E-Paper
Migrant ethics, and life in the Maximum City
Mumbai has migrants from every strata of society. Gurgaon may have its white-collar, & Kolkata its hardworking, low-income migrants but Mumbai attracts everyone
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I landed in Mumbai early on Friday. The city makes a terrible first impression. As your aircraft is about to land, it feels like it will crash into a huge slum; yet, somehow, a landing strip emerges. There was a first-time flyer seated next to me, a scrawny guy probably headed to the Gulf, to work 14 hours and send money home. In full sleeves, blue denim trousers with some embroidery, neatly polished pointy black leather shoes and his backpack secured between his legs, he wanted to capture the landing, may be record evidence of his maiden flight. The guy’s arm suddenly jutted out towards the window from his middle seat — to record, of course. I was a bit taken aback. Sadly, his Chinese smartphone’s camera could focus only on the scratches on the window. I empathised with him enough to forgive his crude behaviour — I was, after all, a first-time flyer not so long ago. So, I asked for his phone, to record a better video. He was thankful — perhaps too innocent for fancy concepts like civic sense.
But this is column material, I muttered to myself, and let it play out — just a small inconvenience for print real estate.
Everybody migrates one day. Some get to capture the clouds — a brief happy moment in transit -— before being fedinto the meat grinder of a metropolis like Mumbai. If you can hear the TV clearly in your bathroom, you are in Mumbai, a city where a home is a bed and a toilet, with some space to keep your shoes. Naturally, people go home in Mumbai only to sleep. That’s why there are so many thronging the streets at any given time of the day. The long commute helps; people spending four hours in transit don’t need a dedicated entertainment room or a balcony, they just need a bed to crash.
Outside my hotel, autorickshaws are parked across the street. One auto-driver has put his feet up on the backseat of the auto, while he’s on a WhatsApp video call with “home”, some thousands of kilometres away. The soft streetlight pours into the rickshaw, lighting up the guy’s smiling face. He seems content, perhaps promising a Chhatth visit to folks at the other end of the call. Mumbai is where you will find the most well-behaved autorickshaw drivers. I maybe wrong, but this is my impression. They are mostly migrants.
A lot of us have this “migrant mindset”, having moved out of our birthplaces after school because there were no jobs or higher education prospects. They develop this muscle memory to not overtake vehicles or have staring contests with other driverson the road. No voicing disappointment with the quality of service to a waiter,cabbie, or anyone who seems to be a local. The attitude is always of de-escalation, and reconciliation. It might sound cowardly or submissive, but this is how they survive.They always enjoy the fruits and ignorethe barbs. Such people, when they travelto another alien land, rarely haveissues because they are conditioned tosurvive by co-existing.
And this is why Mumbai is different from other cities: It has migrants from every strata of society. Gurgaon may have its white-collar migrants and Kolkata its hardworking, low-income migrants. But Mumbai attracts everyone — artists, actors, people good at integral calculus, those who make excellent litti-chokha. Every skill shines here.
The American Civil War blocked cotton supplies from the US to the UK, creating a massive global demand spike. In came the smart Parsis and Gujaratis of Mumbai, who lapped up this opportunity and set-up textile mills all across the city. This mini-industrialisation taught this city discipline that has stayed even a century later. To be able to catch the 7:13 am local train every day, a migrant reaching Mumbai must have the discipline of punctuality.
This is why hundreds of people can arrive at a location from even 50 kilometres away, work 16 hours at a stretch with zero errors, in perfect coordination, and then go home at 2 am. And this is just to shoot a shampoo ad. The trustworthiness of public transport, safety, and security in public spaces supports this. This may sound toxic to the average Joe, but people here are just driven, with no entitlement. That’s why it’s India’s richest city.
As I bite into a vada pav and sit down to type, I realise most of Mumbai street food is designed assuming that you have to leave for somewhere in the next two minutes. That’s why I love Mumbai.
Abhishek Asthana is a tech and media entrepreneur and tweets from @gabbarsingh.The views expressed are personal
