A mascot for Mumbai

Salaam Mumbai...

A baby with 26 stab wounds on its body gets found in a Mumbai garbage dump, by a milk man on his morning rounds, and taken to a hospital to which he is admitted by caring doctors. He then becomes the subject of media attention, and soon, the center of a tussle between NGOs and couples wanting to adopt him.

Next thing you know, the wounds are sutured, he is photographed sleeping peacefully swaddled in a soft blanket and his mother is located. No one is surprised to find that he was born in an auto rickshaw or that he was abandoned out of despair and poverty.

The hospital names him Mrityunjay (the conqueror of death), the NGO he goes to calls him ‘Prince’, but I vote to simply call him ‘Mumbai’, because his story is so intrinsically a Mumbai one, and conjures up the entire city in its sweep: auto rickshaws, garbage dumps, milk men, the media, humanitarian NGOs and a rising from the wretchedness against all odds. Perhaps the city should adopt him as its mascot.

The imbecility of those who stormed into the JJ school of Art and stripped and humiliated a professor for allegedly ‘asking intimate questions’, doesn’t cease to amaze me. After this how on earth will those in charge of teaching Michelangelo’s nudes proceed? As for classes on painting nudes female forms - they’re obviously a thing of the past. I suppose we’ll just have to resign ourselves to the fact that the next generation of artists we produce will have no
expertise in drawing the human form.

What do you do when you’re commuting in Mumbai and find you’re the subject of intense interest to a fellow traveller, whose unabashed stare, bores holes in to your skin? A friend from London waggles his head and waves. I’m not so confident. I’ve tried a shy smile as a response only to find that it doesn’t quite cut it, and only ends up leaving the starer mortified. When will we be a city that has the confidence to greet strangers the way they do in London? For starters, even a tepid nod would do.

You must have chanced upon it on some one or the other’s caller tune. Since its release, the city has not quite got enough of ‘Eh Ganpat, Chal Daru La’ Mika Singh’s amazingly catchy and vivid ditty pictured on Viviek Oberoi in the film ‘Shoot Out at Lokhandwala’. With its raw beat, close- to- the -bone lyrics, its earthy rap rendition and its raunchy innuendo, it’s become the anthem of the some of most well-heeled South Mumbai baba log.

Just like white upper class kids in Manhattan and Hampstead cleave to their Puff Diddy’s and Five Cent’s, upper class brats in Mumbai finally have their own home grown gansta’ rap!

s_malavika@dnaindia.net