Posted on: September 2006

When I was a small boy staying in my school boarding, I did hear a song, sung by the Anglo-Indian students:

Bumb, Bumb, Bumb, Bumb, Bumbay merry hai!

Ladies are nice, Gents are full of spice.

So come to Bombay, Come to Bombay,

Bombay merry hai!!

Come from England,

Come from Scotland,

Come from anywhere

I do not know the full lines, nor do I know whether the lines I remember are correct.

Maybe it was a song sung by the English crowd when they were living in Bombay. (Note 2021: The statement is clearly wrong.) Those times, people used to say that to improve one’s personality one should go to Bombay. People went to Bombay, sharpened their English skills, and came back entirely redesigned.

The roads were good, and the townships were nice. (It was the same in Madras and many other places in India).

Then this fact became known. There was a mass scramble to reach Bombay (and other nice towns and cities in India, including Delhi).

Now Bombay is a real mess, a suburb urban nightmare. It is generally believed that people crowd into Bombay to find their fortune. It is not true. It is true that there is money in Bombay. For, most corporate sector headquarters are in Bombay. The money from most sales all round India gather in Bombay. Yet, there is no real prosperity for most residence of Bombay. There is no place to relax, there is no space to expand, and there is no place to stand, none to sit (for the 99% majority).

There is much space in other places in India, where one can literally expand. Yet, the experiences are not like this. People really rush to Bombay, to escape the entanglements of the feudal social strings in other places. Even though there are places to expand in other places, in reality, one cannot expand, for the language system ties one to extremely immobile social positions, be it of superiority or inferiority.

Bombay is like a social black hole. Here people are forced to exist at unbelievable physical proximity, the kind of which one cannot imagine in most other places in India. In this black hole, all rules, and decorum of social living as designed in the Indian languages, gets deleted, twisted, redesigned or even become reverse. In this scenario, what one feels is not really a discomfort or distress, but the exact opposite. A feeling of nirvana or salvation!

It is a feeling of deliverance. Whereas one’s personality has to be severely twisted to the requirements of the social positioning of so many others in society in other places, in Bombay one can archive an aura of mental liberation.

Yet, it is not a real mental liberation. Only one that one gets as one escapes a most eerie nightmare. Actually one has only escaped one nightmare to enter another. But the sheer relief it lends, gives the feeling that one has reached the daylights, or that one is living in daylight. It is only a hallucination. For most people it is like taking hallucinating drugs to escape crude living experiences.

I have explained what drives persons to escape from places with pure air, green trees, the flowing rivers and large spaces, where one can literally live happy lives with family and friends.

When Bombay was an English speaking city, it had its cosiness. Now, there is no English in the common crowd. It is Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and a lot of other hullabaloo. Most don t want to return, to their hometowns, where again they would be stuck in immovable positioning. It is like being in a overcrowded boat, which seems eternally on the verge of sinking. There is the same boisterousness, as well as the frenzy. In the haste to escape being pushed into the swirling waters outside, one may, with desperate equanimity, push another person into the depths.

The spell is that of living right in the middle of a never ending carnival. Yet, it is nightmare! But no one would admit to it. They have not experienced any other living. And one knows the entanglements of social living elsewhere in India.

Yet, what has happened to Bombay? There are no trees; it is a desert, crowed with hideous concrete towering everywhere. The eyes crave for the sight of greenery. Yet, the common resident doesn’t t miss it; for he or she has not ever experienced it. Nor seen a green hill, or a blue mountain; or mist filled valley. A minor glimpse of these is treated as sparkling example of fascinating holidaying.

Now, the same would happen to all good cities all over the world. It is happening in

Bangalore. Yet, it would take time to see through the sparkle. For the BPO industry has brought in riches here, which can easily out sparkle any other negative themes.

The same danger looms on the horizon for the English nations. It is only a matter of time. Unless drastic measures are thought of. Actually the spineless characters from all the vile nations are desperate to land in English nations. What has to be done is to tell them that if they like to live in an English society, create one in their own nations. And not to bring the vile programs of their own nations into the English nations.

It is not a matter of race or colour. But the sad fact is that the theme that I am putting forward is easily mistaken for issues of colour and race.

Continued

19 October 2007

There were heavy rains in Bombay some months back. The city was flooded with water stagnating and spreading terror. I think it was the second time in two years.

One of my acquaintances living in Colaba area said that his place had no problem. For, the place was designed by the British during their rule. The other places where newer townships had sprung up were flooded. There were grand designs in the town structures for water movement. But each stood in isolation to the others, so that water literally moved in vicious circles. The problem was not in the designs or in the intelligence, but in the communication gap between different builders, and also between different levels of township planning bureaucracies.

So much about an old Indian city.

Then came the rains in England. England stood flooded, with TV channels gleefully showing the water standing stubbornly. What had happened to English planner’s phenomenal farsightedness? It is true the scene was essentially different from Bombay. Yet....