Mumbai — Urbs prima no more

Urbs primus in India — India’s premier city — was once a title that Mumbai wore with pride and a certain panache. Take a look around you now — even if you’ve never left the city, you might have an inkling that the rest of India has caught up. Even worse, overtaken it. Now they tell us we can never have a traffic system as well-coordinated as Bangalore’s, a bus transit system as efficient as Ahmedabad’s or even a metro service as underground as that in Kolkata or New Delhi. A couple of decades ago, you would have sniffed and scoffed that those weren’t even cities really — all right, Kolkata had been, but not for ages.

Now, instead, Mumbai is famous for paani-puri wallahs who relieve themselves in cooking pots. Of course, if you are a proud son of the soil, your first instinct is to rush out and bash all the paani-puri wallahs and other street food vendors. And as it happens, so many of them come from — gasp — North India. And yet, despite the disgust of watching a man urinate into a cooking pot, the whole idea of beating up vendors no longer catches the public imagination — few in Mumbai believe that the MNS has the magic formula to get Mumbai its mojo back. And even worse, there are now whispers and rumours that the whole urination thing was stage-managed to give a political party a stick with which to bash people it doesn’t like. The paani-puri wallah was paid to pee and… well, you get the picture. But it reeks of a political gimmickry which people have begun to see through.

So while the city’s political leaders appear to demonstrate a very odd grasp on reality, is it surprising that we are a city struggling to keep a collective head above the flood waters? Transport a mess? Check. Healthcare a disaster? Check. Education in the doldrums? Check. Housing impossible? Check. Open space invisible? Check. Nightlife missing in action? Check. Quality of life AWOL? Check. So what’s left?

And if someone says Bollywood, I shall cut off their head with a carving knife.

So why are some venerable sections of civil society surprised that thousands supported Anna Hazare and his anti-corruption movement? In the public outrage that followed the 26/11 terror attacks, Vilasrao Deshmukh lost his chief ministership because he took film director Ram Gopal Varma with him to look at the damage done to the Taj. Not because the attacks happened, but because people were sick of official callousness.

All the political parties who tried to get a toe-hold in at the meeting at the Gateway of India a week after the attacks were unceremoniously booted out. Maybe urbs primus in India burns with a slow fire?