Comment

The whole of urban India, and Mumbai especially, appears to like the idea of the Indo-US nuclear deal, according to a comprehensive survey done by this paper. This is hardly surprising.

The nuclear deal, as far as we can tell, appears to be quite reasonable. The person who doesn't like it is Prakash Karat, and he doesn't seem like the kind of person who Mumbai would understand. Mumbai and the US have been closely connected for years. It used to be a standing joke that this city looked westward towards its real spiritual home - Manhattan.

India was the mainland somewhere out there behind us; Mumbai was complete in itself, an island. Its natural affinity lay across the ocean. Or the Arabian Sea. Whatever. Just listen to Salman Khan speak. He comes from Bandra. He sounds like a peculiar hybrid of Carter Road and Park Avenue.

Many people in Mumbai speak with similarly weird accents, from neither this continent nor that nor any, as it happens. But the base note is always 'Amreekan'. The main exception to thiswas one South Mumbai gent who went to the US and came back with an English accent.But that's another story old plum (maybe he was a Bengali in disguise?).

And Mumbai had this patois, years before call centres were invented. You could blindfold someone and take him down Breach Candy and he wouldn't know which country he was in.

By the way, the Breach Candy accent is not to be confused with Colaba-speak, which sounds a bit like Goa and Rajasthan, where locals have been taught how to speak by foreigners. Mumbai doesn't need foreigners to get an accent: it just looks across the bay.

The lines outside the American consulate in Mumbai have always been longer than anywhere else and that's not only because the whole of Gujarat comes here to get their visas as well. Part of the reason could be that in Punjab they bypass the visa thing completely and just jump directly onto planes and ships, but that has nothing to do with my argument. People from the rest of India always came to Mumbai to "do shopping", which is a totally American and Friends thing to do.

Now there are shopping malls all over the country so you can do shopping anywhere but people in the rest of the country just assume that Mumbai's are better.

This is not even true - "New Dally's" are much, much better, but the image has stuck. Plus we have Bollywood, and that's like Hollywood, na? Hollywood's being in Los Angeles makes the New York connection a little tenuous, but then most people in South Mumbai have never heard of Bollywood, so it doesn't really matter. And it's all in America anyway.

Mumbai then has long approved of the US, long before this nuclear deal and since Mumbai's politics are not determined so much by left and right as by Bal Thackeray, Sharad Pawar and Murli Deora, who are all very good friends, we have no political directions either. So poor Prakash Karat would have no chance here over Manmohan Singh and there's no point complaining that Singh has sold us down the river. What river? Not that silly thing that floods every year, surely? We have the sea and it takes us straight to the West. The biggest loser, sadly, in this whole thing is the BJP, not Karat who wasn't a winner here anyway.

By fighting with the Shiv Sena and going against Pratibha Patil and now protesting against the US nuclear deal, the BJP has shot itself in the foot as far as Mumbai is concerned. We have no politics, but we have loyalties.

We would also, truth be told, like to be sure that we remain the only city in India that never has power cuts. And someone, somewhere hinted that this nuclear deal would do just that.

Email:b_ranjona@dnaindia.net