Bombay Dreams & Mumbai Screams – Finale of the trilogy

The city of contrasts

Till I went to stay in Mumbai, my definition of the word ‘contrast’ was limited to fashion where if a blue trouser and light blue shirt were a ‘match’, a sea green trouser and a navy blue shirt was a ‘contrast’. But welcome to Mumbai where contrast is omnipresent. A row of sky-rocketing glittery ‘over-branded’ buildings on one side of the street and a stretch of rickety dilapidated huts on the other. One man in a 15 square feet cabin in an office on one side and 15 men residing in a single square feet of garbage area on the other. A Jacuzzi bathroom on one side and no place to bathe indoors on the other. That’s contrast for you.

One may call it a cosmopolitan culture, but Mumbai also has this extreme contrast in culture and lifestyles. There’s this vendor on one side in one of the suburbs for whom Mumbai is as local and regional as the area where he lives and trades and there’s this global new generation of ‘cool’ Mumbaikars who think that swaying to rock music has brought them in the global league and hence even a hindi gaali (slang) needs to be pronounced with an angrezi accent.

After all, it’s not the cultures you ape that will define your lifestyle; but the deeds you demonstrate that will build the culture of your generation.

Coming back to my personal story, I was also experiencing a contrast. A contrast of writing but not writing creatively… a contrast of editing but not editing something that originated from my mind… a contrast of being too much practical but not imaginative which actually makes the true me. In simple terms, a contrast of being a copy editor in a newspaper and not being a creative writer and conceptualiser. Hence, after some re-think, I decided to quit DNA and join a not-so-big brand but a local agency that allowed me to pursuit creative excellence. And I was back to Ahmedabad.

Today, there’s this love and hate relationship that I share with Mumbai. I hate the crowd there, but I love the people that make that crowd. I detest the commotion there, but admire the commotion of opportunities that the city offers. I abhor the artificialness of the city, but I’m in love with the prospects it gives me in being original.

However, knowing mistakes but still committing them is something that our species is blessed (or should I say cursed) with. Why? Don’t we still cut trees, pollute and happily f**k with nature even though we know it is our ass that’s going to suffer in the end! Don’t we go on with our nuclear weapons developments knowing that it will take less than a day to turn the world into a junkyard if WW III erupts! And by choice or not, I fall into the category of humans… So, be it today, tomorrow or the day after, I know I’ll have to land back into the place where dreams and screams are twin brothers that never get lost in Kumbh mela but always stay together – you guessed it right, MUMBAI (I still love to call it Bombay though).

(The trilogy ends here)

Bombay Dreams & Mumbai Screams - Part II

Mumbaikars in the making

“Come to Bombay, you ass! How much more time will you waste away from here?” This is what my gang of langotia yaars always kept telling me. And now when I had finally reached there, this is what happened: My day 1 at room no. 1-420 got me into a police van! After a little bit of booze and disco, we were dancing with loud music on at 3 in the night at my friend’s place. His neighbours raised an alarm to the police and we were ‘arrested’ and escorted to the police station for ‘hooliganism at night’ or whatever the charge was called (we never dared to ask the policeman). Thanks to the fact that most of us are in the media and are accustomed to PR activities, we used all our maska-polish skills to get away by bribing the cops. (for more details, go to the I-420 blog :)

After that, due to hectic schedules and hopeless travelling problems, I hardly met my gang twice or thrice more in two months. On a Sunday, I decided to visit my friend Kedar who stayed at Thane. Considering that it was a holiday, I thought the traffic in local train would be less lethal. So, here I was with a walkman hung on my waist and waiting for a train that headed to Thane. But little did I know that in Bombay, local trains are even more crowded on holidays, because if it was the man of the house who traveled on weekdays to work, it was the entire family that traveled on Sunday for enjoying a holiday! Finally, my fourth attempt to enter train was successful and I spent the most perspiring 30 minutes of my life trying my best to save my walky from getting sandwiched between sweaty bums!

Most of the time was spent in the office. I had both lunch and dinner at the office canteen. Work was good. Real good! There was a hell lot of difference in the way work happened at Ahmedabad and the way it did in Bombay. The bosses there were exceptionally good with their work. I was the youngest in the team and there was a lot to learn. But there was one problem. We were here till the paper got launched in Ahmedabad and this launch was getting more and more uncertain. So what happened was that both of us were left in the middle of nowhere – we weren’t employees of DNA Mumbai and though we were employees of DNA Money Ahmedabad, the paper’s launch was uncertain. We couldn’t get back home and nor could we start settling there. Both of us were extremely tensed. And when one from a dry state is under tension in a wet land, there is just one recourse - BEER! Yes, beer, every night. It is obvious, especially when your room partner is an expert boozer. The day Mitul got his story published in the newspaper, he’ll say ‘let’s drink to celebrate’. And the day he could find no story, he said ‘let’s drink to relieve mental pain’. Heads or tails, both pointed at the bottle.

(to be continued…)