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A city is not just a collection of bad infrastructure and spectacular heritage (or this city, at any rate). It is also an aggregate of many communities. I don’t mean this in a way that the Shiv Sena or the Samajwadi Party or the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena might. I mean the other collections of people who share their interests, their lives and their activities.

For instance, last week, I attended a delightful evening of burlesque dancing at a trendy eatery in Mumbai’s mill area. Performances were by the teachers and students of a local belly-dancing class and it was for women only. Put baldly like this, it sounds a bit precious and put on but in fact it was great fan. The only men present were the bartenders whose eyes popped out as the women put on a sweet but occasionally risqué show. To be part of a group of women letting their hair down — minus bitching and a beauty parlour — was an invigorating experience.

The mill area also had another trendy event - a mill crawl - which I did not attend, because it sounded oh-so-fake, like blinged-out socialites being told, ‘Oh look, there’s a poor mill worker out of job and home,’ ‘that was once a chimney’ and ‘that’s the local delicacy - boiled spiced potatoes fried in a gram flour batter and served with a cilantro chutney and a dry garlic and red chilli chutney in a locally made bun’. If you live in Mumbai and the mill area is unknown to you, you are not a Mumbaikar. It’s that stark. But could be that I’m wrong and may be it was a sensitive and tasteful experience.

There’s also another group that’s forming — and this is ever since RR Patil came back as home minister — of women who get raided by the police in their own homes for listening to music. Shri Patil, we know of old, may not be very strong in his Hindi idioms or in dealing with terrorists. But he is very emphatic in his view that women should not dance, drink, listen to music and so on in public and now it turns out, in private as well. Oh wait, am I confusing him with Shri Muthalik of the Sri Ram Sene? Maybe not, Shri Patil goes further and wants to ban alcohol in six districts of Vidarbha so that farmers stop committing suicide. So far everyone thought the suicides were about big debts accumulating after crop failure. The home minister knows better — it is alcohol.

But I digress out of Mumbai. The taxi driver I took the other day said that in spite of being a Maharashtrian, he hired only North Indians as drivers. When I argued that this sounded racist, he shrugged and said that they worked harder. Well… maybe that’s another group forming in the city? Employers of the Other?