AND A few stray thoughts for yet another Sunday. From Bombay which is now Mumbai. Not cosmopolitan Mumbai, which Bombay was, but Mumbai of the Marathi manoos, where those who do not know Marathi may not get a taxi licence. Where even making statements that Mumbai belongs to all of India can get you into trouble. Indeed, Mukesh Ambani may face a boycott because at an international forum he declared that Mumbai and indeed all the metropolitan cities like New Delhi and Chennai and Bengaluru belonged not only to all Indians, but to all citizens of planet earth. Which might get him into trouble not only with Bal Thackeray but possibly even the fanatics and lunatics in Chennai and Kolkatta and Bengalaru.

The problem of inclusiveness and exclusiveness is not limited to Mumbai, which was Bombay. It has spread to every city and every state which has migration problems. With an estimated 55 percent of the population of Goa now comprising of migrants, it will not be long before one has a sense of the soil agitation in Goa also. The tension between the Marathi manoos and the others in Mumbai is intensified or compounded by the fact that it has become politicised. The Congress or rather the Yuvraj of the Congress, Rahul Gandhi, has entered the fray to take on the Shiv Sena and its various factions. The BJP is sitting on the fence. The NCP cannot make up its mind whether it is politically more expedient to support Bombay or Mumbai. But residents of Mumbai are more than a little nervous. They are apprehensive that if Rahul starts a war with all the Thackerays, they may get caught up in the middle. So there are a lot of middle class Mumbaikars, including well settled middle class Marathi manoos who think it is time to get out of Mumbai.

NO DIFFERENCE

EVEN a Marathi manoos icon like Sachin Tendulkar has not been forgiven for insisting that he is an Indian first and then a Maharashtrian. It doesn’t matter very much to the bold and the beautiful and the rich and the powerful whether they support the Shiv Sena stand on the Marathi manoos or not. They can always shift their residence to Goa, as many of them have done. Or to London or New York or Paris. The only ones who do not have a choice are the millions of underprivileged migrants who have made Mumbai their home and continue to come to Mumbai to chase their dreams of becoming bold and beautiful and rich and powerful. And the UP bhaiya news vendors and the Bihari taxi drivers and the Punjabi dhaba wallahs would much rather that the politicians keep out and leave them alone to fight their own battles. Indeed every time a Laloo Prasad or a Mulayam Singh makes a statement defending the constitutional right of Indians to live in any part of the country, the migrants risk further retaliation from the lunatics and the fanatics. The migrants, both long settled and recent, know that whether it is Mumbai or Bombay, the city cannot do without them. So they are quite secure about their place in the city.

AND a few stray observations on the perceptions of Goa in Mumbai. Goa is no longer seen as a weekend holiday destination to de-stress. Goa no longer is looked upon as the paradise where stressed out Mumbaikars can go for R & R and rejuvenate themselves. Goa is no longer perceived as the land of the sun, sea and sand, and a hard partying destination. On the contrary, every one appears to be endorsing Mickky Pacheco’s claim that between Ravi Naik and Digamber Kamat Goa has become the rape capital if not the world at least in India. Wherever one goes and whomsoever one visits, the first question which is asked is about the rapes. On earlier visits friends and acquaintances alike were more interested in knowing about property prices in Goa and which was the most reasonable hotel to spend the weekend in. Even within the hotel industry there is concern if not panic about the Goa properties of the major hotels chains in the country.

GOA’S IMAGE

HALF jokingly and half seriously, when a leading hotel chain was trying to decide on the best image or picture to symbolise Goa in their corporate brochure a senior executive wondered whether they should carry an image of rape. Parents of nubile daughters are no longer very enthusiastic about sending off their daughters on an ‘unchaparoned’ holiday to Goa. Fear stalls the mind of most Mumbaikars when they think of vacationing in Goa. Never mind that there have been few or any cases of domestic tourists being sexually molested or raped in Goa. This may probably be because domestic tourists who are molested hush it up and do not approach the media or even the police, given the social ramifications of admitting to being molested or raped. Unlike phirangis who are outraged and insist on following through cases of rape and molestation. In fact, the reason why cases of Russian victims get such wide publicity is because of the lawyer, Vikram Verma, who doubles up as a representative of the Russian consulate, who probably has a vested interest in seeking the widest media attention for cases of molestation and rape of foreign nationals.

To give him the benefit of doubt, he probably rightly believes that the police and the local administration will not act unless the media and the preferable the international media takes up the issue. The bitter ground reality is that both the Home Minister and the Chief Minister are really totally indifferent not only to cases of rape and molestation but even dacoities and burglaries. The ground reality is that the Home Minister has long since abdicated and his only interest is allegedly to find out how much money he can extort from the drug mafia. It is not as though there are no rapes or cases of sexual molestation in London or Moscow, or for that matter Mumbai or Delhi. The difference in Goa is that the police are criminally casual about acting on complaints of molestation and rape. One does not know about the future of charters in Goa. But if the state government continues to be indifferent to the safety of tourists both domestic and local, Goa will cease to be a significant tourist destination. No Mumbaikar is likely to want to holiday in Goa if there is even a remote risk that his teenage daughters may be molested, raped and even murdered on Goa’s beaches.

POOR INFRASTRUCTURE

AND a few stray observations on how failure to create proper infrastructure for growing populations is a great leveller. It does not matter whether you are a khaas aadmi or an aam aadmi in Mumbai. Everyone goes through an equal amount of trauma commuting to work. The aam aadmi may have to rough it out in overcrowded suburban trains and buses. But it is not necessarily true that the khaas aadmi is much better off. You may have a Mercedes but if you cannot speed even on the highways, forget the lanes and bylanes, you are not better off than the aam aadmi. I’m speaking from personal experience because a trip from Churchgate or Nariman Point to Andheri could take two hours or more even if you have the luxury of a chauffeured air-conditioned car. The sea link from Bandra to Worli may look very attractive, but has not really made driving any faster or pleasurable for the Mumbaikar. This is because you may speed across the sea link in ten minutes flat or even less, only to be caught up in horrendous traffic jams at either end of the sea link. In fact, spending a week in Mumbai was a pointer to me of the shape of things to come in Goa.

As in Mumbai, gated communities and multi-storeyed buildings are mushrooming in Goa. The bold and the beautiful and the rich and the powerful appear to be willing to pay any price for a holiday home in Goa. Many of the new rich in New Delhi and the north who have made a fast buck consider it a status symbol to have a bungalow or at least a luxury flat in a gated community in Goa. They probably can afford to buy holiday homes in the French Riviera but are culturally more comfortable in Goa. Which, for all the hype about being different and being very Westernised, is still essentially Indian. But though there has been a huge and unrelenting boom in real estate in Goa, nobody is giving a thought to the infrastructure. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, people cannot fly from destination to destination like superman. Even if they have luxury apartments and high end automobiles, they still need roads to move from beach to beach or from nightclub to nightclub or from their homes to the casinos, which are Goa’s latest attraction for domestic tourists from the north and Mumbai.

Indeed, I understand that many businessmen fly to Goa on a Friday to gamble and return to their home towns on Sunday evening or Monday morning. And in view of the frequency of their visits to Goa and hotels pricing themselves out of the market, all of them look for second or third homes in Goa. There will come a time in the very near future when the main roads in Goa will be as crowded and congested and unbearable and torturous as the roads in Mumbai. Ironically, all those who now flock to Goa because the pollution levels are lower and you can actually see a natural sunset instead of a smoggy sunset do not realise that their very act of buying new homes in Goa is destroying the Goa of their dreams. The situation, of course, is compounded by the fact that unlike in Mumbai the roads are much worse because of the much higher levels of corruption. And the chances of an accident are much higher because Goa’s traffic police are non-existent and even the few traffic police that Goa has are more interested in extortion than regulating the traffic.

RIDICULOUS AUTOMATION

AND a few stray thoughts on how automation can be carried to ridiculous levels. As was dramatised when I visited the seven-star deluxe Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in the western suburbs of Mumbai. It is hard enough to get an appointment with a consultant in a super speciality medical discipline in Mumbai. But at least in most of the other five-star and seven star hospitals we can still fix an appointment with the physician or surgeon you want to see through the reception counters or the secretary of the doctor concerned. But in the Kokilaben Hospital, which claims to be dedicated to the people and keeps boasting that it is aam aadmi friendly, you have to use a call centre to fix an appointment with the consultant you have been referred to. And anyone who has attempted to call any call centre will know how frustrating it is to talk to machines.

The most absurd part of it was that at the reception desk of the hospital we were told that no appointments could be made through flesh and blood human beings and that we would have to contact the call centre. Not a dedicated call centre run by the hospital, but the Reliance General Call Centre. After being kept on hold for almost half an hour, the receptionist took mercy on us and gave us a special number to contact the call centre. We still do not know whether we have to go through the call centre for every subsequent appointment. And while the hospital has state of the art equipment and full time consultants who are supposed to be available to patients 24×7, the human face is totally lacking. It is almost as though one is doing tele medicine and not actually in the premises of a state of the art hospital.

It is unlikely that anyone from Dhirubhai Ambani’s home town will ever be able to get an appointment in the techno obsessed hospital, which apparently trusts machines more than humans. Not to mention the fact that in the historical Marwari and Gujarati tradition everything is rokda. You don’t get to see a doctor or a get to an x-ray or a blood test or a sonogram unless you pay in advance. While everyone at the Kokilaben hospital is anxious to get at your purse, they will not even tell you or commit in writing when you will get your test reports. Surely Kokilaben Ambani, who knows hard times, should have made the hospital more human friendly. Let alone aam aadmi friendly. Arguably, the best hospital in Mumbai is by, of and for the rich.

Though the other extreme is the Tata Memorial Centre in Parel, which resembled the kumbh mela when we went there on Monday for some medical tests. Unlike at the Kokilaben Amabani Hospital, Tata Centre has dozens if not hundreds of attendants and receptionists. There is a counter for picking up the registration form. There is another counter where the details in the form are logged into a computer to prepare the case papers. There is a third queue for paying registration charges, which you can do only after you get your case paper. The torture doesn’t end there. The case paper is only proof of registration and that you have paid the registration charges. You have then to approach the concerned department for an appointment, which you may not get for the next three months.

The Tata Memorial Centre is as aam aadmi unfriendly as the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, though there are many counters and registration facilities. This is because people who do not understand English have difficulty filling up forms. One rural patient kept asking me what identification mark on the body meant. Another confessed that he did not have a PAN card. And whether they would accept the application without the details of the PAN card. And to find out whether you will be treated without a PAN card, you will have to stand in the long winding line at the information counter and then get back to the registration counter.

MUMBAI HELL

AND a last stray thought for yet another week. I left Mumbai after 15 years of working here in 1983. And each time I come to Mumbai, which mercifully is quite rare, I feel even more exhausted. I marvel at how I managed in Bombay for 15 years hopping from bus to suburban trains and a second bus all brimming with people and actually got to my work place on time. I find myself increasingly incapable of even spending a few days in Mumbai, forget about living in Mumbai. My nightmare is that in the next few years Goa will become like Mumbai and become as unliveable as the commercial capital of India.