Maratha Mandir matinee is a metaphor for a meandering Mumbai As the non-stop screening of the iconic movie enters a world record 850th week, Siva Sankar ponders if this is really an achievement or a sign of the times
I went to the Mumbai Central’s Maratha Mandir cinema (where Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge or DDLJ, has been lighting up the big screen for close to 850 weeks non-stop, a world record) expecting to find no more than a handful of hardcore Shah Rukh Khan fans, maybe a few weirdos / depressives, an odd Bollywoodcurious foreigner on a tourist visa. Instead, a surprise greeted me in the form of some 300-400 people of all age-groups, genders and classes. And this on a bright, pleasantly cool, refreshingly smog-free late January Friday morning — traditionally, the day when new Bollywood movies are released! Are new flicks so bad that people still prefer DDLJ? Be that as it may.
Little did I realise that Mumbai had another surprise in store for me the next day. The Saturday afternoon saw no more than 100 book-lovers at the celebrated annual Strand book sale near Churchgate. Just a few days earlier, a colleague wrote how hordes of frantic shoppers descended on Spanish high street fashion retailer Zara’s discount sale as soon as it opened at Lower Parel.
And a few weeks before, Mumbaikars gave the cold shoulder (or a lukewarm response, if you will) to Anna Hazare whose efforts to slay corruption had been attracting worldwide recognition.
Has Mumbai become a mega-village of zombie-like denizens, awake but not fully conscious, on auto-pilot, in denial? Or, are they wise enough not to even think about, leave alone protest against, the deplorable, chaotic and primitive state of their beloved (?) metro? And smart enough to escape into time-tested, mood-elevating fantasy from the mind-numbing reality of the ‘maximum metro’?
In Mumbai, time seems to stand still. To an outsider, it would appear as if people here have developed a cosy relationship with the state of changelessness.
Four key aspects of Mumbai have not changed at all since the time DDLJ was released 15 years back. One, absence of clean, odour-free, dust-free air. Two, absence of litter- and garbage-free streets and public spaces. (It is as if no one here is aware that the rest of the world has moved on to concepts likerubbish bins, garbage disposal and waste management.) Three, absence of pothole-free, smooth roads with proper signboards and lane markings, with sensible, lane-bound, horn-averse vehicle drivers.
And four, absence of civil people with civic sense who don’t spit, urinate, litter, abuse, jostle, fart… in public spaces, people who don’t routinely violate city rules and laws. These four key aspects — of course, there are many others as well, like the quality of suburban commutes — have remained constants, like DDLJ at the Maratha Mandir.
That Mumbai is caught up in a time warp is stating the obvious. That in itself is not a cause for concern though. Not just individuals, cities and nations that live perpetually in a state of denial abound on this planet. For instance, British citizens living in interior cities and towns still believe that the Empire is alive, a force to reckon with in the global scheme of things (even though reality is that within Europe, France and Germany have long upstaged their traditional economic rival).
But what definitely appears to be a cause for concern is the attitude of both natural and naturalised middle-class Mumbaikars (the former being the sons and daughters of the soil while the latter are the immigrants from other states who have made Mumbai their second home and seem to embody the mythical ‘Mumbai spirit’ more than long-time Mumbaikars themselves).
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