A New Beginning

This is the first piece I wrote for Time Out Mumbai, occasioned by their 'End of the Line' issue on the last suburbs at the end of the Mumbai Local lines. Panvel, of course is currently the last station on the Harbour Line.

A New Beginning

Mustansir Dalvi tries to makes sense of living in Panvel

A patch of road, about three feet wide, crosses my path to the railway station on the New Panvel side. Elsewhere, the road continues, well tarred regularly before each monsoon. This singularity, however, remains untouched and has been since the Harbour Line made its way into town in 1995. Not just unmaintained: it was never built in the first place. Every subsequent overlay of tar turns this dirty old track into an even deeper crater filled with rocks and plastic detritus. Each morning, as I drive station-wards, I am compelled to make obeisance here with a loud, teeth-rattling thump. Departmental no man’s land between the Central Railway and CIDCO, to me this patch represents Panvel itself. 

   We found a home in New Panvel in the early ’90s. It was planned by CIDCO, circa 1970, as part of the New Bombay Project. Across the highway is “old” Panvel (of the same vintage as the Big City across the pond). New Panvel – or Naveen Panvel, as it’s now known – falls between several jurisdictional cracks. Part of revenue district Raigad (but not the Raigad Lok Sabha constituency), not under the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation nor administered by the Panvel Municipal Council, yet, apparently maintained by CIDCO, our little hub of urbanity is paternally challenged It’s at one end of the Harbour Line. Although Panvel is a terminus for the suburban line, through trains connect it pan-India, from Hazrat Nizamuddin to Thiruvananthapuram. Old and Naveen coexist, like Siamese twins, both conjoint and severed by the railway and the NH4.

   New Panvel was a one-horse town when we first bought our home, and remained so until the millennium. I can get nostalgic about leisurely drives down its wide, main avenue perpendicular to the highway, through the town and beyond into pristine wilderness, into the spectacular hillscape at the foothills of Matheran. Every monsoon, we chased the elusive 180 degree rainbow. We got lucky, once. Then, we would return to this well-planned place that, for 30 years, merely existed; a place for investors and absentee landlords, a few service shops and several jewellers’ boutiques that fronted for moneylenders. New educational complexes grew and prospered because land was available, as was easy residential accommodation. “Then came the churches, then came the schools, then came the lawyers, then came the rules; then came the trains and the trucks with their load,” exactly as Dire Straits predicted in their song “Telegraph Road”. New Bombay developed, but this node awoke only after the Harbour Line reached Panvel in 1995. 

  
In the ’90s and noughties, as we paid up EMIs at 16.5 per cent, Panvel surfed the crests and troughs of real estate vagary and emerged, unlike sisters Vashi and Kharghar, resolutely downmarket. Migration fuelled economy; incoming communities marked their presence with new religious places – a temple to Kali, another to Ayappa, a new mosque, the unusually named CIDCO Vinayak mandir.  Forty years on, the wrinkles are visible, what with the administrative ambiguity the city finds itself in. Now, various levels of neglect can mean that load-shedding hits us as if Panvel is a rural backwater; local rickshawallahs scorn metering (for every fuel price hike of one rupee, their base-fare rises by five); garbage collection is sluggish; bins are usually taken apart by stray dogs, who rule the night and run in packs of 20.

   The other Panvel, to my right as I get off the train, is, not unlike Mumbai, an old town in a new world. Historically both a port and a trading town, Panvel was once the rice bowl of the north Konkan, with its famous Bazaar Peth, Mirchi and Kapad Gallis. Panvel Gaon dates back to 1725, when the Bapat Wada was built. It was elevated in the 1800s, when migrants from the Konkan were populating Bombay and Panvel Shahar became an alternate place to make a home. When you talk to old-timers, they tell you that a newcomer could always find home in the Bapat Wada and occupation in Dhootpapeshwar, the ayurvedic factory. While the factory is gone, the wada still shelters several hundred residents.

   Then as now, festivals at the many temples, mosques, dargahs, even a synagogue bring the faithful thronging to Panvel. The oldest temple, the Ballaleshwar, is from the eighteenth century; the Beth-El Synagogue was consecrated in 1849. When I visit these places today, I am struck by their similarity. On the outside, every place of worship looks like every other, and only reveals the trappings of faith when I enter. This old town was once a paragon of middle-class cosmopolitanism. Its various communities – Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Jains – shared a Konkani culture, food, clothing and Marathi as lingua franca. 

   In the past 20 years or so, I have seen attitudes stiffen: today, gentrification pervades, the old bonhomie is breaking down. More and more overt displays of religion and community foreground civic life – flags and flex-banners pervade. I am uneasy when I encounter makeshift notice-boards, not-so-subtly exhorting good religious behaviour. Money also fuels change. Many (thankfully, not all) of these places of worship are now “renovated”, with RCC shikharas and minarets sprouting incongruously. Many wadas too have given way to MHHSes, or Middle Class Housing Societies. Now, tall buildings crowd narrow alleyways bottlenecked with newly acquired cars. No country for old men.

  But I wallow in my good fortune, for, out of my window I can see, beyond the whooshing SUVs on the expressway, Panvel’s glorious peaks – Malang, Vishal, Prabal, Matheran and Karnala. Each with signature crowns, they transport me to the geological beginnings of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. This entire geography was the result of great and sustained volcanic eruptions 65 million years ago that cooled to form the Deccan, the Konkan and the isles that were Bombay (eliminating all the dinosaurs in the process). This craggy beauty bookends Navi Mumbai to the east and signals the end of the Harbour Line. 

   Meanwhile, Panvel waits; patient, like the stone sentinels that shadow it, patient like Mother Konkan, who waited decades for the railways to link her to the ghats. Panvel now waits (as I do) for a new airport, a new SEZ, a fast train to Mumbai or even a three-foot patch of road to energise its fortunes – and mine. Until that happens, I have to be content with “Asia’s largest railway station” (all steel mushroom decking and faux Egyptian columns), still in the making. 

Which historical wrong gives you the right?

One bone of contention that bedevils any talks on climate, such as those currently on at Copenhagen is that the ‘developed countries’ must bear the brunt of responsibility for climate change. This is through fundamental restructuring of production and enterprise, everyday living and general progress in these nations, the ones who are well off. The developed countries of the world, Old Europe and New America have reaped the benefits of industrialization for the past two hundred years, most of it through the over-generous use of the finite resources of the planet. In doing so they have polluted the atmosphere, not only locally but globally, raising temperatures, and have brought the natural resources of our planet to the edge of depletion. All this is substantially true, but to make a whipping boy of industrialized countries by positioning themselves as victims, the ‘developing countries’ make poor, untenable arguments. These countries and indeed those of the ‘underdeveloped world’ want to have it both ways- make the big boys pay for the sins of the past and continue their own present substantially polluting ways because they ‘need to develop’ to come on par with the rest/best.

I think it is this misguided sense of victimhood, this subaltern posing that will bring useful action on climate change to an inevitable halt. The sense of historical wrong that the Other World is ballyhooing has a whiff of hypocrisy about it. For which are the historical wrongs that give those present a right to redress? That the sins of the fathers committed in the name of development are the sins of the sons and need immediately to be countered, whereas the sins of the fathers committed in the name of racism, religious intolerance and ethnic fundamentalism should be let go in the name of reconciliation and the need to ‘move beyond’? Can one assert that one wrong is tenable while the other is not? Take your pick. Every historical wrong, from the Jews being dispossessed by the Romans to the depredations caused by every former coloniser on every former colony, from the temple breakers of the early 1100s India to those crusaders who sacked Constantinople rather than continue their own religious jihad on Jerusalem can be called upon once again and through their descendants be made to pay for the wrongs of the past. Why then should the descendants of those who created, nurtured and ultimately prospered because of the Industrial Revolution now have to pick up the tab? Even more so, it is a wilful under-appreciation of the fact that industrial progress has, whether those crying wolf like it or not, raised the standard of living of peoples everywhere, which in turn has allowed even the erstwhile dispossessed to reclaim their rights and dignity, right up to the point where they can make these one-sided claims.

It is time primarily to put one’s own house in order. In terms of the environment, the price to pay will be high. The changes to shift to a more sustainable way of being are paradigmatic in most cases and painful for those accustomed to the comforts of a lifestyle fuelled by using natural resources and pollution as most of the developing countries, China, India, Brazil and those of the Middle and Far East already are. They strip-mine, dump sewage into fresh-water, mass produce vehicles of mass pollution and pat themselves for their progressive ways. Such countries have no business posing as victims so that they can continue their exploitative ways ‘for some more time’ so that they can come up on economic par with the First World. In the case of a ticking bomb scenario, as climate change very much is, each country should put their nose to the grindstone and find their own ways and means to convert to more sustainable ways of living. Laying down conditions, buying time, and creating ‘first you, then us’ arguments will only make things worse, and things such are they are, bring in no cheer at all.

To that extent the Government of India should be lauded for making targets for emission cuts by themselves, without waiting for agreements on climate such as those being attempted at Copenhagen. This is by no means enough, but should show the rest of the world that unilateral attempts to alleviate the ill effects of climate change should be the precursor to coming together at the negotiating table. All strategists are aware of the management game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. When this game is played iteratively, the best way forward is ‘Do Good First’. The phenomenon of conditional reciprocity that all the developing and undeveloped countries are waiting for shows them up in a poor light. No matter how under-resourced you are, you can change and you should. Remember if you have nothing, or not much at all, you are not contributing overmuch to the problem. That does not give you the right to become an exploiter,  just because your neighbours or former rulers have been.

Strategy begins at home.