Mumbai now looks like sasta New York, it reveals wrong Indian way of doing things

Mumbai, in the last five years, has seen a construction boom that has changed its skyline. With skyscrapers dotting its coast, it now looks like New York and Hong Kong. But its beautiful skyline also hides something, a grimier and messy city that lives on the ground.

In Short

• Mumbai has a transformed and beautiful skyline now
• The city, however, remains a work in progress
• It also reveals we are good at big things, not so mindful of small matters

Last month, I twice took a flight from Delhi to Mumbai. It had been a while, or rather years, since I was in Mumbai last. So when I landed, and from my cab on the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, looked outside, I found the view different. In a good way. In a transformative way. In a way that shows the city is undergoing a metamorphosis. In a way that reflects new prosperity and fresh aspirations. With skyscrapers dotting the coast, Mumbai looked similar to Hong Kong, or New York. Surely, not quite there yet. But inching closer, changing itself to match the standards set by the Big Apple. Mumbai looked dazzling from the Bandra-Worli Sea Link.

It was close to midnight by the time the cab reached the hotel in Lower Parel. I checked, threw myself on the bed and slept. Next morning around 6, from the room somewhere high above the city, I looked at Mumbai anew. It was then I clicked this photo:

I sent it to a couple of friends, writing: “Sasta New York.” I didn’t think much of it until one of these friends confronted me. Why sasta New York, they asked. It sure damn looks as good as New York.

It does kind of. They have a point.

But it is a sasta New York because, if you look at the photo, it is made up of two ideas: There is a Mumbai that floats among clouds, dazzling in the golden sun every evening. And then there is another Mumbai, as you can see in the image, made up of shanties and buildings darkened by moss, soot, and time. These are the buildings that share a crowded space on the ground, they dot roads and pathways carved haphazardly, roads and pathways that overflow with waste from choked drains and millions of people struggling to survive. The city still offers similar sights that greeted V S Naipaul in 1962, the sights that made him write “India, the world’s largest slum” in An Area of Darkness. Of course, Mumbai skyline might look like that of New York. But it’s an imitation, a city that copies the shell but not the substance of New York. It is sasta New York.

Now, before you throw that Roman proverb — which is not Roman at all — at me and tell me that Rome wasn’t built in one day, let me clear something: I like how Mumbai is transforming itself. I hope that in another five years it won’t be an imitation of what we consider a developed and modern city. It will be one.

But that photo I clicked also shows something more than a mere snapshot of a city. It shows the way we in India tend to go about doing things, the wrong way of doing things. We master the big, we wrestle with things that are much more difficult while ignoring the basics. Or as Naipual wrote, “In India, the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore was the most obvious.”

Take, for example, the Mumbai skyline. It looks glorious. You look at it, and it makes you feel chuffed and pleased, it gives you an impression that we — that Mumbai — has arrived on the world scene. No wonder its photos go viral so often on Instagram. Creating such a skyline is no easy task. Very few cities have it. The problem, however, is that despite this glittering and dazzling skyline — a big achievement — the city of Mumbai fails at fixing more mundane and basic problems. The problem of sanitation, for example. It fails to fix the problem of dingy roads, broken pathways, and lack of basic amenities for the majority of its population. It still fails to offer a dignified life to millions of its people.

In any other place, which aspires to be a world-class city, the basics are taken care of first. Water, air, public amenities, traffic, roads, housing, the architecture and the layout — these are fixed first before the city starts on its skyscraper spree. The beginning is made not from the middle or the end, but from the beginning. First the ground is fixed, then come the ivory towers. But Mumbai seems to be doing it in reverse. First the towers, then the roads.

It is not just Mumbai. India, by and large, follows the same pattern, the same wrong way of doing things. Look at the Jewar airport. A mammoth undertaking, it is finished. But it doesn’t have a good road or rail network to feed it; work on them is beginning only now.

India always aspires for the top and in most cases achieves it, but that achievement comes at the cost of the beginning and middle.

The country scripts its stories by starting with a conclusion. India has a space programme that would make most developed countries jealous. But India still, although things have improved, doesn’t have a manufacturing base for goods its citizens need on a daily basis. We have one of the best rail networks in the world but piss-poor trains that run on a bhagwan-bharose schedule. We have world-class colleges and universities, from IITs to IIMs, but we don’t have good schools for the majority of kids. We have institutions like AIIMS but we don’t have good universal healthcare. We have built Gurgaon and Bengaluru with world-class offices but we don’t have a functional drainage system in our cities. We have achieved surplus in power generation and we even export some of it but we have such a shoddy power distribution network that most of our cities suffer power cuts.

Even at the top, like the utmost top, we have a fairly robust constitution and a democratic system of government. It is so good that billions of people in the world living under despotic rules feel envious of it. And yet, despite our lofty achievements in creating a democratic country, we fail at basic governance. We have a glorious parliament, but we have been unable to create a system that makes politicians accountable to people. We have good laws but no enforcement.

The rest of the world, or at least the world that the growing Mumbai aspires to, tends to do things differently. People start from basics and then build their edifice, their modern temples and factories and institutions, by putting brick after brick on the solid ground. One plus one equals two and so they build. In India, we directly jump to ten. We often succeed in achieving that ten even if beneath it there is nothing but hollow ground.

When we achieve ten we also tend to beat our chest in triumph, loudly proclaiming how much we have achieved. And probably this loudness is needed because if we don’t shout our big achievements, we will hear muffled and sad murmurings from the ground, from the masses who despite our big achievements continue to live their life without access to basic comforts and amenities. We now have a skyline but we don’t have a life that people in cities like New York take for granted. It’s a pity really because it makes our successes, and there are many of them, come across as that of sasta variety.

- Ends