Of eavesdropping on conversations in cabs...

So I overheard this rather interesting conversation today.

It so happened that I landed up in a cab with a stranger in the front  passenger seat. Cabs were hard to come by today, and we were both headed in the same direction- the cab guy was gracious enough to suggest that I hop on as well, (for he had taken on the other guy first,) and the dark, lanky passenger nodded his agreement.

As soon as the cab started the lanky boy in the front seat started fiddling with the newspaper on the dashboard.

Ye aaj ka hai?

Nahin, kal ka. Aaj ka nahin hai mere paas.

Arre, aaj ka paper dekhne ka hai.

Kyun, kya hua.

Burma mein logon ko kaat rele hain.

(Incredulous) Acchha?

Haan, bahut logon ko. Bacchon ko bhi nahin chhod rahe. Ek mahine ke bacche ka sar kaat dala. Usi ke liye log jama hai Azad Maidan pe.

Acchha? Kyun maar rahen hain.

Kya maloom, bahut kuchh to gadbad kiya rahega.

Ye Burma kidhar hai?

Nepal ke baju mein.

Acchha. matlab India mein hai?

Nahin. India mein nahin hai. India mein Assam mein maar rele hain. Kaat ke phhenk rele hai.

Acchha? TV pe dikha rahen hain ye sab.

Nahin, TV pe kahan. Sab daba dete hain aisi khabar ko. Kahin nahin milegi, na TV pe, na paper mein.

Cabdriver gets a phone call- his mom has called to apprise him of the trouble at Azad Maidan, and to ask him not to go there. He speaks to her, hangs up and relates the news to us.

At this point, my destination is near. Much as I would have liked to hear more of this conversation between the very interesting passenger and the simple, rather ignorant and easily believing cab driver, I had to ask the cab to slow down. The lanky guy shuffled around as I paid up, he got out of the cab and left without offering to share the fare.  As I entered the building, I realized he was there in the foyer, not ignoring me but not acknowledging either. We entered the lift together, and got off at the 10^th floor. On the way I stole a couple of glances at him- there is something oddly familiar about him. He waits for me to get out first. Chivalry, I thought, or has he just decided to let me lead the way since I obviously know where I’m headed.

I was late, and even though I was curious to at least ask his name, or check if he has come for the screening, (in which case I would have asked him to come with me,) I just rush through to the theatre. A minute after I find myself a seat, I see him walk past and sit a few rows ahead. The first film has ended and the second one begins.

And there he is, on the screen. Videokaaran.

Update- and I still mostly don't look forward to the rains

And as if to prove my point, a day after I posted the last piece, I had another conversation with my maid Vibha.

So she took a day off because her child was unwell, and then turned up late the next day. When I enquired why, she said they were preparing for the rain, keeping stuff up at a height. So late, I asked with surprise, you should have done that in the very first week of June, Bambai ki baarish ka kya bharosa. Yes, she said, but we had heard that there might be demolitions, so we were waiting for that. But then there were the pre monsoon showers the previous day, and so much stuff got wet, that they went ahead and prepared for the monsoon anyway. What does this preparation entail- a brand new tarpaulin roof. They had a roof of course, but it was an old weathered sheet, enough to shield from the summer sun but not enough to bear the brunt of the fury that the monsoon rain in Bombay can be.

Anyway, whether or not demolitions follow, they have had to put up a new sheet to keep out the water. How often do demolitions happen, I ask. About three or four times a year, she says. I am incredulous. You rebuild every single time then, three or four times a year? Yes, she says simply. We rebuild. It takes them two to four hours to rebuild and get everything in order, provided they don’t lose much to theft.

Rebuilding a house, twice a year (she admitted later that there isn’t always demolition every time there is a threat of one, so it actually really happens about twice a year.) A house that will be defenseless once the monsoon hits with full force, and the streets begin to overflow with water that simply doesn’t have anywhere to go because we’ve built multistory buildings and blocked its natural drainage path. Upar se aane wale paani ko to rok bhi lete hain, she had said to me once, neeche se jo aata hai uska kya karen. (We are still able to prevent water from coming in from above, what do we do about the water that comes in from below- that collects in the streets and threatens to and sometimes does come in to the house through doors.)

Why I’m not looking forward to the rains

Why indeed? I mean, who doesn’t like pleasant weather and the romance of rains after the oppressive heat that is Bombay summer? Well, me for one. I’m not looking forward to rains.

It’s not like I don’t like rain. It’s beautiful of course. From my window. The moment I have to step out, it doesn’t seem so great anymore. Bombay in the monsoon sucks. It’s filthy most of the year; during monsoon it’s filthy and wet- ie gross. If you are not from the privileged class that travels only in cars, chances are you will have to wade through dirty water at some point or another, every single time you step out. And even if you are from the privileged class, in fact especially so, you will get stuck in traffic.

And then there is the matter of all those people living on pavements and in slums, with no proper drainage to speak of. Do they find the rain romantic when the water reaches their doorstep and beyond? Do they find it romantic when their roof starts to leak, or when the streets become rivers of floating muck, and excreta from several living forms? Do they find it romantic when they spend nights huddled under plastic sheets?

I’m not sure when I started to view the rain differently. I don’t want to be a spoilsport when everyone seems to be waiting with such anticipation, and there is joy all around. Maybe this conversation is partly to blame. At any rate, I can safely say, as lovely as the rain still is from my window, as stunning as the skies are these days, and luscious the green, I will henceforth always have mixed feelings about rain.

A day in May

Scorching sun, oppressive heat; no sign of the slightest wind, not a leaf stirring.

Househunting blues.

An owner trying to impress on me that the rent is justified, after all it is a ‘good society’, a reference to a building being gated, relatively well maintained and with inhabitants who are typically a little better off. A hierarchy even in buildings. ‘A good society’ does not mean good people, it just means people with more money, I think to myself but don’t say it. When will the Mumbai housing Gods smile down on me?

Sweaty, hot and depressed, I come back home and stare out of the window at the limping palm leaves that I am going to miss very much.

Call from Faiza. There have been demolitions in Ambujwadi and Sion Koliwada.

My househunting blues are now coloured with a tinge of guilt.

A healthy obsession... or maybe OCD?

I have what some might call a bit of an obsession. :)

I like to take informed decisions, but the process of ‘informing’ myself can sometimes be long. And I mean *long*, by most people’s standards.

The latest one concerned drinking water, and one would think that that alone should have been reason enough for a quick decision, but that would be underestimating my ability to procrastinate.

Anyway, to begin at the beginning: I moved into my current house at Yari Road about 6 months back. It’s a nice enough house, though the building is very old and not very well maintained, but that’s another story. Even when I had first moved in, the broker had informed me about the water situation- that the water in the tap is a mix of BMC (ie municipal supply) and borewell water, and therefore, I should procure drinking water from the couple of taps in H block that have continuous BMC water supply. For the first week, while I was still settling down, I got a 20l bottle of Bisleri while I tried to figure out what to do about drinking water. For those of you who are not from the country, let me tell you that the water that is supplied by our municipal corporations, though treated, is often not fit for drinking. There are all kinds of impurities and contamination to be found in the water, and while many of us seem to have developed a healthy immunity thanks to having grown up here, sometimes even we succumb to water borne diseases. And that is why there is a wide variety of water purifiers available in the market, all of which do brisk business.

Having said that, BMC water is actually not bad in most places. There is a friend of mine who scoffs at me and drinks water straight off the tap, but then he has the constitution of an ox. I have in fact had water at his place many times and survived it, but that simply wasn’t an option I was willing to consider as a permanent solution. Besides, much as I would love to trust our government agencies, it’s just not practical. So as I sipped on Bisleri that first week, I happened to visit a friend who lives in the same building. I was surprised to learn that she had no idea that the water in the tap wasn’t entirely BMC and had happily been using it, albeit with a storage water filter. I corrected her, and told her how all the residents, or most of them anyway, get their drinking water from H block in cans. That’s what all the big white cans lined up on the ground floor are for; they pay the guard a monthly fee to fill them up and leave them at their doorstep everyday. But she couldn’t be bothered, she declared, and neither could I, I decided.

And how about the purification? Well, as far as eliminating microorganisms is concerned, the surest, most effective way is boiling water and that’s what I decided to do, in lieu of getting a filter. Sure it’s tedious, and sometimes one plain forgets; the worst is when you plain forget after you’ve put the vessel on the burner, and an half hour later you smell something burning- you run into the kitchen to find a red hot steel vessel, disfigured for life! But you get used to it all after a while.

So what happened now, six months later? Well, lately I’ve noticed a layer of oil in the boiled water. Also there is a residue of salt in my plants, left behind by the evaporated water I assume. Both these trouble me needless to say, and when my maid mentioned to me (not for the first time,) that I should reconsider where I’m getting my drinking water from, and worse- that she never drinks water at my place because I use tap water, that really was the last straw!

I got myself another big bottle of Bisleri and got down to the task of researching to figure out a solution. Here are the findings of two days of off-and-on and half a day of concentrated researching and reading:

The kind of purifier you use depends on the quality of water in your area (but of course.)

In my case, since part of the water was ground water, it was likely to contain oil, solid contaminants, and dissolved salts. All of these are hard to remove, and only by a process called reverse osmosis. RO filters are some of the most expensive in the market and are not efficient- they waste 2 to 3 times as much water as they purify. These factors effectively ruled out a wall mounted water purifier connected to the tap.

This left the other solution- getting water from downstairs in a water can. I am not very comfortable with the idea of a plastic water can to get and store water, however temporarily. This is not to say that I have managed to eliminate plastic from my life- not by a long shot, but I am trying!

Even if one gets BMC water, there is the matter of purifying it, although this task is much easier since this water does not contain oils and dissolved salts and is already treated with both UV radiation and chlorine.

Therefore, even a simple storage type water filter should suffice (which typically uses activated carbon though companies nowadays have patended technologies, using two or more steps) though even in this case, boiling is best.

I have read reports of doctors saying that one should boil water even after filtering/ purifying using a purifier! By the way, the right way to purify water by boiling is to bring it to a rolling boil and let it boil for about a minute if you reside near sea level, and for 3 minutes at higher altitudes. It doesn’t even need to boil really, it just needs to attain a temperature of 72deg for about 5 minutes, but since this is harder to achieve practically, bringing to boil and letting it boil for 1 minute is recommended (although is there was a way around it, it would lead to substantial saving in fuel consumption.) Storage of this water needs some care so as to not contaminate it post boiling.

And while several top companies such as Eureka Forbes (the market leader in water purifiers), Tata and HUL, all have very affordable storage water filters in the market, do a basic search for reviews and you would realise almost none are hassle free, though HUL clearly scores better than the others. (I won’t get into the technologies they use, for while I am vaguely aware of them, I am none the wiser as to which is better.)

But, there is an environmental cost to boiling water- it uses LPG which is not a renewable resource.

So there it is then- that is my dilemma. Most people would just go for a filter I suppose and it is probably the wiser choice. It saves one the hassle of having to boil water and does a reasonably good job of purifying water of BMC quality. A filter like HUL’s Pure-it actually uses a two stage process where it eliminates solid articles by passing the water through thin semi pervious membranes, and chlorinates.

Heck, most people would have done that without the research and the waste of a couple of days! :)

I’ll just draw solace in thinking of myself as a little better informed- for whatever it’s worth.

Random rainy morning conversation

The day began with a conversation with my two maids, both of who happened to land up at more or less the same time today. They’re friends and neighbours often looking out for each other- in fact I found one through the other. The conversation initiator was the rain. It has been raining incessantly for the last few days. Its like the monsoon decided to make a comeback with a vengeance. Not that I’m complaining. This city needs all the water it can get and more. As do the farmers tending to their fields, I suppose. Anyway, there was a fresh bout of furious rain in the morning right about the time that they turned up. Anita, the cook looked out of the window and commented on it. On how hard and relentlessly its been raining, and how the building compound, especially at the back, is waterlogged. I nodded absent-mindedly. My window opens out to the back of building compound, and the view is thankfully mostly green (and beautiful), and if you look down from the balcony or the window, you can see the empty brown patch that some residents use for parking. I’ve been noting the build up of the water in this small brown patch. It often turns into a tiny pond, as it did this morning, until the earth soaks up the water.

But I digress. All the romance of the rain went straight of the window when I heard what she said next. She mentioned how the water had come into their house and upto the ankles, wetting everything. Couldn’t sleep the whole night, she said, because everything is wet, you know, even the mattress, all the while smiling ear to ear. It never fails to amaze me. It’s not the first time that I’ve heard something like this of course, but it just seems so incredible that people can live like that and talk about it so nonchalantly, even happily. She spoke of the water seeping in from the ground. (All this ‘reclaimed’ land in Mumbai! I live on it, and I’m not blind to its repercussions. The city is bursting at the seams, and anyone with half a mind can see it. But the builder-politician nexus will not allow any corrective measures. So land will continue to get reclaimed, buildings will continue to come up, slums too for the people in the high rises need their maids and their guards and their delivery boys and their drivers.)

Then she spoke of the water coming in from above, and went on to explain that her husband, being stocky, can’t climb up properly and put the plastic sheet on the roof. Besides the day they had to buy the plastic sheet, he was at work and she was entrusted with the task of buying it, and she got the wrong size, correct length wise, but short breadth wise; so now they’re stuck with a roof that only provides part protection and the water keeps coming in. Animatedly they exchanged notes about their husbands, how Vibha’s knows how to build a house, and has build enough of a good rapport at work so that whenever he needs it, labour is easy to find. Like last year when the roof of her house came crashing down. Fortunately Anita was around then though Vibha was at work, and she took in Vibha’s kids and called to inform her (yes, they have cellphones!). Vibha was shocked, how could my house just fall like that? But her enterprising husband came with a bunch of men from work, and they put it up again within an hour. My house is also bigger, Vibha said proudly, and drier because it’s at a higher level, so the water takes much longer to seep through. And it has four layers of thick plastic as roofing, so the water doesn’t come in. They went on to speak of some unruly relatives, and how friends are so much more precious in times of need, and of demolition drives, when everyone comes to everyone’s rescue though some neighbours do take advantage and steal. Mostly it is the Corporation workers though. They take away all good stuff, the utensils, the gas cylinder even the bamboo poles used to make houses. All this accompanied with much smiling and giggling.

It had something of a humbling effect, this ‘girly’ conversation with my maids. It reminded me of how petty I can sometimes be in my concerns. It reminded me of the resilience of people, especially the poor in this country and I suppose in the world, and their ability to smile and be happy in situations that seem so hopeless to me. I wondered about my own ‘armchair intellectualism’, and its usefulness, if any. I wondered about the order of things- how it’s always been and will always continue to be (so why despair over it?)

And having gone through the motion of pondering over such questions, no wiser in the end than at the start, I sat down and wrote this post.

Meanwhile, it continues to rain.

Walking with the people

I think it would be safe to say that we’re living in very interesting times. Incredibly hard times too for many millions, and it is these very people who will make it more interesting still.
When I look around me, at the state of the country, at its corruption and its politics, its treatment of its own people, whether they be those dispossessed of their lands in the mineral rich Orissa or Chhatisgarh, or those dispossessed of their homes in the slums in Delhi or Mumbai, all those who suffer at the hands of ‘development’ and whose struggles never quite make it to any mainstream, national newspapers or TV channels, I wonder how it's possible that they won’t someday join hands and rise to awaken the middle class out of its 8-plus-percent growth induced slumber.
Surely the conditions are ripe for a people’s revolution? Though I have no idea what shape it would be in, and who would lead it.

For the moment, I am completely taken in by a small people’s movement raising its head in Golibar in Khar East in Mumbai. I’ve been following it only for the last 6 months or so and it’s been fascinating so far. For a history of the movement check:
Khar East Andolan website,
and this post about Golibar on the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan website.
Here is Javed's account:
Invisible Cities Part 7: the Golibar Diary
(Javed Iqbal is a brilliant young journalist who shoots as well as he writes- or is it the other way round? His reportage of Chhatisgarh/ Tribal/ Maoist struggle is insightful, powerful writing. And some of his pictures are haunting to say the least.)
And here is a Times Crest article by Ashutosh Phatak and Chatura Rao.

When I heard of the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan, I was reminded of all that I had read about people’s participation in the design process while researching for my dissertation back in architecture school. There have been many instances and experimentations around people’s participation in designing spaces, usually homes for themselves, from around the world, and it was (then) an evolving process, as it is bound to be. And yet it held tremendously exciting possibilities. More than anything else, it seems only logical that people should have a say in how they want to live. Yes, we need experts to work things out, and sometimes to demonstrate better ways of doing things, but as end users, it only makes sense that people have a say in the kind of spaces they want to spend their lives in. This becomes even more critical for a settlement like Dharavi, which is not just residential but home to many cottage industries providing livelihood to many thousands. But that’s a whole separate debate.

Coming back to the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan. I have yet to understand it fully, but from what I gather these people are demanding (apart from their rights over their homes and lands) that rehabilitation be a collaborative process, not something that is forced on them. Having aided in building the city, they feel they are perfectly capable of building their own homes. While I’m not sure how the modalities of that would be worked out, it’s definitely an idea worth working on, and a fantastic initiative on the part of the people. If only our government could in turn, live up to the challenge. At the moment they don’t seem interested. Understandably. Much of the politics and by consequence public policy in this country, is heavily influenced by various pockets of money power. In this case it seems to be the builder lobby. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that they just want the people’s land; they’re not really interested in engaging with them at any other level. The ill-designed and maintained SRA buildings would stand testament to this. ‘Redevelopment’ is the new mantra, and there are enormous profits to be made, if the huge tracts of slum lands in the city can be freed up. This however necessarily involves rehabilitating thousands of people, many of who are migrant workers in the first place. This further involves massive administrative exercises of establishing the number of households eligible for redevelopment, which would be a constantly evolving number, of finding means of establishing ‘rights’ of these people who are not original inhabitants of the city, Constitutional provisions to the right to work and travel anywhere in the country notwithstanding. It involves taking the people’s consent to take away and homes and lands, and to ‘rehabilitate’ them in ill conceived, perhaps even inappropriate high-rise buildings.
None of these are debated in the public sphere of course, because if they were the government would be forced to face uncomfortable questions. And its records of rehabilitation are dismal to say the least. Given this context, the GBGB seems a logical if inconvenient response by the people. And has been largely ignored by the government, as far as I can tell.
Anyway, the Golibar people’s spirited fight for their homes reached a new milestone last month with some people from Ganesh Krupa Society sitting on a fast led by Medhatai Patkar, and the State Government agreeing to some their demands. A month later it turned out that the State Government didn’t want to honour the promises they had made to the people. So the people decided to take to the streets. They decided to walk from Golibar to Mantralaya, and meet the CM yet again. They were joined by others from all over the city, many of who were similarly aggrieved.
I joined the walk for a few hours on both days, curious to see the faces of these people, many of them hardly literate, who were nevertheless driven to fight for their rights by a corrupt, exploitative and unresponsive administration. And they chose to do so in a very Gandhi-ian way, using a non violent but forceful approach. All along the way they shouted slogans. A few articulate young men at the head of the procession constantly spoke about their grievances in the microphone, aiming to educate the people along the way and garner their support. At times the procession halted so Medhatai could give a short speech.
And so it was that to shouts of ‘ladenge, jeetenge’, ‘awaz do hum ek hain’, ‘buildaron ki jagir nahin, Mumbai humari hai’, ‘Maharashtra shasan hosh mein aao, bhrashtachar band karo’, ‘Rajiv Gandhi Awaas Yojana laagu karo, laagu karo’, ‘mukhya mantri samvaad karo’ and my favourite ‘sarkar humse darti hai, police ko aage karti hai’, people walked from Golibar in Khar to Mantralaya over two days, the 28th and 29th of May 2011.
Here are some pictures of the walk.

Women Power!




Curious cab drivers look on and take videos of the people walking. They prbably understand their reasons to protest all too well.


Some walking barefoot.


Walking under ever darkening skies. Soon after this image was taken, it started to pour.


Day 2: I joined the yatra at Lalbaug. Here Medhatai addresses the people...


... to an enthusiastic response.


Sangharsh Yatra!


Yes, this kid marched all the way. A country where children have to fight for rights to their homes (or lands as in Orissa) has much to answer for...


This one kinda 'marched' all the way too!


Ah smiles! I envy the photographer... was it Javed?




'Zameen and zameer bechna band karo'




Yes, it does get tiring, walking all day.


Vada pav- quick snack break.


Walking by the side of the road, so as to not disrupt traffic. The procession walked in a long queue of twos through the narrow streets of Golibar, and by the side on the main roads.


Walking, accompanied by the police.


The tireless Medha Patkar.


Informing the people along the way...


Keeping the NAPM flag flying high.


I had messaged a friend to get directions to Lalbaug, and he mentioned he was driving past the very area. So I asked him if he had seen the procession, so he could give exact current location. "No, flew over them all, I guess... With the new flyover.' Prophetic words, I thought to myself.


Md Ali Road. This is where a man walked up to me and asked if she was Medha Patkar. 'Heard of her, never saw her before.' he smilingly said.


Passers by stop to listen.






VT Station


Negotiating with the Police.


There were barricades near the VT station to prevent the yatra from proceeding towards the Mantralaya.


So the people went to Azad Maidan instead...


And sat there in protest while Medha Patkar and few other representatives of the people went to have a word with the CM.

Life is beautiful

Recounting the events of an evening not long ago.

Today was one of those days. A day when things happen. And make your life a little more meaningful. But also a day that makes you question your life.

Saw Deepa Bhatia’s film, ‘Nero’s Guests’. The film itself is not spectacular but its protagonist most certainly is. The film follows P Sainath, a man who has devoted his life to a study of India’s rural affairs, and most notably its recent agrarian crisis. And Sainath is an angry man. Not hard to see why, for the last few years he has been following the trail of suicides in the cotton belt of India, a symptom, he says of the larger agrarian crisis of ‘corporatisation of Indian agriculture.’ It can’t be easy to be faced with the despair and helplessness in those thousands of faces, knowing that there’s little he can do to help them. God knows it was difficult enough to see the film without a lump in the throat.
He is also a good speaker, a fallout one assumes of the many talks he gives regularly. His knowledge of the subject is commendable, and his arguments forceful. I have read Sainath before, even some of the one-liners that he used in the film and later while interacting with the audience. (I guess in this country one ends up being repetitive in order to simply be heard.) He always comes across as well researched, and today was no exception. The pleasant surprise was to see his impressive personality and aura. Though maybe it should not have been.
The film was well made. It was a film about the agrarian crisis as seen through its protagonist’s eyes, and delivered on that front. It is high on emotional content, often resorting to emotion to drive home a point, sometimes to anger, sometimes sarcasm, and at other times to poetry and story telling. It’s the kind of approach I have often found in Arundhati Roy’s non fiction writings. It makes for very interesting reading, in this case viewing, but you come away wondering if you haven’t also been somewhat emotionally manipulated. Be that as it may, it is nevertheless an important film for the message it holds, which is urgent and yet much neglected.

I came back home to see a crowd at the corner of Ahimsa Marg, where our building stands. This street corner has been witness to much action over the last few days because of the attempts of the residents of the corner building to remove a vegetable vendor who sits on the footpath. He’s been around for awhile, as long as we have been. I never knew there was a problem with his location in the first place, after all he is just selling vegetables, like many other illegal hawkers and vendors in the city… how could he pose a problem to anyone? Besides, how do the residents of a building have any right over the footpath outside, even if it is the one adjoining their boundary wall? That is after all public property. A couple of days back when we headed towards the vendor to get some vegetables, we saw his entire lot strewn over the road, and a large crowd gathered around, with some of the ones in the centre looking rather self important. Even then I had wondered if the goons of some political outfit such as the Sena or the MNS were involved. That’s the one thing that makes us Indians brave. Connections. Backing by local rogue elements.
Sure enough today when I was on my way back from the film, I saw a small board with a picture of Raj Thackery and notice about illegal hawkers at the corner. There was also a row of stone seats installed around the corner, in place of the vegetable vendor, and the dosa and pani puri stalls that existed earlier. There was a crowd again, and upon enquiry I realized that there had been some sort of physical fight, and the police was expected to arrest the vendors.
The vendors?
I can’t help but wonder at our apathy. We want all the conveniences that the underbelly of the city provides us, such as our drivers and our domestic helps, and free home delivery of vegetables and groceries from the local kirana shop, but we’d rather not see them if possible. We believe in beautification drives. We’d rather have a row of stone seats at a corner of an intersection full of traffic, than a bunch of people trying to earn a livelihood. Where do they go, you ask? Well, that’s the government’s lookout, isn’t it?
Another story that the only one I’ve seen sitting on one of those seats ever since they have been installed, is the security guard ‘protecting’ them.

Got home finally. And found this touching photo essay, (link shared by a talented photographer friend, Zishaan Latif http://www.zishaanlatif.com)

Life suddenly seems beautiful in more ways than we find the time to appreciate.

And I travel by the same trains, Part 2

A rant from a long time ago... written on January 26, 2009

H’s brother died today.
I don’t know H too well; he’s a part of the Grip team that I have been working with on the last two shoots. He’s a young boy, all of nineteen, quiet and unassuming. And forever smiling. Today I got to know that he had a younger brother, a brother he lost to a local train accident.
This is about as close as I have come yet to my fears being realized, and now I am angrier and more scared and helpless still. Why is it so? Why is human life so worthless in this country? How many deaths does it take for us to sit up and take notice? Why are small numbers over a period of time so easy to ignore?
It seems to be a pattern. Small offences are forgivable, it takes a big jolt for people to really react. It’s as if we become habituated to things, and learn to accept them, because we feel so powerless to do anything about them. So we react with anger and outrage to bomb blasts that kill hundreds in the same local trains that claim hundreds of lives per month anyway. Somehow these hundred deaths are worth reacting to, their stories worth telling, their families worth supporting, while the other nameless faceless ones who lose their lives in the simple act of leading a normal life on a normal day go unnoticed because its something we have got used to.
Let me try and understand this. I read the papers, mostly HT, and I listen to the news on TV occasionally. And then there is the internet; chain mails, and Facebook groups. There seems to be a lot of anger in the people, especially about the recent attack in Mumbai. And what is it exactly that people are reacting to… the deaths, and the lack of security, the inability of the establishment to deal with terrorism, and to react to emergency situations.
I would have imagined however that there would be curiosity about finding the root of the problem, or atleast a drive towards it. There is most certainly a rise in terrorism. There is also a rise in violence in general, and in the crime rate. There is a rise in intolerance, whether it is towards another human being, or an entire community. And there is a rise in the concept of instant gratification. It’s a reflection of the society and the times we are living in.
Inconveniencing people brings instant gratification. It disrupts their peace, and they react immediately and strongly. And killing near and dear ones is the greatest inconvenience one can cause. If you inconvenience a critical mass of people, you get a certain amount of reaction. A few years ago, a few AK 47s would have sufficed. Then came the bomb. Now its serial blasts. Every time however people got used to it, and the reaction diluted. So I guess the brains behind the terrorists had to get more and more creative about it. They had to keep increasing the critical mass. When serial blasts stopped eliciting the desired response, they decided a change of tactic was in order. Some bright fellow came up with the idea of a sustained attack that would last a long time, a siege, so to say, of a place where the wealthy and the noticeable hang out. November 26 was born.
What next? Serial blasts across the nation?
(I still think the most creative was 9/11. That was a stroke of genius. Or maybe it was obvious to a more disruptive mind than mine.)
And towards what cause? I’m not entirely clear…
There are several points I am trying to make here. The situation is so complex, and there is so much to react to, that it makes me incoherent. I hope I can be excused for it…
The first is the rise in intolerance. It didn’t come about overnight. Nor is it confined to a single act. Its around us everywhere. Its what our children are growing up watching and imbibing. It’s there on the roads when we don’t allow a car to overtake, or grab a parking space. It’s there when we make a run for a bus instead of standing in queues. It’s there when we bribe government officials to get our water connection ahead of people before us. It’s there, and every new generation will be more intolerant that the one preceding it if we don’t accept and address it soon.
The next (ironically) is acceptance. We have learnt to accept injustice, even crime. We have become quietly submissive to restrictions on our daily lives, than fight for our freedom and dignity. So it is than women are afraid to step out after dark in Delhi, or people in Mumbai won’t voice their dissent against the likes of the Shiv Sena or the MNS, or Mayawati in UP or Modi in Gujarat. The force we have to fight is either too large and obscure, or too powerful to fight against. The fight seems too long drawn out, and the rewards too elusive, besides the fight is itself as thankless as it is fraught with danger. Faced with such odds, it’s hardly surprising that people make the choice that they do.
The next is insensitivity. As long as something doesn’t affect us directly we ignore it, or don’t give it its due, until it grows so large that we can’t ignore it anymore. Take the case of the Kashmir problem, or the insurgency in the North east or the Maoist movement in many states.

H’s brother wasn’t the first to die in a local train related accident, nor will he be the last. Accidents will keep happening, and people will keep getting injured and dying, a few everyday, until we decide to do something about it.

People like Us

While reading the paper today, I came across several times, and in different articles, the same word: vulnerable. Whether it was somebody driving their daughter to school, or hanging around with friends in a pub, or having fun at garba celebrations, the people in this country have a new fear: that of terror.
Its somewhat new, atleast to people in cities likely Delhi and Mumbai, though some pockets of the country have been familiar with it for awhile… and has only recently reached a stage where the common man, ‘people like us’ have begun to feel unsafe in their very homes. Actually it is probably this attitude which has led to this situation. There’s no denying the fact that out country is multicultural, with cultures sometimes so different that it becomes difficult to completely identify with each other’s problems. And that probably is why in the fast growing, economically well off cities, where it was possible to turn dreams to reality, even the common man chose to ignore and deny the problems of his fellow brother. Everytime there was a massacre in Kashmir, or a killing in Bihar, or a rape in UP, or burning of a Christian missionary in Orissa, or a sati in Rajasthan, or a naked protest march in the North east, or an earthquake in Bhuj, or tribal lands taken away, or riots in Godhra, or the depletion of the ground water table in Kerala because of a multinational soft drink company’s irresponsible manufacturing practices, or farmer suicides in Vidarbha, or the floods in Bihar… the list goes on… we treat it like it’s someone else’s problem. We convince ourselves that we are helpless to do anything anyway, and don’t even so much as raise our voices even when we see a tragedy, or injustice being done in front of our own eyes. We further push the marginalized to the very edges of society, while we are busy with the important business of earning our livelihood, or getting a new haircut or buying car, or discussing the even more important implications of Saif Ali Khan’s tattoo, or Prakash Karat’s opposition of the Nuclear deal with the US, neither of which we can claim to understand. We have informed opinions about how Mamata Banerjee is a hindrance to development, without fully understanding the implications of the land takeover on the farmers who she represents, about Narendra Modi’s criminal ways, without understanding what makes him such a popular leader in Gujarat, about the insurgents in the North east, without understanding why they choose to call their organization a ‘Liberation’ front.
We have been playing living room politics with these people and with their very lives for far too long. It was only a matter of time before they got frustrated at being ignored and sidelined and decided to walk into our very living rooms so that they may finally be heard.

Walking around in fading light...

... on the roads of south Mumbai, rushing from an exhibition to a screening, I couldn't help but stop a few times...

The Mumbai local

My friends keep asking me why there are no pictures on my blog. A cinematographer, and only writing? I my defense I say, well, I am more than just a cinematographer. But they do have a point, so here goes… a few pictures on one of my favourite things about Mumbai, the local train.

And I travel by the same trains...

It was a news item that was both shocking and frustrating. The headline in HT today spoke of a young man who had had an accident at a railway station, and had to wait for over 45 minutes for an ambulance to take him to a hospital.
Before I go further, here are a few facts, all quoted from the same article:
‘The railways do not have a single ambulance available at any of their 103 stations.
There used to be 18 ambulances run by a concerned citizen who himself lost a limb in a rail accident. He withdrew the service after the railways demanded that he pay them parking fees and regularly commandeered his vehicles to go vegetable shopping.
About 25 people are injured and 10 people killed on the suburban railway tracks every day, as a bursting- at- the- seams service struggles to accommodate a third of the city’s 18 million people.’
This, in Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country and a city modeling itself on Shanghai. This is the state of the ‘lifeline’ of the city, the suburban railway. On the one hand the city administration talks of a multi pronged approach to develop Mumbai and turn it into a ‘world class’ city. On the other hand it can’t provide basic amenities to its teeming millions. What is even more shocking is that it is unable to support the efforts of citizens who try to make a contribution. And this is the sort of dichotomy that people seem to have learnt to accept.

What has always struck me as odd is all the hullbaloo that is created about the ‘spirit’ of Mumbai every now and then. When the serial bomb blasts happened in local trains a couple of years ago, everyone was talking about the spirit of the people of Mumbai, who were back on their feet the next day. Well, I ask you, do they have a choice? Everybody has compulsions, responsibilities, jobs to get to, errands to finish, and at the end of the day, families to feed. Not working or taking the day off, are prerogatives of the well to do, not of the common man who travels by train.
What might be more impressive, or perhaps disturbing, is that the people of Mumbai continue to travel by trains, without raising a voice against the conditions under which they travel, and the lack of safety and first aid mechanisms.
At the time of the bomb blasts, the number of deaths was a huge issue. Mumbai had lost many of its hard working, promising citizens to terrorism. What about the hundreds it loses every month to the apathy of its leaders? If we were to do the mathematics, guess who would emerge as the bigger evil.
And yet people have learnt to accept things as they are, because that’s the way they have always been. And because the common man is too busy earning his daily bread. Where does he have the skill or the time to write letters, sit on dharnas or file public interest litigations?
He is content as long as the trains run and he gets a foothold…

Valentines's Day Mumbai style

Yesterday my maid walked in in the morning asking me about the situation in the city. Since I have all but stopped watching television news unless something positively drastic has happened (such as for instance, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, which was the last time I switched on the television to see the news.) So I say I shall read the newspaper and tell her. I pick up the paper expecting to see headlines about the violence in the city and Raj Thackery’s latest moves. Instead I see a full page picture of Neha Dhupia sporting a dainty little piece of diamond studded jewellery round her neck. Ah, of course, it's Valentine’s day!
Could things be more ironic?
This whole identity thing has always intrigued me. If our politicians are not dividing us on the basis of religion, as does the BJP and Shiv Sena, or caste, as does the Samajwadi party, its region, as we are witnessing in Mumbai and elsewhere in Maharashtra right now. So what makes this sense of identity, this feeling of belonging to a group, so important? Is it just a sense of security, in numbers, for instance? No, certainly it’s more than that. People in a minority are often fervently loyal to their religion, caste or ethnic group, irrespective of what the consequences of such a stand might be. And then there are people who are willing to turn violent, to beat, steal, rape, even murder for what they consider is the cause of their brethren. But surely all these are against what any religion professes. Forget religion, surely it’s against basic human nature?

Unhappy New Year

On the 31st evening I nearly scolded my friend X for what I thought was an overdose of concern and protectiveness towards his girl friend. Two days later I am most distressed to note that I’m ready to eat my words.
He had got a last minute call from this girl he adores, and he had to make plans for the evening. So there we were discussing at 6 on the evening of the 31st what his options were. One of these, which both of us thought was an excellent idea, was to go across to Pune, a lovely city and a favourite with many of my friends. Only he felt it was too late already, and if they tried doing that they might well end up spending midnight crossover to the new year in the bus on the highway. So I suggested that to be faster he should take a cool cab instead. His immediate reaction was ‘no way, they are too unsafe for a woman’. I pointed out to him that he would be with her, but he was adamant that it was not safe, and that in the event of any untoward incident on the way, there was little he alone would be able to do to help. I was a little miffed at this restriction that all of us have had to impose on ourselves at some point in our lives. Having grown up in Delhi, I have done that more times than I care to recall, or yet I have never grown used to it. This curb on my freedom inspires an unnaturally strong opposition in me and mixed feelings of anger, helplessness and frustration. This was what I felt yet again as I was having this conversation with X. I mean, this was Mumbai, this city is different.
Apparently not.
The cover story in today’s HT is how a mob ushered in 2008, for themselves and for a couple of young women, for whom the first two hours of 2008 will be unforgettable forever.
It was mobocracy once again.
My apologies to X, he was right. I’m sure he would never want his girl to be caught in a situation like that, and one can hardly blame him for finding the sacrifice of giving up on a romantic trip to Pune preferable to taking the risk.

An aside: If there’s anything to rival my feelings from the conversation a couple of days ago, it was what I felt looking at the pictures in the paper this morning.
Over the years I have realized that while anger and frustration are bad enough, its helplessness which kills me. What can one do except feel indignant at reading reports such as these. There has to be something, I haven’t yet figured out what.

The Mumbai Project

For the last fortnight or so, the Hindustan Times has been running a series of articles called the ‘Mumbai Project’. Here’s an introduction to the series, as it appears on their website:
‘Mumbai is booming. Mumbai is crumbling. With our new aspirations, new money and new confidence, we feel — we know — that we can take on the world. Yet, as Mumbai pursues a great global dream, the reality is that it is a third-world city. So, we now roam the farthest corners of the globe, and are shocked when we return to traffic snarls, potholes and the tensions of daily life.
HT believes we live in a time of hope — and great change. So, it's time to hope, certainly, that we can transform our city. It's also time to understand the change that is upon us. Did you know we are the process of spending Rs 43,000 crore to transform Mumbai? New flyovers. New trains. New taxis. New pavements. New roads. New drains. That's just the start. Where the money's going? Can we do better? How do we make sure we have the best in the world? It's time to begin the first real public dialogue for the new Mumbai.’
I believe, as much as HT does, that we live in a time of hope and great change. And while our cities need transformations, maybe even complete makeovers, to cope with all the additional pressures, there is an equally pressing need to go back to the source of the problem, and try to contain and prevent a further spread of it.
Most of the city’s problems stem from the fact that its infrastructure can no longer cope with its huge, and rapidly increasing population. Add to this the booming economy and its rewards, and it isn’t merely a problem of numbers, but one of a population that now has higher disposable incomes than ever before and an eager, enterprising market, keen to show them exactly how to spend it.

So this is the scenario. We have a city of 14 million and growing. We have an infrastructure that is crumbling.
The source of the biggest problem that Mumbai faces today is also its biggest resource: its teeming millions. And what is bringing these millions to the city, every day, day after day? The promise of jobs, the dream of making it big, of having a better life for themselves and their families back home. And are there really that many jobs in the city? Certainly there are, because it’s the economic capital of the country, a huge number of industrial and business houses have their head offices and branches here, and more than anything else, its a growing city, which in turn means that there is always a further creation of jobs happening simultaneously.
This is what they call a vicious circle, and someone’s got to realize it and break it. (And that doesn’t just mean creating a New Bombay. I have driven through some parts of New Bombay and it is the most repetitive and characterless township I have seen.)
In fact the story of Mumbai is not very different from the stories of the other metros. They are all suffering from massive urban migration leading to a shortage in infrastructure, further leading to related problems such as traffic snarls, overcrowded local transport, airports struggling to manage the massive traffic, electricity and water shortages, lack of proper maintenance of public utilities and so on and so forth. These have been researched thoroughly and discussed by the HT team of journalists in their articles over the last few days. (HT story)
So what is it that I am trying to say? Nothing new or innovative, as it happens, but something so blatantly obvious…
What Mumbai, and other Indian metros need, is not just a makeover.
What they need is a breather.
It’s in the interest of the whole country and not just the big metros that we look at developing our small towns as centers of trade and industry, and create enough opportunities for jobs and a standard of living that is appealing enough for a sort of reverse migration to take place. Equally importantly, we need far reaching reforms in the agriculture sector (I wonder when HT will do an equally in depth series on the Rural Agriculture Project?) so news like farmer suicides can become a thing of the past.
An interesting tool/ phenomenon (and one used frequently in the current series by HT) is our tendency to look towards other countries and cities, and emulate their example. While it is good practice to learn from other’s successes, it is equally important to study the same examples for possible flaws, and feasibility studies when the model is applied in the local context and culture, and to inform the public of the results. May we remind ourselves that the very cities we are talking about are the ones with huge ecological footprints that are unsustainable in the long run.
To take an example, a higher FSI is touted as the solution to Mumbai’s space crunch. Needless to say, it is a solution. Possibly the only solution, given the current situation. But is it necessarily a happy solution? The people residing in the high rises close to even higher-rise office buildings, are surrounded by an artificially created environment all day. They would most certainly have a higher standard of living (indeed they would need to, to be able to afford a high rise in Mumbai), but will they also necessarily have a better ‘quality of life’? Can we have studies comparing the health and happiness quotient of people residing in low and high rises in a city, given that all other factors be more or less equal? I don’t need to even say what the results of such a study would be. And yet we all know that there is no escaping high rises as a solution in the current scenario. But can we afford to ignore the merits of the alternative? And should we not try to preserve, as much as possible, the horizontal and organic character of our cities, and in turn the (relative) mental well being of its inhabitants?
This again is not possible if we let the same cities become hubs of every kind of activity. That brings me back to the point I made earlier. We have no choice but to develop smaller towns, and in a way that is efficient and sustainable.
To be fair, its not like it hasn’t started already. Infosys, headquartered in Bangalore, another city bursting at its seems, has now a mini township in the smaller neighbouring town of Mysore. We've already been shown a way. We need to study and built upon the experience.

The power of numbers

I heard a new word last week, and subsequently read it in the paper. I’m sure it’s been around now for a while, since the phenomenon it describes certainly has, it’s just that it seems to have missed my eye till now.
It is ‘mobocracy’.
In India in recent times, it is a word well worth coining.
Here are some facts: Sometime ago a mob had attacked an art student’s exhibition in Baroda, alleging that his paintings were provocative and offensive to the Hindu religion. In Bihar over the last week, twelve people were lynched in two separate incidents, on suspicion of robbery. In Nawada district, a mob gouged out the eyes of three youths for stealing a motorcycle. In Bhagalpur, a chainsnatcher was beaten up, tied to a motorcycle and dragged through the streets. In Mandya in South India, eleven Dalits were injured when a mob of over 150 people from “upper caste” attacked a Dalit colony. In Firozabad, a Dalit woman, whose son was accused of eloping with a girl of another caste, was burnt to death while her family members were held hostage. All except the Baroda incident occurred in the last one month.
Whatever the provocation, religious, social or caste based, and whether spontaneous or preplanned, mobocracy is a phenomenon fast on the rise.
I am reminded of a thought that had occurred to me sometime ago. The occasion was janamashtami, better known as dahi handi in Maharashtra, named after the extremely popular game that is played in every locality in the city, and that attracts bigger sponsorships and consequently bigger amounts of prize money with every passing year. All over people were on the streets that day, dressed in their very best, laughing, chatting, dancing to music blaring from loudspeakers.
Needless to say travelling by road that day was a nightmare. And that’s what made me think, looking at all those people on the streets, so carefree, and occupying the roads with such authority, that that’s what it was about. Here’s the common man, who slogs day in and day out to earn his daily bread, and goes about his daily life resigned to fate, with little hope of a better future. He toils because he must. And he hopes that the future will be bigger and brighter for him and his close ones, that he can make it so by working harder and harder still, but realizes too that that is but a dream, atleast for the majority of the people. The overriding feeling for most of his life is one of helplessness. Certainly I have felt it a lot of times, when I have found myself unable to help, either myself or people around me.
And then there are days like janamashtami. When he can dance on the streets and he is king of the road. When he feels a certain power. What is this power? The power to obstruct normal life, even for people way more influential than himself, who he bows down to every other day of the year?
And where does he derive this power? I suppose in numbers. So is that it then? It’s the power of numbers that gives people the confidence to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. And that’s what mob psychology is about. It could be one man’s vendetta, or the frustration of many, coming to the fore every time a mob gets out of hand. But whatever the source of the unrest, numbers render people nameless and faceless, and give them the power to commit acts that they wouldn’t dare otherwise for fear of social or legal repercussions.
That’s mobocracy. The evil face of the power of numbers.

Shooting for NYATG

The other day I asked X what he thought of my blog and all he could think of saying was that it was too verbose for him to read.
Fair enough.
Here’s a little story with a picture.


Some months ago, I co shot with a producer- director- cinematographer- anchor from New York, for an episode on Mumbai, for a travel show called ‘Not your average travel guide’, a Discovery Travel and Living program. His name is Joseph van Harken, and he is a partner in a production house called Showcobra in NYC.
It was a fun shoot. The crew was small, just four of us: Joseph, Deepa of Mumbai magic fame, who was our guide to the city, Kottayan, who was our ‘location’ guy i.e. he was to handle matters in case we ran into trouble with the police, or the BMC or the plethora of other organizations that one needs permissions from to be able to shoot in the streets, and yours truly.
Joe, Deepa and I got along like a house on fire, and continue to be in touch. Maybe that’s what made the shoot fun. It was like hanging out with friends. But I’ll leave that for another post. The particular incident that I thought I would write about today happened on Marine Drive.
Joe wanted to take a time lapse shot of Marine Drive, with the sun going down, and the street lights of the ‘Queen’s necklace’ coming on. He wanted, therefore, a long shot from a reasonable vantage point. Deepa pulled some strings and arranged for us to shoot from the roof of one of the residential buildings near the Nariman Point end of Marine Drive.
We went up to the roof and Joe and I started looking for our shot. Except that we couldn’t find it. Nothing seemed good enough. We needed to be further out, or a few buildings further down to get the shot we wanted. The latter was not an option, and we were on the very edge of the roof already, hugging the parapet wall. While we were trying to figure out what to do, I noticed that the window ledge was fairly wide. I pointed this out to Joe, who agreed it was worth a try. So off I went to look for a ladder. Fortunately there was some repair work going on on the floor below and I was able to procure a tall stool fairly quickly. Time was of the essence, for the light would soon start dying and that’s exactly what we were there to shoot, dying light on Marine Drive.
Joe and I lowered the stool onto the ledge which was about seven feet below the top of the parapet wall. Then Joe jumped down, followed by equipment i.e. camera, tripod and a bag with spare batteries and tapes and other such paraphernalia, and finally me. There we found the shot that we wanted.
We set up the shot, pressed record and waited.
For the next 45 minutes we were stranded on that ledge, with strong winds blowing in from the sea, and believe me, the winds seem stronger when you are five floors above ground. We had to keep a hand on the camera to keep it pressed down, so that the frame wouldn’t change.
But every minute was worth it for the sheer adventure of it, and for getting the shot.
I hope it found it’s way to the final cut.