The Idea-smithy

I know someone whose mission statement has to be “Mujhse panga mat lena!” She fights off robbers single-handed, she champions the causes of Clean Mumbai, Feminism, Equal rights, Rakhi Sawant and Salman Khan. We love her anyway but for her kickass attitude, she gets the I Style! vote. And if you think I’m kidding, check out what she wears at home!! While most of us lounge in bathroom chappals, this lady shows off spikes on her slippers!!

And just in case you’re still wondering who I’m talking about, go say hi to the Gutsy Gal, queen of desi-bloggydom and Bollywood blog-rockstar.

The last fifteen days of summer!! Already the dark clouds have started gathering in the sky, heralding the onset of monsoon…very soon. *Sigh* Three months of muddy feet, browned clothes, greasy hair and the sniffles. The whole country thinks that rains are romantic and looks forward to the dark clouds with eagerness; I don’t. This isn’t a pretty city and it gets uglier in the rains. Trains stop, traffic stalls, roads flood and everyone’s passing colds to each other. Moreover it reminds me of that miserable time heralding the start of a new school year right after a delightful vacation. ‘Back to the grind’ is the overwhelming feeling I have right through Mumbai’s monsoon.

But today the sun shines and on Random Shuffle, I drift into the streams of

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, and I say it’s all right

Little darling, the smiles returning to the faces
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun and I say it’s all right

What spells summer better than aamras? Succulent golden-yellow mangoes with their insides scooped out and beaten to smooth consistency. Sweet, so sweet that you can put the sugar-can away.

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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It seems almost pathetic to call the sight of satellite dish antennae, scaffolding rods and TV aerials beautiful. But that’s what the skyline in Mumbai looks like. And even for a jaded, gritty city-zen, the freshness of that undefinable colour of light creeping up behind the buildings before the sun is mesmerizing.

And down below, in the heart of the darkness is that which distinguishes this from any other skyline. A small fire glowing, warming a faceless entity. Watchman? Slum-dweller? Milk shopkeeper? Just another one of those people who’re up and awake and keep the city bustling while some of us slumber in the city that never sleeps.

As all my friends move into matrimony and kid-bearing and generally ’settling down’, they acquire the other trappings of yuppies - investments! One of my friends thinks that real estate is the best option. So I accompanied her on a ‘window-shopping’ spree, scouting the city for the perfect place of land that she could call her own.

We ended up at Vasai Road. Yes, it has a station of its own on the Western line. What’s more, with the number of overhead bridges with twists and turns and forks, I thought we might have landed up in some future version of Mumbai without the crowds.

With all the snobbery of a middle-class suburbanite I always thought Vasai Road was a part of the ‘outskirts of Mumbai area’, this idea being accompanied by a vague image of dirt roads, cows and fields. Here’s what I found:

While the more fashionable addresses in Mumbai showcase their matchbox flats with parking for..oh, bicycles…we were taken around mini-townships with gardens, schools, walkways and even bungalows and penthouses. The roads were not all in great condition but well, can any part of Mumbai boast of these? At least there were trees! And broad roads!

As the city is progressively gobbled up by commercial buildings, living spaces seem to be moving furthur north to keep up with affordability. Obviously these will probably go the same way as Powai and Malad, getting congested and over-infested with the mall-culture. But for the time being Vasai Road proves to be a lovely haven of refuge from a maddening city.

On the other hand, the commute just might kill you if you work furthur south (which you most probably do considering I haven’t heard of too many offices in the Vasai area). The train ride was sheer madness, even by my hardened train-traveller standards. We had a good 25-minute wait for the train taking us back into terra firma. And by the time the train pulled up, the crowd was 20-deep to the door. It was another half an hour before we wriggled out, swearing off the adventure and taking an auto-rickshaw instead. The Mumbai autos with meters, I mean. My dread of the train was matched only by my first shock at having to travel in a Vasai Road auto-rickshaw without a meter! That’s a crime by Mumbai standards but ah, well we aren’t in Mumbai anymore are we? Not with those lovely roads and open skies, we aren’t!

I visited some friends at their fashionable south Mumbai address recently. Besides braving traffic snarls, congestions and pollution, we spent a good bit driving around looking for parking space. And then finally we had to get down and walk, party finery et al on a broken dog-path (not cow-path because there wasn’t room for any creature bigger than the solitary stray dog I almost fell over). When we finally got there, the house turned out to be a miniscule cubbyhole that seemed even tinier with the guests. And we had a great view of the peeling paint and cracked walls of the building opposite. Of note, the only reason my friends could afford to live in this ‘premium space’ was that their family had owned the flat for generations. Almost grotesque it is then that we continue to place a hellish value on…well, hell.

I guess if you don’t have to travel around too much, if you are a recluse who likes trees and open skies and broad roads, Vasai Road could be the place for you. The city’s madness is only about an hour away….by unmetered auto-rickshaws and crowded trains!

Or if you just need to get away from the madness every once in awhile and find some greenery and open skies, leave the metered madness of Mumbai behind and take a ride north-ward. My friends have invested there and it is to be hoped that their investment will pay off duly early enough for me to have my weekend getaway..before the rest of city discovers it and converges on it.

And finally, this may not be Oz after all, considering that it has an entry on Wikipedia! .

In a city that loves designers, it is always good to go back to the philosophy of raste ka maal saste mein! Take a walk down the street with me while I poke into the tinsel of GlamourTown.

Roti (food), kapda (clothing) aur makan (shelter)…so the dictat goes. Roti (and also naan, idli, dosa, pizza, pasta and pita) is available in an appetizing variety while the glitz and glamour of teeny-weeny kapdas dazzle us. But what of makan? Oh well….life is always something short of perfect. For now, we settle for ramming our fresh fruit purchases in with the bling-thing that we call an LBD (Little Bright Dress!)

This is one of the original ‘moll’s that stroked our wallets long before Atria, CrossRoad, R Mall and In Orbit. Set in the heart of a vegetable/fruit market, it always amuses me to see the rasta-Mumbai rub shoulders with wannabe cool.

But then beauty is always a booming business in showtown. Bangles, bracelets, armlets, necklaces, chains, pendants, rings, hoops, studs, navel-rings, lower-lip piercings, clips, bands, scrunchies, hair grips, henna tattoos…

Any teenager in the city will tell you that the coolest stuff is available off the streets. Who wants to fork out all that money for stuff the whole city is wearing when you can pick up one-of-a-kind trinkets at the numerous tables at every street corner? Self-confessed junk jewellery junkie that I am, I’ve often ended up buying clothes to match stuff that I picked off the roadside stalls!

And for the more intellectually inclined, the streets have something for you as well! For those of us who grew up with bookish tastes, this is an ode to those days of splashing preciously saved pocket-money on recycled and reprinted books. The wonderful (or perhaps not..) thing is that everything is a business in this city and every street-hawker, a master salesman. They may not have studied beyond class 5 but they’ll know the ‘latest, ekdum fast-moving’ authors, related genres and books of interest.

And finally, Mumbai even promises you a trip to the moon and back!!! Don’t you believe me?

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