The Hindu Business Line : Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan!

Mumbai is one Indian city where you can be yourself... where you will not be judged by your parentage, origin or address. Contrast this with Delhi or Chennai...

The incomparable Hungarian humorist George Mikes once said that England and he set foot on each other sometime in the mid 1950s. Such has been the stamp of influence that I can say with equal emphasis that it was 40 years ago that Bombay (as it still is to me) and I set foot on each other. I arrived at the crack of dawn by train from Madras and was received warmly by a thoughtful relative carrying a spare umbrella against the driving rain. I soon found that many things one had heard about this bustling city were true and not the hyperbole of an envious southerner. The first of these was that the awesome force of the rain could easily reverse the umbrella in your hands while you were still struggling to hold it upright. The Mumbai monsoon had to be seen to be believed because it had no parallel in most parts of the south, except Kerala. Rain fell silently most of the time without the sound and light effects of rain in our city. And it fell incessantly and in sheets, for days on end, from a grey smudge of sky unrelieved by a streak of sunlight.

Yet the city just went about its daily business sloshing around in gumboots and galoshes. Many commuters went prepared for a soaking, with a spare set of clothes in a plastic bag, to change into on arrival at the office usually in the far away southern tip of the city. There was little raving and ranting against the weather. The Mumbaikar just took water as it came — which, if you think about it, was the way he approached everything else in life too. Relationships, residences, jobs, money all had the same value or so it seemed to the innocent and wide-eyed 19-year-old that I was. Everything was good while it lasted and it was easy-come-easy go. "Bindas" is a typically evocative local expression that is only weakly translated as carefree. Yet, to my green and tender spirit, the city's chief characteristic was far from relaxed but a kind of sustained intensity that made you pace your life by the rhythm of the "Thane fast" and "Borivili fast" or 7:02 a.m. or whatever. Life for those living 30 km from work could be one continuous movement from Monday morning to late Friday evening interspersed by food and sleep — but one was defined by one's location and job. So you were known to the family as Chembur Krishnan (to distinguish you from namesakes in every suburban train stop). Otherwise, it was as Pfizer Sundaram if all your life you had spent in that company, in all probability rising from an accounts clerk to Chief Accountant over the decades.

All over the two parallel chains of suburbs surrounding the two great railroads that give the city its peculiar character, my relatives were housed in similar looking flats. And in the few days I had, before I went to report at IIM Ahmedabad, I tried to meet as many of them as I could. The language they spoke was strange to my ears at first until I realised that it was Tamil as she was spoken in the border district of Palghat sometime between the wars. It was rich in allusion to a rural past, quaint village customs and characters long faded into sepia tint in the memories of their Madras cousins. Like everyone else they too had made Mumbai theirs, carving out an island within another. To my equal amazement and surprise, I found a few years later this was true of all other communities, especially the Parsees. Between a Parsee family I knew on Marine Lines and a Maharashtrian or South Indian one in Matunga, there was seemingly almost nothing in common except an immigrant status, yet the city belonged just as much to all of them.

In those days certainly no one was made to feel unwelcome or a stranger for long. Indeed the lives of thousands are stories of coming to the city of Gold drawn by a dream and an encouraging cousin, uncle or friend from way back. They slept in makeshift beds in converted balconies that doubled up as the guest bedroom in a 700-sq-ft flat for months, before moving on to make nooks of their own, into which they in turn invited other cousins from the "native place" to partake of this new-found plenty.

As with all mass movements of population they grew apart from those that remained behind. The next generation born and raised in Mumbai went through a mutation like some transatlantic mammal becoming different over time from the European counterpart — and now belong more in the new home than any other place their families originally came from. It is a marvellous thing for a visitor to see the general camaraderie amongst college mates and colleagues in a Bombay setting, which cuts across class, caste and region. This to me is the greatest strength of the city, unlike the other three large metropolises, which have over time taken on the cultural hues of the hinterland far more. Delhi for example is more Punjabi or West-Uttar Pradesh in its feel than Mumbai will ever be as a Maharashtrian city. It is a pan-Indian city just as much as the Hindi spoken there and the film industry that it has spawned is indeed one of our country's unifying influences — despite all its flaws and foibles.

Looking back, the past 40 years seem to have been a period of receding yet still visible colonial influence as to how the white-collar person must behave. The language of formal transaction continues to be English, though somewhere along in the late 1980s the Indian baby-boomers broke free of the mould. This is very much evident when you meet managers and professionals in a large assembly. The Indian manager would appear to have found his/her voice. And the voice speaks a strange language indeed both in vocabulary and syntax. Today, if you see the words "Do" or "Teen" on an ostensibly English language hoarding in Bombay, what would you read them as? English words denoting a verb of action and a certain age group — or Hindi words representing the numerals two and three? It entirely depends on the context and, to an extent, your own background. If you were educated in Tamil Nadu or abroad and did not encounter much Hindi in your school days then you are likely to be a little surprised by the strange string of words that followed but otherwise you would not even notice the transition from the Devanagari script to the Roman. One other thing you would notice as you drive through the streets of Mumbai is that almost all the posters and huge hoardings advertising Bollywood's latest Hindi movies are all mainly in English!

"Bombay speaks only one language — money" so went the friendly tip from a relative. I wondered if it was said with a trace of bitterness. The fact remains that it is the destination of choice for the young, the ambitious and the talented Indian in almost every walk of life. As a young man I too found this a heady atmosphere, especially as one developed a network of friends involved in media, advertising and theatre — whose lifestyle was nothing if not cosmopolitan.

"You can be yourself here" a classmate very dear to me once told me "no one will ever ask you who or what your father was — nor ever try to judge you by your origins or address". I still think the assessment is very right, especially where you contrast it with Delhi or Chennai where name-dropping and connections matter such a great deal still. It is therefore a bit ironic that some stereotypes glorified in ancient film songs see it as soulless: "Kahin building, Kahin tramein, Kahin Motor, Kahin Mill, Milta hai yehan sab kucch, par milta nahin dil". On the contrary a lot of people seem to discover that the city has offered them an opportunity to break out of provincial moulds and find their métier (as well as a mate) of their own choice. The very distance from the hometown seems to have a uniquely liberating influence. Call it a drug-induced high or living on adrenaline, several million Indians wouldn't have it any other way. And they would join Mohammed Rafi in the refrain of the same 1950s' number, Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan!

Picture by Paul Noronha

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