Column

Why should you care about the city? Just mind your business

News about the humanity index coming from most Indian urban centres offers a disturbing catalogue of turpitude and, worse, amorality.

An affluent Gurgaon couple tortures their household help, a small girl, as most neighbours tend to their EMIs and pack their school-going children’s lunch boxes.

A man in Chennai is battered by college mates, even as the police blankly watch the assault. The cops were waiting for the principal’s permission to stop the hammering of someone too far gone to even yelp. In Mumbai, we have no time to record any horror: the resilient Mumbaikar hops from one gutted taxi to the next to reach the office on time.

The problem with Mumbai, it seems to me, is not apathy but sanctimony. A true story, related by a friend about his colleague, will illustrate the point. My friend’s colleague, let us call him Kapil, used to live alone in a luxury apartment complex in Malad. K

apil is a software guru and spends most of his waking hours at his workstation. He sleeps for only a few hours, which was the time he used to spend at his Malad apartment, plus a few hours for everyday drudgery like shaving and breakfast. His neighbours found him quiet and non-interfering, and therefore an ideal member for their housing society.

Then one day, Kapil decided to invite a few friends over for a little get-together because the day happened to be his birthday. At some stage during the party, somebody cranked up the volume of the music system and some neighbour summoned the security warden to complain. The warden rang Kapil on the intercom and the volume was immediately turned down. The rest of the evening went agreeably for Kapil and his neighbours.

Yet the next day, Kapil got a notice from the housing society. It was signed by all members and expressed displeasure over the nuisance he had caused. In the end, the notice articulated the hope that he would be more sensitive to the codes of decency in the future.

Kapil was thunderously angry and decided to move out. My friend, who was recounting the tale, said Kapil was shaken because the society had picked on him for a trivial transgression while it tolerated a wife-beater, simply because he had kept his abuses quiet.

“Everybody from the security guy to the maids knew this man would pummel his wife,” my friend quoted Kapil as saying. “Even I saw her swollen, bruised face and complete hopelessness in her eyes when I happened to run into her one day in the elevator.”

That, in short, is Mumbai’s attitude: if my ears are besmirched by Jimi Hendrix, I will sue you. But if you are vile on the sly, it is not my problem.

It is fitting to close this with Martin Niemöller’s poem on apathy. Niemöller did not bother much about the Nazis till they became a personal bother. Here is the poem: “… they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist/And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist/And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew/And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”
raghu@dnaindia.net