I am back home after 3 years, 4 months and some days. How do I feel? Did I have time to feel? Well, not really. I have been traveling to every corner/suburb of Mumbai like a crazy backpacker, staying at different places every night, meeting friends, relatives, attending weddings/social functions every day.
I feel like a stranger or tourist in my own city. The city in which I grew up, is changing rapidly. New skyscrapers, new flyovers, more crowds, and vehicles.. One thing that is still intact is the spirit of Mumbai. I still see people hurrying towards their workplaces in the morning and sprinting back home in the evenings. They develop friendships with their travel-mates, celebrate never-ending festivals with same fervor, but are conveniently numb and hapless towards the problems that Mumbai faces. For the first time, I am looking at all these things from a third-person perspective. I feel so much like Suketu Mehta in Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.
Before coming here, somebody made a remark about Mumbai that its a city of rude people everywhere. I categorically denied it then, and would do it again. It is the city that people come to fulfill their dreams, earn their bread. Its charm fascinates everybody, but not everybody can handle its rough life and maddening speed. If you live in this city once, you can live anywhere on earth.
The city can easily come across as an insolent place, where people don't care about each other. The truth is people do care, but they are so busy making a better life for themselves and for the people they care, that they tend to(have to?) become insensitive to some of the glaring indecencies around.
I think we all need some love and care, and if every soul in Mumbai makes a some conscious effort to treat every other living being nicely; life would be much more pleasent.
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