RIP: Mumbai, meri jaan


Mumbai, my Mumbai. What has come of the by lanes once I tread upon! The gateways that gave me the confidence in a world of cut-throat competition are stuffed with RDX and gelatine. The trains that gave me new companionships in the form of the kids that exchanged chitrahaars and the chitramalas on the Ektara for a penny or two are now missing. My Mumbai is dead and gone.

Lovely Victoria Terminus, which once upon a time provided me with the best avenues for the babe-watch of the lustful kind and the vada pav-Pepsi dinners, sports a nightmarish garb. Faces that once used to sport a smile for even the stranger are now veiled in gloom after nasty gun men rushed in with the firing machines. Mumbai, I weep blood at your fall!

Wednesday nights will never be different. Blood soaked and wounded, my Mumbai writhes in pain. Is this the price a metropolis would have to give for having gained the strength to go global? Is this what means to be the financial capital of a secular sovereign republic? I don’t want my Mumbai to be one.

My maximum city is under maximum stress all of a sudden. The children with the ektaras and the deft fingers, the extremely desirable bar girls of the night, the vada pav sellers, the lonely cops protecting the local trains, the scribes and telly reporters that infested all crowded spots and elsewhere, the local country liquor shops, the heaving cleavages and the micro minis that go up the elevators in various malls, the queens necklace and its admirers – Mumbai will never be the same for them anymore.

Terror attacks just happen, they never come announced. But then, what has been our intelligence infrastructure doing all the while. Terror came floating to my Mumbai’s shores, and Patil saab was found napping. He still is! Wtf!

Television images churn out live images of smoke billowing from the Taj and the Trident even as I sit mourning my beloved metro. Ambulances and the battle ready cops fill up the screen. Foreign nationals who came looking for a safe haven in this metro see life turning into a bullet ridden dream. My Mumbai, why do you make me weep so bad?

Tailpiece: Listening to the CNN-IBN reporter, who is wasting no time ridiculing the poor constables around the Taj and the Trident for their body language is, to me, nauseating. Doesn’t this reporter have a more important assignment in the gun shots heard inside. Let the cops do their work, please don’t poke your stinking mike between his life and work, for heavens sake!

Comments

Unknown said…
good one..Mumbai meri jaan reminds of old Hindi song..
12:58 AM
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