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ShareSalaam Mumbai...
In a city with its share of fiscal challenges, here was a sight to savour: public money put to creative and equitable use. This weekend, at sunset, thousands of people walked, jogged or just lazed around on the almost-completed Marine Drive Promenade, a public space that for the past eighteen months or so, has been the habitat seemingly of bulldozers and the building industry.
But now this strip, (okay, the Queen's Necklace for the benefit of all those foreign visitors to our city), has been recast as a genuine public space. As expected, canoodling couples cuddled besides the walkers, joggers, senior citizens, and college students from the Churchgate area.
But here is my spot of the day: among this landscape of Mumbaikars, I spotted a celebrity billionaire chief executive of a Mumbai bank, Ipod-connected and in ironed tennis whites, taking his evening constitutional. Happily, amid the comfortable anonymity of the crowds lining this great and now improved democratic space, our citizen-banker looked totally at ease.
I grew up at a time when notions of school safety and accountability scarcely existed. Our playgrounds were a minefield of potential accidents, our school buses unsupervised and rusty, and we drank water straight from the school taps -- unfiltered and definitely contaminated. Yet somehow in those days there were fewer accidents and tragedies. The drowning of Harekrishna Singh last week in the pool of his suburban school has resulted in an out-pouring of office water-cooler discussions and parental hysteria. How do we ensure our children are safe in the face of school negligence?
What on earth has compelled man-child Sanjay Dutt to pack his love interest Manyata off to South Africa? On the eve of his sentencing for his role in the '93 Mumbai blasts case, the weekend media sensationally reported that the lovable but unthinking star wants to shield his partner from media glare, in the event of his possible incarceration, by securing for her a job in a boutique in far-away Johannesburg. Now, who will deliver the star's Tiffin to jail?
The Mumbai polices' tackling of drunken driving by allegedly 'sniffing' out offenders, is going to jack up sales of mouth fresheners, mints, gums and colognes on whose back Mumbai's party-hearties will post their sobriety. Gives the phrase 'smelling a rat' a whole new meaning!
A ten-year-old gets publicly harassed by young men in a jeep, and then mauled as she is dragged by the vehicle, and now lies traumatised in a hospital
fighting for her life. And we call that 'eve teasing?'
And no, the plot to kill Himesh Reshamiya was not hatched by a music lover.
