Maximum City - excerpts

I'm reading 'Maximum City; Bombay lost and found' by Suketu Mehta. It's about time too; my cousin Anand, an ardent Bombayiite, had recommended the book to me two years ago. 'Amazing', he'd described it. Bombay was where I was born, and how little I know of its amazing story!
I'm not going to review the book yet, as I'm still reading it. However, I couldn't resist quoting some excerpts from the book here:

On villages and cities:

"Fifty years ago, if you wanted to see where the action was in India, you went to the villages. They contributed 71% of the net domestic product in 1950. Today, you go to the cities, which now account for 60% of the net domestic product. Bombay alone pays 38% of the nation's taxes. What makes Bombay overpopulated is the impoverishment of the countryside, so that a young man with dreams in his head will take the first train to Bombay to live on the footpath. If you fix the problems of the villages, you fix, as a happy side-effect, the problems of the cities."

On the city now:

"Visitors come and I have to strain to explain to them that it was not always thus. Bombay used to be a beautiful city, a breathable city. Breathing the air in Bombay now is the equivalent of smoking 2.5 packets of cigarettes a day. The city of Bombay is divided between the AC and the non-AC parts. My nose can't handle the radical difference in the worlds of Bombay. I am continuously sneezing. I am advised to buy an AC car. We have no choice but to live rich, if we are to live at all."

"The wars of the 21st century will be fought over parking places. "

"The more roads you build, the greater the number of new cars that will rush in to use those roads and then they're jammed again."

"Once Bombay was composed of seven hilly islands, which were leveled, and the soil dumped into the sea, to make one big island."

On the 1992-93 riots:

"Most of Jogeshwari, the Hindu and especially the Muslim area, is a slum. On 8 January 1993, a Hindu family of mill workers was sleeping in a room in Radhabai Chawl, in the middle of the Muslim part of the slum. Someone locked their door from the outside; someone else threw a petrol bomb in through the window. The family of six died screaming, clawing at the door to get out. One of them was a handicapped teenage girl. The flames spread from their house to set all of Bombay on fire."

"The riots affected a lot of thinking, educated people. Very educated, very literate people became very anti-Muslim."

"The Muslims of Bombay are the most diverse group of the followers of Mohammed in the country. It's not just the division between Shia and Sunni; there are Dawoodi Bohras, Ismailis, Deobandis, Barelvis, Memons, Moplahs, Ahmaddiyas, and so on. The Hindutva parties spread fear of the Muslim horde, as if it were a monolith. The truth is that many of the groups often hate each other more passionately than they do the Hindus. But the riots united them too. The Dawoodi Bohras of Malabar Hill discovered what they had in common with the Bihari Sunnis in the Madanpura slums; a very public questioning of their claim to be citizens of India. They discovered their biggest crime was that they were Muslims.
An entire segment of the population has been made to feel like foreigners in the city in which they were born and raised."

"...this kind of communal rioting was unknown in the villages of India. In the villages, people were secure in their faith; they had no need to convince themselves of their devotion by massacring infidels. As one of the hot-headed young men in Radhabai chawl had explained, 'In the village, if there are two Muslims families and there is a Patel, the Patel will take care of the Muslims. In the city, the politicians and the police harass Muslims."

On religion:

"In 1997, an untouchable, K R Narayanan, became president. Brahmin ministers scrambled to touch his feet and ask for his blessings."

"In the Bombay I grew up in, being Muslim or Hindu or Catholic was merely a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle.
Now being Hindu, Muslim or Christian mattered. Because it mattered to Bal Thackeray."

"...How did I have this hatred in me? And I realized I had been taught it since childhood. Maybe it was Partition , maybe it was their food habits-Muslims kill animals-but our parents taught us we couldn't trust them. The events of Partition washed away the teachings of Gandhiji. My grandfather and his brother were staunch Gandhians except when it came to Muslims. I could never bring a Muslim friend to my home and I couldn't go to theirs."

On renaming the city:

"The government can't make the physical city a better place, but they can call it by a different name. The city is in the grip of mass renaming frenzy.

Many of the neighbourhoods of Bombay are named after the trees and groves that flourished there...Cumballa Hill, Babulnath, Bhendi Bazaar, Tamarind Lane, Tardeo, Worli, Chinchpokli... The trees no longer exist, but their names still remain, pleasantly evocative until you realize what has been lost. A name is such that if you grow up with it you get attached to it, whatever its origins. I grew up on Nepean Sea Road, which is now Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas Marg. I have no idea who Sir Ernest Nepean was nor do I know who Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas was, but I am attached to the original name and see no reason why it should change.
Name-changing is in vogue in all of India nowadays; Madras has been renamed Chennai, Calcutta, that British-made city, changed its name to Kolkata. A BJP MP has demanded that India's name be changed to Bharat. This is a process not just of decolonization but de-Islamization. The idea is to go back not just to a past but to an idealized past, in all cases a Hindu past. But to change a name, for a person or a road or a city, there had better be a good reason. And there was no good reason to change the name of Bombay. It is nonsense to say that Mumbai was the original name. Bombay was created by the Portugese and the British from a cluster of malarial islands, and to them should go the baptismal rights. The Gujaratis and Maharashtrians always called it Mumbai, when speaking Gujarati or Marathi, and Bombay when speaking English.There was no need to choose."

On the Taj:

"The Taj was born out of a slight; because a man was turned away from a fancy hotel. When the prominent Parsi industrialist Jamshedji Tata was refused entrance into Watson's hotel in the 19th century because he was a native, he swore revenge and built the massive Taj in 1903, which outshone Watson's in every department. It is less a hotel than a proving ground for the ego. The Taj lobby and it's adjoining toilets are where you test your self worth; theoretically, anyone can come in out of the heat and sit in the plush lobby, on the ornate sofas, amid the billionaire Arabs and the society ladies, or relive themselves in the gleaming toilets. But you need that inner confidence to project to the numerous gatekeepers, the toilet attendants; you need first to convince yourself that you belong there, in order to convince others that you do. And then you realize that the most forbidding gatekeeper is within you."

On youth of India and voting:

"...His number and name are checked off a list, an official tears a ballot paper against a steel slide rule, and his finger is inked. He takes the seal and goes behind a chest-high cardboard barrier, marks his ballot with the seal, folds it, and finally deposits it in the slot. The city is full of people for whom it isn't this simple, people who come to the booth and look up their name and address only to find a small red mark on the list; someone has already voted in their name. Someone has stolen their right to make the only meaningful choice available in a democracy. At that point, it doesn't matter if you can prove to be who you are. You arrived second."

"75% of the country is below the age of 25. Sunil is representative of this group-a generation that expects something better than their parents had. If they won't get it, they will be angry. And no family, no country can withstand the anger of its young.
It is an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For 18 years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won't buy her new sari, and your sister will stay home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the ago of 18, you have your worshipful family's expectations behind you. You dare not turn around. You know what is expected of you; you have been witness to all the petty humiliations they have suffered to get you to this place. You now need to deliver. Your sister is getting married, your mother is sick, and your father will retire next year. It's up to you; you carry a heavy burden of guilt from your childhood for having heedlessly taken the best of everything. So when you go out with your matriculation certificate or your BA and find there are no jobs-the big companies have stopped hiring or are leaving the city altogether, and the small companies will hire only relatives of people already working there, and your family is from Raigad or Bihar and has no influence here-you will look for other ways of making money.
You will look for other ways of assuring your family that their investment wasn't lost. You can take beatings, you can take rejection, but you can't face your family if you don't do your duty as the son. Go out in the morning, and come back at night, or go out at night and come back in the daytime if you have to, but take care of the family. You owe it to them; it is your dharma."

On true progress:

"Long before the millennium, Indians such as the late PM Rajiv Gandhi were talking about taking the country into the 21st century, as if the 20th century could be just leapfrogged. India desires modernity; it desires computers, information technology, neural networks, video on demand. But there is no guarantee of a constant supply of electricity in most places in the country. In this, as in every other area, the country is convinced it can pole vault over the basics: develop world-class computer and management institutes without achieving basic literacy; provide advanced cardiac surgery and diagnostic imaging facilities while the most easily avoidable childhood diseases run rampant; sell washing machines that depend on a non-existent water supply from shops that are dark most hours of the day because of power cuts; support a dozen private and public companies offering mobile phone services, while the basic land telephone network is in terrible shape; drive scores of new cars that go from 0 to 60 in 10 seconds without any roads where they might do this without killing everything inside and out, man and beast.
It is an optimistic view of technological progress-that if you reach for the moon, you will somehow, automatically, span the inconvenient steps in between. India has the 3rd largest pool of technical labour in the world, but a 3rd of it's one billion people can't read or write. An Indian scientist can design a supercomputer, but it won't work because the junior technician cannot maintain it properly. The country produces some of the best technical brains in the world but neglects to teach my plumber how to fix a toilet so it stays fixed. It is still a Brahmin oriented system of education; those who work with their hands have to learn for themselves. Education has to do with reading a writing, with abstraction, with higher thought."

"Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books."