Ages ago, while I was working in Mumbai the Indian Express asked me to write some 500 words about being an outsider in Mumbai, for their end of the year special editions. This was in the backdrop of Raj Thackeray and his hooligans then as part of the Shiv Sena beating up students from UP & Bihar who had come to Maharashtra to write the entrance test for jobs in the Railways.
How the Indian Express reached is rather interesting. I had written a small article and with a desire to have it published took it to the newspaper. They didn't it like and rejected my contribution. I wrote another article, this time about Bihar. The local(Bombay) editorial team liked it and they sent it to their central editorial team in Delhi. A couple of days later I heard from them, to be told that they couldn't carry the article.
I asked, why?
They said, ' Who are you that we should publish the article?'
I was stumped, I always had been sure of my identity.
Then a month or say later they called to check if I was keen to write for their end of the year editions.
Pasted below is the said article I had sent to them. Further below is the link to what was actually published.
So that is how my second article was published in a newspaper. Though the editing left me very dissatisfied, I felt like a celebrity with the photographer from the newspaper spending half a day clicking pictures of me all over the city.
My Contribution
A European friend on his first trip to India was briefed by his consulate that Bombay was not India and yet all of India, but for me, fresh out of India’s irrepressible cow belt Bombay was and is what only India could be. Bombay is a microcosm of the whole of India – rich, diverse, tolerant and ‘shining’.
My encounter with the city initially was full of disappointments. Soon after I had arrived the city shut shop because it happened to have rained heavily the night before. The dividers on arterial roads were submerged under water and above all people didn’t think twice before wading across ankle or even knee deep mucky water. The only thing people seemed to eat were ‘pav’ and everything they said seemed to end with a ‘che’. People appeared to be mild to the extent of being sissy, and this was quite disconcerting for someone who had till then lived only in the pushy, and crass north.
Names of most fashionable stores written in Hindi, besides the usual English, albeit in small font was a peculiar sight. The Oval maidan and its cricketers in whites amidst the neo Gothic buildings gave it all an old world charm. The sensex indicator at Churchgate station appeared quite queer. No conversation being complete without discussing and predicting sensex levels felt a trifle too materialistic.
Live in Bombay for a couple of weeks and you see all the original notions of the city crashing one after another, and that sure happened with me too. From the initial fascination of the endless and rumbling sea to the kem cho’s the city simply grew on me. The mildness was better appreciated as the politeness and the civic sense of its citizens. The unusual spectacle of queues at bus stops and trains running by the minute and not by the quarter of the hour soon became routine. The city did not sleep and the freedom to go anywhere and at any hour without any fear or whatsoever gave me a sort of a heady feeling and I realized I was snugly falling in love with this city.
Though the on and off xenophobic violence under the ‘Mee Mumbaikar’ campaign raises some questions about the city’s large heart and its accommodating spirit, here too one needn’t despair for these incidences fall in the realm of politics for was it not the Tamils at the receiving end some years ago. These are for the voters’ consumption which we from Bihar and UP find it easy to appreciate given the disproportionately large public space we give to politics back home. Such incidences are against the spirit of Bombay for Bombay thrives on its cosmopolitan culture and has always accepted in her bosom anyone who has chosen to seek his fortune here.
Hence and not surprisingly, living in Bombay for the past few years has made me realize that living elsewhere now would be a difficult proposition.
The link to the published article
http://cities.expressindia.com/local-news/archivefullstory.php?newsid=71732&creation_date=2003-12-27"
