Mumbai's resilience - what a load of crap!

I think it’s high time someone called off this bullshit concept of Mumbai’s resilience and Mumbai’s spirit. Let’s be honest – we are not resilient, and we wouldn’t recognize our spirit if it came in any form other than a nice shiny bottle of Glenfiddich!

What we are is cynical, apathetic, and very selfish.

Why are we all back to work after the blasts? Because we’re not affected by what happened. Seriously, we’re not! Those folks you see on the news talk-shows, they’re just there for the TRPs. If they dislike the Government’s governance, the security forces’ security apparatus, and our overall intelligence failure – well here’s an easy enough solution for all of it – move to Goa. Yes, Goa has never had bomb blasts and getting stoned there is far easier than Mumbai, and the booze is cheaper! So why don’t we all just up and leave?

Because here’s where we make our money and live our lives, and because we don’t give a damn about pretty much anything else (except IPL and the movies). How does a city get to the stage where it doesn’t give a damn? How do we get so comfortably numb?

Of course, it’s thousands of years of culture seeping the ‘hota hai, chalta hai’ attitude right into our DNA. It is easier to accept horrors like these with the sort of apathy that lies deep within the cells of our bone marrow. And it’s not getting out of there any time soon either.

It’s also because it’s happened a few too many times. When the Mumbai riots happened in 1992, we were all scared shitless! Even my grandparents were horror-struck – and they’d been through 1947 and escaped by the skin of their teeth! Then the serial blasts happened in1993 and it left us all stunned speechless. Then it happened again in 2003 (I’m sure no one even remembers these ones), then the train bombings of 2006, and of course 26/11. After every event, there are the discussions, the politicians expressing condolences (like who gives a fuck!), the talk-show hosts, the industrialists talking about increasing our intelligence apparatus, and the police who promise to look at all angles and give us some concrete news very soon. It’s like a script that Franz Kafka and Stephen King co-wrote during one drunken night! Scarily tragic, yet amazingly surreal in its intensity and regularity.

Even the front-page gore on the Times of India doesn’t really make us flinch anymore. We just take a few more sips of the morning tea and find it mildly amusing that alongside the mauled remains and the blood-splattered streets, we also get to know what our expert numerologist Sanjay Jumani thinks about the date of the event (if this isn’t Kafkaesque, then what is!?)

So we shrug our shoulders, look at the body-count and say, oh more people than this die of malaria, slum landslides, and construction site accidents every monsoon in this city. And by the way, none of those get paid Rs. 5 lakhs per person (sorry, per body).

Now that we’ve shed our sheen of pseudo-resilience, let’s take an equally brutally honest view of what the future holds. 

Here’s how I see it unfolding. We’ll get hit again, for sure. Maybe this year itself, or if we’re lucky not more than once every financial year – around about the same time as filing our tax returns. Bitter irony that – given that we are the financial capital of the country! Or hey maybe if we consult Mr. Jumani, we might even know all the unlucky dates of the year, and then simply stay in the safety of our bunkers.

The same socialites, news anchors, politicians, home ministers, and police officials will come, make their respective angst, opinions, gas, condolences, and more stinking gas known to everyone. Then life will go on.

Oh, but then we have all of these people who say – this is terrible, the system sucks, we want to make a difference! Seriously? The average Mumbaikar has had more than 10 fucking years to make a difference! What have you been waiting for? Armageddon? You and I never did make a difference, and we never will. You think going out and casting a vote is going to make a difference? The hell it will – changes in political parties won’t change the essentially rotten nature of how our shining superpower of a nation functions. Neither will holding candle light vigils. Nor will tut-tutting over single malts.

So we basically have two choices. The same two choices that confront anyone who has not yet become complete inured – fight the system either from the outside or from the inside. The first is anarchy, and I think that deserves a whole different write-up. The second is easier. 

No, no. I am not saying form a political party – you’ll get your ass whipped at the first elections. Simply get 3 friends who want to make shit loads of money in double quick time. Get one of them into the police, one in the main political party, and the third into the opposing political party (it’s called hedging your bets, silly). You then start a security company that supplies the most high-end security apparatus – CCTVs with facial recognition, sniffer dogs that can sniff the RDX from deep inside the bugger’s ass, high-speed patrolling boats with night-vision cameras to patrol our coasts, Tasers, and stuff like that. Take it to the next level – add in some private intelligence folks (since all the police khabris have apparently disappeared), some high-end monitoring software, and real-time communication interception systems.

Then you work out a deal with your two political friends and your senior police officer to begin the necessary lobbying/bribing of the government apparatus to dole out crores of rupees worth of contracts to your firm. Hey, I’ll even help you out with the other 2 competing bids you need to complete the 3-bid system. That’s how all government tenders go out – to the most technically qualified, lowest price bidder, no?

So everyone wins – the system gets the money it needs to function effectively and dole out the contracts, your company wins all the large contracts, and we Mumbaikars actually get some semblance of security! And also, since you said you wanted to make a difference, I’m sure you won’t be supplying sub-standard crap like this.

Otherwise, suck it up, shut up and live with it. Oh, I almost forgot. There is of course a third choice – move to Goa!