Mumbai

Kabul

Worli

Zaveria Regency

Versova Beach

Manu Joseph

ByOverpopulation, class issues, inept, corrupt corporations and a lack of civic sense all contribute to the chaos in our public spacesSometimes I walk in.That should not be a shocking statement. Most humans walk in the cities they live in. In ours though, it is somehow a Herculean task. Like winning some sort of war, just to be able to walk on a pavement. That's mainly because there isn't a road to walk on that doesn't look like it isn't under threat of caving in. Nor a bridge that doesn't look precarious. Nor a pavement with a giant, inexplicable hole in it. “I lived induring the worse days of bomb attacks," a journalist friend told me, “and somehow they had better roads and pavements than Mumbai."Sometimes, I'll stand in front of a building to catch my breath and be shooed away by a security guard, suggesting that the little patch that looked like a public space is in fact private and therefore nice enough to stand and catch my breath ­ a luxury I was almost stealing. At other times, I'll open a Google map in my head to weave between a car and an auto stuck in traffic, secretly joyous at having overtaken the two vehicles, only to have my brief joy thwarted by imagining all my friends walking in some park with their dog in some other city in the world, while here I am, celebrating squeezing past autos at signals.There are thousands of excuses as to why our public spaces are what they are.Population, apparently; class issues (rich people don't walk). People say municipal corporations are inept and corrupt. Municipal corporations say people don't listen and are by and large crazy. “We had installed cans for people to throw garbage in near," a municipal officer told me. “In two weeks, all of them had been stolen.Some time later, they were recycled and sold to us as smaller garbage cans!" Go into any home in Mumbai, a private space, and it is incredibly clean, pristine, protected. Go out into a shared space and it is a mix of rubble and chaos; a zoo and the apocalypse. As if our collective consciousness says, “Nope.Not mine, don't care."Our city has incredible things the world looks at admiringly, thinking, “How is that even possible?" Honesty, for example. There are numerous, incredible stories of people losing wallets and people of meagre means finding them and returning them when they could have just disappeared into the night with the money. This is some thing western societies cannot fathom.Certain givens in western societies, however -like clean public spaces ­ we cannot fathom. “In any public park on most nights, there is something criminal going on. By day, homeless people sleep there," a Mumbai policeman explained. Maybe that's why people prefer parks and walking tracks inside buildings namedor some such, protected by 12 guards from a private security firm to give the feeling of a city when, really, you're just inside a building compound. Ours is the only city where people are hell-bent on creating private cities within it, so everything that's outside their private city can pretty much go to hell.Therefore, those who must commute in the open city, outside enclaves, face a daily Blade Runner type futuristic world, where to the foreign eye, seeing rush hour at any Mumbai train station would seem like they were watching the world ending. “Privatise the suburban commuter trains and see how good they get," a millionaire told me.Like, if there was a profit in it? And without it, basic civic infrastructure -a road, a footpath, a train hub -is nobody's problem. The shared consciousness being, “Yes I live here, but I'm only interested in taking care of the little bit I own." Therefore, when one does step up and do something incredible, like the gent who took the initiative to clean up(which, the last time I checked, was not owned by an individual), he was and continues to be hailed on Twitter as “a messiah", 'a Nobel nominee“. And he introduced this crazy idea that a space can belong to none of us and all of us at the same time -which should be a basic fact we live with, but in this city, we went, “Whoa, genius thought."I asked the famous novelist, whose delightful ouvre has long been concerned with how the Indian mind operates differently (and whose third novel, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous, is out now), especially when it comes to the ideas of living in a collective, and he explained is thus: “Our defining quality is freedom. At the civic level, we are the freest organism. We are probably freer than many wild animals.India allows us to be this way most of the time; some days we just die. On the road, or on a footbridge. A nation is a mental state because it is largely what its people are trained to be. We are trained to be suspicious of order, to become unhappy by order, chiefly civic and financial order. But we are great at social order that maintains social hierarchies. We can be governed as long as some animal freedoms are guaranteed. We are innately an informal people, that is who we are."