BY TARA NARAYAN

FOOD FOR thought! I’ve come back from Mumbai which was Bombay feeling like a mall rat or a mall moll (as the hubby puts it)! All one needs to feel at home in Mumbai is lots and lots of money to spend for the city itself is like a mega mall and leaves one with a desire to shop and shop till one drops dead. The ultimate material metro has arrived and I’m not sure how much I love or hate it! Certainly I don’t love it for life suddenly seems to be revolving around youth and their money power to buy, buy and buy, it makes me feel so old for I can’t compete in all the shopping around!

Somewhere there I was asking myself what do I want to shop till I drop dead anyway…shopping is a disease in Mumbai and I’ve friends who hate to visit malls for shopping, seeing a film at one of the attached multiplex auditoriums and hanging around in one of the designer lounges for some rest and recreation over fine tea, coffee, chocolate or cocktails mock or alcoholic…pretending to be ladies or gentlemen of leisure. Out on the noisy, polluted, frustrating streets it may be an aam aadmi’s Mumbai but in the sprawling, brightly lit malls with their international and national goodies, it’s very definitely a khaas aadmi’s Mumbai … some of my friends have become mall rats! A girlfriend of old whom I’ve lent a shoulder to weep on when she was young and married to a sob with three young children to bring up (all grown up and scattered now)… has quit her very remunerative but stressful job (at the beck and call of her high profile employer 24 x7) with no regrets. It seems to me that she now sells her old homes to buy new ones profitably in the distant Western suburbs of Mumbai!

In suburban Mumbai “re-development” is an emerging phenomenon whereby old tacky crumbling housing complexes make way for newer high rise and fancier apartment blocks all the time … and developers will pay Rs.2 crore plus for a resident to quit a two bedroom apartment purchased ten or 15 years ago for Rs.12 or Rs.15 lakhs. Says the friend, “I’m going to buy another apartment which I will rent… while I myself will live in a rented apartment in Juhu so that I can live close to Juhu beach where I love to go for a morning walk!” Even if she puts away a crore in fixed deposits for a generous monthly income, she can live in style. A one time girl from village Bihar who found it challenging to speak in English, she’s now matured into a seasoned savvy POT (pretty old thing), forever looking out for companions to have some fun with. Needless to say much of the looking for fun with like minded friends goes on in one of the innumerable well appointed mall lounges of Mumbai. Don’t call them restaurants… pur… leeze!

ENTERTAINMENT CITY

I THOUGHT my friends would entertain me in Mumbai (seeing that I entertain them when they come to Goa). Alas, this friend kind of conned me into entertaining her to a mall outing to see the latest film from Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan’s My Name is Khan…she said, “I’ve got no cash on me, only a credit card… will go to an ATM later on!” Before I quite realised it I’d paid Rs.650 plus for two tickets for the film, and she in turn bought a huge box of popcorn tossed in stale butter and caramel and treated me later to a mug of fine Darjeeling tea at one of the R & R lounges at the multiplex. Meaning she spent much, much less than I did! Hanging around at the lounge she tried to tempt me to attend a Rs.15,000 paid for party organised by a friend “where we will drink and party with other singles and doubles and have a good time… come on, you’re a big girl now and you don’t have to go home at 9 pm!”

I had to tell her I don’t have that kind of money for partying around with her coterie of racy mall friends (who have wealthy boyfriends and drive around in the latest car models)…and some of them have terrible background stories to tell of family breakups and how exactly life’s depressing experiences have turned them into hardboiled, cynical old-timers of the world, with little left to do except to look for momentary fun in every which way they can. Don’t laugh, most of them divide their time between beauty spas (don’t call them beauty parlours!) and cruising around in malls and partying. I found myself asking an old-fashioned question: Do “bad” girls go everywhere while “good” girls go nowhere? What’s “bad” and “good”? I don’t want to judge women of my generation who’ve had more than their fair share of indefinable hard knocks in life… in fact, I feel like cheering them on!

But the old Bombay I loved has changed into a Mumbai which is bigger, more bad and more sad… big-time. And Goa is small, bad and sad… trying desperately to catch up with Mumbai! I always come back from Mumbai which was Bombay with a mixed bag of feelings, but the first thing I do after getting out of Dabolim airport is take a deep breath of pure pleasure. In Mumbai one stops breathing or so to speak. In Goa life is still worth breathing in both material and immaterial ways. From the air Mumbai looks like a mega cancerous city. Closer home in Goa a bird’s eye view reveals that Goa too is going the hard, concrete, cancerous way. And so are we, my friends — just take a look at the exploited, humiliated, tortured rivers of Goa from the air… the arteries of Goa are dying and who’s doing anything about it???

MORE food for thought! One always ends up seeing films in Mumbai and I ended up seeing My Name is Khan twice over (paying for two friends!) and on my own I made it for Rann (all about how the media loses its credibility when instead of fighting a system catering to the never ending want and greed of the khaas aadmi it becomes a part of the system) and the English Avatar (a glorious 3-D back and forth in time modern fairy tale of a film with the evergreen moral message that life better not be about exploitation, humiliation and torture in the worst sense of the words)… hey, they’re all films for our times. Some say My Name is Khan is over-hyped but I don’t - it offers some powerful insight into how the 9/11 tragedy has impacted the Muslim world and the story unfolds through the eyes of love, an unforgettable love story. Make time to see all three films, my friends!