City Adrift

Writes Mumbai Boss/

We’d like to think that it’s only recently that Mumbaikars have expressed their unhappiness with their city so volubly and relentlessly. But Mumbai’s decline, its long time critics will know is not a recent phenomenon (“The housing famine is acute” huffed one citizen about Bandra in 1927). We’ve been on that trajectory for well over three centuries right from when the East India Company first leased the city from Charles II and saw in its swampy, malaria-ridden acres a strategically located port and trade route. It’s this path of decline, as warped as the course of the Mithi, that Naresh Fernandes charts in City Adrift: A Short Biography Of Bombay, a terrifically paced, terribly heartbreaking chronicle of the many times when the citizenry of Bombay very effectively screwed things up.

Fernandes’s tone is exasperated, angry even, that of a man whose love for the city has been ridden over roughshod just one too many times. He is obstinate too as when he stakes his right to call Bombay by its colonial name (until tellingly the very last line), because “the rechristening of the city is still remembered for what it is – a refutation of Bombay’s inclusive history”. If someone would like to come forth and defend Mumbai’s glories, then step forward please (unless you’re from the government), because as it stands, we have near none to claim anymore.

There is plenty to roil anyone living here – like when Navi Mumbai’s urban ambitions were thwarted in stupidity and shortsightedness to build Nariman Point; when crores were plugged into infrastructure projects like the Bandra Worli Sea Link that privilege a few. When mills are redeveloped in such higgledy piggledy nonchalance for the bottom line of profit, we are all but ensured a city of breathtaking claustrophobia. Today there are parks open to all situated, in a cruelly ironic twist, inside private mill compounds; few know they exist, fewer still ever see them. To wit: each of us living here has about 1.1 square metres of open space and that includes pavements and traffic islands.
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