Yeh hai Mumbai meri Jaan !!

Yeh hai Mumbai Meri Jaan !

It has been my habit since childhood to stay out of a window, watching Mumbai and its many moods. The windows changes all the time --- it could be out of the window of a car, a train, a bus, the plate glass window of a hotel, or the window of my bedroom overlooking the sea. Everything changes --- the scene in front of me, the passage through which I am looking, and the frame that holds the scene being observed. The only constant is that Mumbai never fails to move and interest me. It offers up scenes that only master filmmakers like Fellini or Ray could direct. It leads me to stories that could only Dickens could write. Its poignancy and vibrancy is what Picasso once painted.

I stare out at these scenes --- crowded market places, endless water, glorious sunsets, beautiful garbage piles --- and see not only what is front of me, but the little asides in the margins; the forgotten people, the lost children, the unclaimed lives.

In every locality of this city I see the people who we overlook --- the people who have merged in to the environment, who are of no consequence, and who have become our blind spot. The cobbler bent over his shoes, the florist arranging flowers for the rich and happy and the urchin begging at the streetlights. Incidental people with incidential lives that hardly impinge on our own. The men & women who stop and stare but never dare to crawl out of the shadows we have related them to.

Why do these people fasinate me so much? When I first heard Eleanor Rigby and the chorus "All those lonely people where do they all come from?" I thought I was hearing in alegy for Mumbai. Don Maclean's Starry Starry Night and it's "those faceless men in nameless crowds" seemed to be sung to Mumbai's masses, and the anthem streets of London, according to me could have been written for Mumbai's gray and winding roads.

What makes me such a voyeur, and why I am so fascinated by other people and other lives? As a child, residing near a building construction site gave me hours of uninterrupted pleasure as I observed workers and their families living such rich & textured live in such proximity, and in the open.

As a college student my journey each day would take me by train to Churchgate, past the hovels of Tulsi pipe road and through the heart of Mumbai's poverty. Here I would each morning and evening be privacy to the lives of Mumbai's slum dwellers as if they were unfolding like the pages of a book in front of me.

And later, as a passenger in a car, all of Mumbai's sweep of richness -- it's many hued multi-layered and dense uniqueness was exposed to me, giving me hours of silent observation and pleasure.

Mumbai never fails to fascinate me. Its diversity, its contradictions, and its ever changing vistas. Its high life and low-streets. Its crowds and its solitary people. They say if one tires of London, one is tired of life. But I feel if one wearies of Mumbai -- and finds nothing in it to revive and refresh the spirit -- than one is tired of existence itself and one might as well move to another planet.

-- By Kapil Goenka