Three concepts describe why Mumbai looks shabby and unkempt despite endless attempts to make it world-class and liveable. Master them and the city is yours
An aerial view of a slum in Santosh Nagar, Dahisar East. File Pic/Nimesh Dave
As a part of the research for Bombai, the book I am writing about this city, I closely examine congestion, decay, chaos and enterprise. Mumbai abounds in those but at their heart is a single question. Why has Mumbai always been in a state of preparation or reparation for two centuries?
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Roads are forever dug up and being remade or repaired.
Everything is eternally under construction.
Nothing stays pristine for long; deterioration is the norm (with the inexplicable exception of the Metro railway, as spotless as a foreign land).
Ramshackle is the word that best describes the majority of the city’s pavements, structures, public vehicles, utilities and general environment.
Three concepts describe why Mumbai looks shabby and unkempt despite endless attempts by the world’s richest municipal corporation to make it world-class
and liveable.
They are Edge, Gap and Squeeze. These three words are Swiss Army knives when trying to understand this city.
The most consequential edge in Mumbai is the one where sea and land meet. From back when it was a motley clutch of islands and sandbanks, pushing the sea’s edge farther was how the city has grown. That requires soil, which came from the hills of the area. As they shrank in size to fill the creeks, Mumbai expanded.
Two centuries later, nothing has changed. The Coastal Road and other earthworks in progress continue to push the sea’s edge away even farther. The city is always under construction because its edges are forever growing.
Look at the newly paved roads, classy and tiled like European walking streets, with interlocking peanut-shaped paver blocks. There too, decay starts at the edges where the curving tiles meet the straight pavements, creating gaps loosely filled as an afterthought. The tiles begin coming loose here, leaving a pixelated roadscape whose components disintegrate and fly away.
No gap is left unfilled, no edge unexploited. From the plane, flying in, you see the gritty edges where sprawling slums under blue tarps meet the walled compounds of upper-crust high-rises with names straight out of royal Britain like Greenfields, and Belvedere. Within these ivory dwellings, you will again see decay at the edges of flooring tiles chipped and cracked, with awkward gaps. Nothing is immaculate, in the buildings or outside them in public areas.
The gap is also an opportunity. A young man will come from Roorkee, with tapes of his brilliant music, Rs 10,000 in his pocket and dreams of being rich and famous. After scavenging like a rodent for some years, he hears of—a gap. A famous movie director is looking for someone to replace a key grip who left suddenly. Our young man begs and pleads and fills that gap.
Once you find a gap in Mumbai, you can gain a foothold and begin climbing. Our young man befriended other gap refugees, and was soon in more films. Eventually, he became the Music Director of a smash hit called Gully Boy. His name is Ankur Tewari, and his life is all about edges, gaps and squeezes.
If the gap was between two tin sheds in Dharavi, you could squeeze a bed and a tarp there and call it yours. In ten years, it’ll be yours and the neighbour’s shanty as well.
My research showed me only one place that has neither a gap nor an edge: a Mumbai suburban train at 5 pm.
It’s the magic hour of the day when passengers turn into cows and are moved about in herds by forces they barely understand. Going in or out is not a choice. You will be sucked in by a tide of frantic in-going cattle. Within, everyone will be squeezed into one damp mass, armpits in faces, shoes atop shoes, sweaty bodies crushed into immobility like gooseberries in a jam bottle.
You will be arbitrarily expelled at some station, yours or not, part of a toothpaste of passengers being squeezed out.
In peak-hour Mumbai today, a train rated to carry 2,000 somehow accommodates 4,500 passengers. In Transport Economics, this is called a Crush Load, normally measured using the number of standing passengers per square metre. Six is considered an acceptable practical limit.
Predictably, Crush Load doesn’t begin to capture Mumbai’s reality. A new term, the Super-Dense Crush Load, had to be coined. It describes 14 to 16 standing passengers per square metre of floor space.
You will not see any edges or gaps, just the world’s tightest squeeze.
AN APPEAL TO READERS
If you, your building society or other association has a WhatsApp group, please copy and paste the short appeal below. Useful responses will enrich the book I am writing about this great megalopolis.
I am C Y Gopinath, journalist and author, working on a major biography of Mumbai as it is today, to be called BOMBAI. The book will span history, geography, migrations, success stories, major events and milestones.
I am interested in hearing Mumbai community stories of extraordinary, unexpected compassion, collaboration and resilience. If you have any stories to share in these areas that I could investigate further, please do write to me at [email protected], including your name and mobile. If your story sounds interesting, I will certainly reach out to you.
You can reach C Y Gopinath at [email protected]
Send your feedback to [email protected]
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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