I was recently struck by something a South Mumbaikar friend said. Let’s call him Rahul, a popular name in Hindi cinema. He is observant in the way only someone who has seen the world—all his life—from a balcony overlooking the sea can be. Without the sea, whether in his club or home or office, he is simply not who he is.

We were talking about Mumbai’s new infrastructure—the sea link extensions, RoRo, coastal road, Atal Setu, flyovers, and expressways curling towards the old and new airports—when he said, quite casually, “You know, Mumbai’s infra has been built over so many years just to ensure that South Mumbaikars can get to the airport or weekend retreats in Alibaug and Lonavala without ever meeting ‘the other humans’.”

Mumbai’s mythology was built around its democracy of space—the stories of the local train where a diamond merchant could brush shoulders with a blue-collar worker, where everyone sweated equally. That Mumbai still exists somewhere between the suburbs and the ultra-suburbs like Virar, in compartments where elbows and lives collide.

Rahul went on to explain how almost all of Mumbai’s ruling class—politicians, bureaucrats, industrialists, and celebrities—are packed within the old island city. What he calls ‘the zip codes of power’. He added smoothly that most of them, him included, have inherited kingdoms without the inconvenience of creation.

The city’s elite, clinging to........

© Free Press Journal