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The city gets an award for being India’s best mega city. What does this say for India’s other cities, when Mumbai is in such a mess? For old-timers, it seems like the city is going from bad to worse. Once it was the coolest, most with it, least bothered city in the country. Now, it’s dirty, crowded, petty, stinking and if we pay attention to the global warming doomsday wallahs, sinking as well. Mega what exactly?

Of course, we understand the award is because Mumbai has more under-construction sites than any other place in the world, except possibly the now hapless and helpless Dubai. At least we do not artificially reclaim islands in the shape of a palm tree off our coast. But we have our fair share of cockamamie schemes to hold our own. (Case in point: whatever is being dug up, dug out, destroyed and fought over in your neighbourhood.)

The statue in the sea is not yet more than a glint in a couple of eyes, but soon we’re going to have our new crop of skyscrapers, our various kinds of railways, even more bridges and flyovers and all kinds of redevelopment.

And that’s the boring nuts and bolts stuff which is going to make us khallas, even while we’ve lost the ability to be bindaas. Where is it, that ‘don’t care, doing my own thing’ spirit? It jumps up in little spurts and bursts but when you need it — like that day one year after the terror attacks — it’s missing. Instead, you get a made-up, carefully constructed version of the Mumbai spirit. It’s not ‘don’t care’; it’s caring by corporate control with some government help thrown in along the way. It is a sort of public-private partnership of fake mourning; just like all our flyovers.

If this is the future, then is it time to get off the carousel? Mumbai is already in danger of losing its cool city status and this means that India will be left bereft! It will become a city as faux as all the air kisses of the fake people in the colour pages of the newspapers. We need to get back our street smarts, give the fakes a thumb’s down and get back to doing what we were once best at — being bindaas, being ourselves. Or, it’s khallas.