Column

The chief peril of growing old, for me, is an eternal sense of déjà vu. That is, everything seems to have happened before, especially when people tell me that it’s been happening for the first time.

Like I will read a newspaper article about how humans have had sex for the first time or the television will tell me, gasp, revelation, dogs can and do bark. I start to feel very old because I have a feeling that humans have had sex from before newspapers were invented and dogs used to bark before television.

I am not old enough to know about life before newspapers were invented, but I can safely conjecture that sex did take place before that.

Therefore, when some youth tells me, gasp, revelation, Marine Drive is an important part of the Mumbai landscape, I do not know whether to laugh or cry. I do know however that what has happened to Marine Drive since my youth (heh heh heh) is a bit of a tragedy.

This has nothing to do with déjà vu - the past exists only to point to the fact that the present has got it wrong. The new paving has not worked. The killing of the existing trees is unfortunate. Half the newly planted saplings have also died. So have the plants that surround the bus stops. Someone has now draped agro-netting over the plants at the bus stops, which seems too little too late.

All in all, for vast stretches, Marine Drive now looks like an exemplary sad, lost promenade. What still looks good is the sea. That, so far, is not because of human invention or intervention. Contrary to what the newspapers or television might tell you, the sea existed before they did, possibly even before sex did.

But Marine Drive is no longer what it was and for this, we have to fairly and squarely blame ourselves for letting the authorities get away with it. Someone (us, you, we, me, they) should have cried foul when the whole stretch was being fouled up. But no, we waited and now we’re wailing. Or should be.

There are those who will tell you that Mumbai is not what it used to be and therefore Marine Drive is not as important as it thinks it is. To use an old-fashioned word: Bollocks. If you don’t get Marine Drive, you don’t deserve to be here.

It ought to be like the infamous Tebbit test to check the loyalties of British immigrants: You like Marine Drive, you can live in Mumbai. The rest of you can go back to wherever you came from and leave us to wail and fret about what’s gone wrong.

Pick of the week
Everyone tells me that it ought to be that show where some sundry weirdos, losers and posers are stuck together in a house and we all watch what happens to them.

I tried last year and the truth is that I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. I stretched my TV set’s volume to the max, my neighbours complained and I still couldn’t understand. So I can’t watch it.

Every morning, my cabbie tells me about the general upshot (he looks about 95 so I guess his TV has a better sound system than mine or I need to go to an ENT) and even that bores me. The Olympics were better. And now the US Open starts. Sorry boss.
b_ranjona@dnaindia.net