The One with Bombay Musings

With great thought and will, I have overcome the overbearing shackles of laziness to finally come back to the blog to update after five months..well, four and a half to be more precise.
And, what has brought this sudden turnaround you ask? The one reason that makes all bloggers a little bit more active- a summer internship with not much work to do.
Over the last 3-4 weeks, since I have landed in Mumbai, many a times I have felt the urge to write. Many a times, I have wanted to discuss on the blog things running through my mind. But then, the moments passed and laziness conquered.
Let's start with the way I feel about Mumbai.
The city is very different from Delhi. Just to make myself clear- I will not be making any judgements in this post.
Bombay is functionally much more efficient than Delhi. When I say functionally efficient I mean things like being able to find transport at any point of the day or night. The way the people in this city do everything in an orderly way. To echo a friend's thoughts- in a city so large and with so many people, if they did not do it in an orderly way, there would be utter chaos. The ability to stay out at late at night knowing that it is safe.
These are some things that make it definitely better than Delhi.
Ever since I've come here, every conversation with every other person ends up with the other person passing a judgement that says -"That's it. I've said it. Bombay is better than Delhi and I obviously know what I'm talking about."
I am going to reserve my judgement on this matter.
For a person who has lived all her life in Delhi, Bombay is a very different city. The very feel, the essence of the city is starkly different from Delhi. As it should be. In Bombay, I see lots of people and then some more, lots of small small flats, major rush in the public trains, traffic jams... essentially space constraint. It is a city accomodating more and more people looking as if it will burst at the seams. It is divided into a city and then lots of suburbs, where people live. People travel to the city for work, entertainment, schools, colleges etc., but catch a train and go back to live in the suburbs.
Delhi does not have any suburbs... I wouldnt call Noida and Gurgaon suburbs. As a completely opposite view, Delhi has space. It always gives one the feeling of having a lot of space around. There are no traffic jams, the population is distributed amongst the various regions and nobody travels to one part of the city for work, education and lives in another. It also has its share of the posh and the not-so-posh areas. It's regions are also structurally very different from each other, but there is always space. That I think, is the essential difference.
It is true that people in Delhi hardly ever wait in queues to get to anywhere.
By contrast, in Bombay, there is a queue for everything, a queue which people respect. Last week, I was at a friend's brother's marriage and there was a queue to greet the couple at the reception dias. I can honestly say I've never seen that before.
As different as cities maybe, I believe that all types of people reside in any given city. To harshly stereotype a city's residents as one thing or the other is not really fair. Sure, the surroundings have an effect on people, and people in different cities are different, but once again, every city has all types of people living in it. Some good and helpful and some not.
This is stemming from something a batchmate of mine said last week - "People in Delhi are such hypocrites. They are absolutely intolerable." Much as I would have liked to retort to that, I generally don't rise to such baits. Well, my friend obviously did not realise that she was speaking to a true blue Delhiite. I have lived all my life in Delhi and I have come across different people. Much as I know, that if I were to live the rest of my life in Bombay, I will still come across different people.
I guess the post has become quite long and as usual, I am not sure whether I have articulated my thoughts on this matter in the correct fashion or not.
I'll end this post with a little question for which I do not have an answer- does a city make it's people or do people make a city?