Flooded and Frozen Mumbai

Flooded and Frozen

NO! It's not about water or a river. It's not cool either. What you will get to read in this write up is just hot turmoil.

4th May 2010, it was the day when 70 lakh mumbaites spent their day on the road, roads with molten tar. An international megacity came to a grinding halt for 36 hours.

It was indeed a sunny bitchy day. Streets were flooded with people and machines. For a change, there were no traffic snarls that day. The simple reason being, the whole of Mumbai was snarled under the scorching heat, and each Mumbaikar bathed in sweat for hours at a stretch. People halted all over, signal or no signal with gruesome helplessness as they gnarled at every other misfortuned.

The world might say there's a lot of moolah in Mumbai. Why not? Yes. It's immense. Mumbai is not all about its money. At last, much of sweat is there too. A cocky mumbaikar's pride is not in his advanced lifestyle, but in his suffering.

Mumbaikar is brave. He flaunts his bravery... Bravery - in moving on with a bleeding broken heart... moving on by clinging outside the windows of trains...He can face every unpredictable event, but cannot bear one halting him. That day too, he kept patience. He crawled, but moved on.

That's why I love Mumbai.

Here, life and death keep running parallel. Life - mocking at death, skipping every trap set by misfortune...laughing at the meekness of both, life as well as death.

And then there is also the "roaring silence" of the seashore that sways every evening, ditching all betrayals...belittling the ocean by ignoring his threats of swallowing them...despite knowing how the traitor engulfs the prey stealthily!

A salute to the mumbaites for their tough muscle-minded mien.