I suppose there are poor people everywhere, and some of them work through a hard life and their children start off a little better. But it took a long break from Bombay, and a short return (a week is as long as I can stomach), for the sight of real poverty to slap me in the face. It isn’t that they’re poor. It’s that they’re so poor they’ll always be poor. This reminds me of Lawrence Durrel writing in Justine: For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one; then one day with growing alarm, one realises that it is God who does not care: and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other.
Even these boys here, enjoying a joke and a break in the dark recesses of Yazdani Bakery, where I would end up after hours of walking and dreaming after college, in time for hot bun-maska and tea. They’re much better off than a couple of anonymous millions in this city, doddering between life and death, of course. But chances are they’ll end up like the man on the right, after a lifetime of shovelling bread in and out of the oven.
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Dear Pinaki, thank you for the trip to Mumbai (your Bombay) and for the semantic sneak peaks around corners and through keyholes that I’ll probably never have the chance of seeing by myself. Why would anyone need to see Mumbai when Pinaki strolls you through his Bombay with his magical quill and lens as vehicles? Nahhh, maybe I’ll never go to Mumbai after all. Especially if Pinaki keeps writing about it. And shooting it, in his own way. The best story is always his own.
hey, today’s Mumbai kids on the street are, well, street-smart. 15 years from now, these bread-shovellers will probably be running their own international chain of bakeries and will have plenty of dough!
…and chances are that they won’t end up like him – the glass could be half empty…or half full! And the perspective that ‘Bombay’ gives me is really full of optimism and resilience
So the man on the right could just still be in the 6 lakh odd villages of India, toiling at his family farmland – by now, divided into bits with each passing generation…at the mercy of good rains or poor droughts! Instead, walk the streets of Mumbai and you will come across petty traders, shop keepers, vendors…self made businessmen in their own right! It is the city that spawns entrepreneurship in every size and form…the city that gives people a chance to make a life and yet presents poverty as a very real option….it is these complex ironies that make us love the city!