Mumbai behind in Monopoly race

Mumbai’s real estate market is blazing-hot, as anyone can tell, with valuations that exceed even the best that Manhattan offers.

But in the race to get itself listed as a valuable property market on the board game Monopoly, Mumbai is currently at a lowly 46th place, behind many leading world cities.
With just 10 days to go for an online vote to end, Mumbai risks falling off the board, so to speak, unless its netizens wake up and start voting. To vote, you need to go to monopolyworldvote.com, and register; you can vote everyday for up to 10 cities a day.

The world edition of Monopoly, due out in August, will feature 22 cities, chosen on the basis of valid votes cast in the online ballot. On the main board of 68 pre-selected cities, there’s only one city from India: Mumbai.

However, another Indian city, Chennai, is on the list of 20 wildcard city nominations, votes for which open on February 29.

Hong Kong, which  too lays claim of being  a vibrant property market, is also at risk of losing its place on the Monopoly board. It is currently  at 21st place, behind Kyiv in Ukraine (18th place) Riga in Latvia (4th place).

The top three slots are  currently taken by Istanbul, Montreal and Cape Town.   

The week gone by has been a breathless one in Hong Kong, with more than a thousand lurid pictures of Canto-pop stars and actors making it into the public domain in trickles, leaving the region’s police, who tried ham-handedly to put a lid on it, red-faced with embarrassment.  

Since my computer was acting up with what an engineer graphically described as “digital arthritis”, I was pretty much resigned to sitting out this scandal. But thanks to kindly Chinese friends who felt that my sedate life needed some enrichment, I got more than a passing glimpse of the anatomically explicit pictures.

And I have to say, after a dispassionate appraisal of the anecdotal evidence, that I was struck by several aspects of the protagonists’ psychological bent of mind.  

First, that Edison Chen, the actor with the ravenous sexual appetite and a string of contortionist partners, appears to be having an out-of-body sexual experience.

In the middle of even the most intimate sexual acts, Chen isn’t exactly in the throes of passion.

Rather than savouring the moment, he is overly busy filming it — possibly for delayed gratification of a sort that my simple mind cannot readily come to grips with. 

And as for the bimbettes who allowed themselves to be filmed en flagrante derelicto in poses  unbeknownst to man (and who now find their careers and marriages on the rocks), just what were they thinking?