The Idea-smithy

One of my most memorable experiences of this year was The Kala Ghoda Art Festival was held in February. These posts were written for the blog covering the festival. Here they are again, as a reminder of sparks of beauty in this otherwise dirty city.

I stopped by this pavement stall last evening. It has been…oh, so very long..since I visited this place. Getting to be a real book-snob, are we, patronizing only the big bookstores? Yet, the bookseller recognized me in trice and his eyes bore no rebuke.

There’s one at every corner, if you know where to look and I’ve given away a few of my secrets before. This is (or used to be) one of my favorite haunts before convenience and credit cards took over.

From the evergreen Sidney Sheldons, John Grishams and Jeffrey Archers to the ubiquitous management books, this place still holds its charm. It’s hard to supress that innate sense of superiority in pulling out a book and placing it in the ‘right’ stack along with others in the genre. So pop fiction to the sides, classics in the middle, bestsellers on top. Then realisation strikes that the dynamics of cataloguing work differently in a street-stall.
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Long, bumpy rides in Mumbai’s bylanes bring you face to face with some terribly amusing sights.

Pssst….for those of you who can’t read in the Mumbai smog, it says,

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I remain a Mumbai train loyalist. Not only is the Mumbai Metropolitan Railway, the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B in Mumbai, it also gives you a slice of what I think of as ‘the real Mumbai life’. Frantic students cramming in seat-huddles tell you that the board examinations are around the corner. A bling-ey group chatters away about the wedding they’re off to in the matrimony season. Office-goers - peons, sales executives, doctors, journalists run shoulders (okay, bodies) in the nau-dabbon-ki-jalad-lowkulll.

And speaking of dabbas, how about the other dabbas? The ones carrying piping hot nourishment, lovingly made by mothers and wives and cooks across the city and delivered Just In Time for lunch to their hungry patrons? To the uninitiated, the dabbawallas are a network of deliverymen who carry lunchboxes from homes to offices and back using a never-fail above-world-class system of colour coding. An Ivy League US b-school used them as a case study and the concept has picked up much visibility since then.
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Sunday afternoon screening of Choti si baat. Associations aplenty.

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Raj Thackeray has just been arrested and is being driven to Vikroli for the court hearing. Now what? Let’s see. This titbit has enjoyed much more publicity in the past week in Mumbai than the falling temperatures, the art festival and all such mundane things as national news.

The television channels are running a continuous clip of him getting into the van and some twenty-odd (?) policemen getting in after him. One supposes even they are relieved to be able to air something other than,

*MNS chief to be arrested.*

and

*Raj Thackeray may be arrested.*

Viewers are also advised to be cautious since the city is on tenter-hooks, anticipating protests from his supporters. Well, we’ve been waiting for the axe to fall for a week now. Had this been pulled too long, we may as well have been bloody witnesses to protests against inaction.

It’s nearing five now and there’s no telling whether the roads now will fill up with angry protesters, violent mobs or petrified citizens on their way back.

The one thing I’m thinking now is - do the paranoid anti-terrorism campaigning superpowers know this feeling? Perhaps not - constant unease doesn’t make the same headlines that sporadic terror does.

The auto-rickshawalla who ferried me today interrupted my morning reverie with

Why are the shops not open yet? Has something happened in the night?

Of course he was from Uttar Pradesh, an uttar bharatiya, probably the one group that’s even more terrorized by organized politics than the Muslim community right now.

Congratulations, Mr.Thackeray, you’ve guaranteed yourself top-of-mind recall in the Mumbai mind for awhile to come. Uh, until someone else decides to play Big Bully in the Island Playground, that is.

So much of the colour at Kala Ghoda comes from not just the artists but the visitors as well. That little street is awash with colour. Art students display their fledgling works. Aspiring writers congregate with journalists. Photographers stroll around, cameras casually hung around their necks. Families wander around wonder and curiosity writ large on their faces. Busy corporate types step out to ‘catch the fest’, ties loosened around their necks and their reactions escaping from their normally controlled faces. Tourists bustle about, wide-eyed at the colour. Teenagers mill about, their natural energy, for once, shared by everyone in the crowd alike, age irrespective.

The different faces of the city walk around marveling at the sights. And at each other.

The festival seems to bring out the hidden artist in everyone as the visitors all sport their own brand of individual colour.

Art in its many forms is never as evident as it is in this part of the year. When you walk very close to one of the buildings, you can hear strains of music. As you pass, it gives way to announcements for a children’s event in the parking lot. A little furthur and the organisers are ushering participants into the next workshop or film. Look around and suddenly you’re very aware of art in daily life.

Art is about self-expression, isn’t it? And freedom. And power. And a wry sense of humour.

As you walk around, you marvel at how much beauty, how much raw energy there is, hidden deep inside the people you see every single day. And what happens when they let a bit of their colours show.

The art district of Mumbai is hosting a festival. Movies are being screened, workshops conducted, books discussed, plays (and other acts) staged. There is also a mela happening!

Don’t believe me?

Here is a potter. He beckons…come closer. A grinning imp, paint streaked across his face settles down to touch the clay.

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On Sunday, violence erupted in Mumbai (not again…). Taxi-drivers, paan-wallas and ‘outsiders’ (read UPites and Biharis) were the target of assault by frenzied MNS supporters. In an is-it-related-or-not incident, Amitabh Bachchan’s house was attacked the next day, spurred by resentment towards his move to set up a girls’ school in Uttar Pradesh rather than Maharashtra.

I was at home on Horror Monday (Can we call it that? - We’d probably have to name at least one day each month for the sundry episodes of communal clashes that errupt so frequently in this so-called cosmopolitan metropolis). The news channels had a field day running and re-running the clips of a taxi-driver being dragged out of his car and beaten to pulp and soundbytes with the public expressing their outrage at this breach of peace.

Yesterday a reader wrote to me saying that he’d dropped into my blog for news on this event and was disappointed to hear me talking about art and festivals instead. Point taken. I’m part of that unconcerned, educated upper-middle class elite that tut-tuts about the ruin our politicians are bringing to the country and then does nothing about it.

To be quite honest, I don’t know what to say. On one hand, we’ve gotten practically used to cricket pitches being dug up, shops shut down, bandhs called, trains delayed, people being beaten up by the saffron brigade. And then there’s the reality that the news channels rarely, if ever, cover the truth as is.

As a point of fact, I travelled across the city yesterday and today. For all purposes Mumbai is its usual bustling, thriving self. It’s like it might not have been at all.

And then I wonder, how does the driver of the taxi I’m in, feel? Is he really waiting for the signal to change or is he actually casting a wary eye around at would-be attackers? How about the doodhwala by whose doorbell ring we can set our alarm clocks? To be here at 5:30 a.m. I only wonder what time he’d have to get up. The much-maligned autorickshaw-wallas?

At the end of all that, I wonder, does it matter? Does the MNS or Shiv Sena before them really believe that they can ‘rid’ Mumbai of its outsiders? More likely, no one’s thinking or caring about that far into the future. It’s the here and now. Any publicity is good publicity, be it ever so blood-spattered.

And guess what - it’s the lower extremes that get the cut, like extensions getting pruned away. Who cares, they’ll grow back tomorrow! So while AB gets his security beefed up, our roads are awash with lingering fear writ large on the faces of nameless people who make this city run.

I’m just wondering if the welfare of Maharashtrians is the cause, is anyone thinking of what’s happening within the state? But I suppose dying farmers aren’t as catchy a story. So much easier to just grab a punching bag.

In a related aside, do read this post and the comments that follow. The image I’m carrying in my mind is of a fat goose that lays golden eggs. Everyone’s trying to get a piece of it and brush off everyone else’s hands..and so what if the goose is strangulated in the process?? That’s Mumbai.