Column

Salaam Mumbai...

Adnan Patrawala liked fast cars, gaming parlours and making friends on Orkut we are told. If the GenX and its emergence in liberalised India required a symbol, could there be anything more apt than this young man and his tragic unrealised life? If this tragedy raises any questions, surely one of them is our preparedness to embrace certain lifestyle pursuits Clearly for instance, social networking sites work better in homogenised societies than in inequitable ones and all those teens who’ve bared their souls on virtual platforms need to rethink their candor in the context of a Mumbai where the friendly neighbourhood gangster is a very real proposition.

This tragedy also brings to surface the interesting geographical and generational realities: the parents of Adnan’s friends accused of his murder come across on TV as regular everyday citizens, with no pretensions to glamour or fast lives. And yet, their progeny have been revealed to be denizens of another lifestyle. Then again, a Mumbai that was not until recently associated with lifestyle excesses has spawned this story, more typical of a South Mumbai rigour.

This is the new Mumbai that we are coming to grips with. As a heavily cologned diamond dealer from Antwerp said to me the other day: “All the money is in Malad and places like it. I recently sold a pair of solitaires for Rs21 crore. It’s the new areas that are spending their recently acquired money on acquiring old
assets like property, cars and diamonds!”

With the arrests of Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves, the community of Roman Catholics in Mumbai, once regarded as the last bastion of the peaceful and mild, has acquired a militant air. But for those of us in Mumbai who have attended Catholic schools and have been acquainted with activist lawyers who dedicate their lives to the empowering of the disfranchised, people such as Ferreira and Gonsalves appear to be familiar and thus less likely to be malign.

Certainly on the face of it, their trajectories-a flirtation with priesthood, attendance at some of the city’s best regarded colleges and residences in the western suburbs, make them seem more like idealistic and academically-inclined citizens than the dangerous Naxals that the police say they are.

Ronen Sen now says that his ‘headless chicken’ remark was meant for his friends in the media. If that is so, then hacks should take comfort in the fact that they have been upgraded from their usual position as running dogs of the establishment! Incidentally the Opposition MPs baying for his blood have thought nothing of accusing him of far more awful acts than the skittering of decapitated birds: working for the US, and selling out his country for instance!

s_malavika@dnaindia.net