found the sights and smells of one corner of one street in the city so overwhelming that it became a metonymy for the city as a whole, and resulted in the design of skyscrapers made out of ‘kachra’. 

Nothing interests student practitioners of architecture and urban design and their mentor institutes more than change. The objective is always to make a city ‘more livable’. This is predicated on the understanding of a city as it is as ‘less livable’. Sociology rather than technology is currently the driving force behind change, and alternatives derived to conceptualize ‘better cities’ are the results of surveys and sampling, even if the sample set is a few persons doing muttergashti at street corners, or a paanwallah, say, or a local SIM shop. There is an urgent need to put it all down on paper and soon conceptual charts, three dimensional street views, stitched photo-collages and before/after layouts are all put together and displayed. 

By now, there is entire machinery in place here in the city to receive these visitors and cater to their needs, spaces for work and presentations, large panels for pinning up their work and seminar spaces for discussion, even for the conduct of international conferences. The usual suspects of invited city experts are rounded up from time to time to take on these fights of urban regeneration fantasies, and to give anecdotal and insightful comments and ‘crits’ about the nature of change in Mumbai, which are eagerly lapped up by these wide eyed, travel-lite acolytes. I should know, on occasion I have been one of them.