Mumbai mirror

Whenever disaster strikes Mumbai, as it seems to again and again, we mouth platitudes about the city’s resilience, its fight. We expect it to dust itself off and start again. We have big expectations of this city; we feel its joys and sorrows keenly. After all, we like to think of ourselves as modern, and this was once the metropolis that exemplified Indian modernity. So, seeing Mumbai devastated and brought down feels personal no matter where you’re from. Personal because it’s a part of us: we go to big cities seeking our private grails. Mumbai, like all great cities, invites identification; it is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Of course much of this is wish-fulfilment. Much like the splendid old façade of the Taj Mahal Hotel, that hybrid, generous conception of Bombay has taken a body blow. From repeated terrorist attacks or from the provincial pettiness of its politics, there have been attempts to serially diminish Mumbai. Even as the city reels from this shock, we know this is not the first time that the great thrumming engine of the metropolis has been under attack — from communal anger, from natural disaster, from the malevolent energies of its own citizens scrabbling over its spoils.

Soon, normality will reassert itself in Mumbai. Trade and art and entertainment and commerce and everyday life will resume. People will move on, because what else is there to do? But events like this can simultaneously bring out the best and worst in us — in days to come, will the city we’ve all thought of as ours react out of insecurity or out of strength? It could retreat into a fearful shell, to fortify its frontiers and react with wariness; but what we want is for it to stand up and square its shoulders, and refuse to relinquish its freedoms. Once again, Mumbai will have to bear the weight of our outsized expectations.

Source: indianexpress.com