Mumbai is a city straight out of a Philip K Dick novel
Mumbai is, among other things, a Philip K Dick megalopolis. It’s been exactly six months since I moved here, and in those six months you wonder about what kind of a city it is; only wondering because you get the feeling that even after six years or six decades there are people who still don’t get it. What is undeniable is that multiple realities exist in the same city-space and that it will take some doing to even scratch the surface of some of those realities (thank God for journalists). Wednesday night’s bombings ripped open a connection between those multiple realities. The blasts were scary, and depressing. And then came the post-blasts noise. You have to wonder if the people making this noise ‘get’ Mumbai; and so Philip K Dick pops into mind.
PKD was a prolific writer of books dealing with parallel universes, alternate histories, and intrusive governments. Many readers might be more familiar with the films made from his stories: recently The Adjustment Bureau, and famously Blade Runner. (Of course the movies are cleaned up, glamorous and less intense versions of his writing.) The stories are set in a future that’s just-around-the-corner; the cities are sprawling, dense, gray and labyrinthine; the characters are hard-working, sometimes zonked out, sometimes neurotic; and the government is simultaneously too distant (poor garbage collection and mail delivery) and too close (big-brother-type surveillance). They could easily be set in Mumbai.
After the blasts there was the usual moaning about our policing and the usual sniping at the state home minister. Frankly, I don’t see what people expect. This city is on the brink of complete anarchy. The chaos looks barely manageable; as if the city’s policemen are standing in a line, forming a human cordon holding back disorder, with the madness pushing against the human chain and ballooning out momentarily from time to time. No wonder the city has an underworld; in a perverted way it probably contributes to managing the disorder (though for a pound of flesh). The political class looks like it long gave up, deciding to profit as much as it can from the confusion. That the police reacted as fast as it did to the blasts, amidst this chaos, is actually commendable.
There might be an argument for blaming the political class in Delhi. Our home minster, P Chidambaram, a Harvard MBA and a practitioner of the law, could have put his high-IQ to solving some of the systemic problems in India’s law-and-order management (you certainly can’t expect that the venal state politicians are up to this). But the fellow seems too impressed by his ministry’s bureaucrats, pig-headed in the way that only a Delhi babu can be; he’s too impressed by their damned power-point presentations; and he’s too impressed by himself and has thus decided to devote his energies not towards solving problems but towards plotting against that other dude in North Block, Pranab Mukherjee.
But then I wonder what Chidambaram could possibly do: in the PKD short story “Minority Report” (which ends more grimly than the Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise film), even the ability to predict crimes in the future does not stop crimes from being committed. Even clairvoyance can’t stop terrorism, and Chidambaram isn’t even able to properly equip or train special anti-terrorist squads.
So there’s hardly any point in ranting against government.
Then there’s the spirit of Mumbai. It was manifest in people offering refuge or rides to those stranded in town in the wake of the blasts. But it was also manifest in the agents who fleeced the kin of the dead, or the good Samaritans who went through victims’ pockets at Zaveri Bazar hoping to hit a jackpot. Perhaps Mumbaikars are just individuals who are propelled forward with our lives because time does not move backward; that in Mumbai, wanting one’s space and minding one’s business defines the actual spirit of Mumbai. There are folks who prefer the bubble of online relationships to the web of neighbourhood ties, and it is no big secret that the lack of strong local communities guarantees anonymity to the terrorist. The spirit of Mumbai is more one of narcissism than anything else (exhibit A: Mukesh Ambani’s $100 million phallic symbol).
To return to Mumbai as a PKD megalopolis: the safest prediction about this city in the years to come is that it will grow, and grow, and grow. It already resembles the futuristic Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. I’ll bet that blasts and such will be a regular occurrence in Mumbai that we will begin to take in our stride (if we haven’t already) in the way people take heinous crimes like serial killing and gang-rape in their stride. People will go on with their lives, and some of them will applaud it as the resilience of Mumbai. Philip K Dick, however, would see in it something far darker and dystopian.
Aditya Sinha | Sunday, July 17, 2011
The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai
PKD was a prolific writer of books dealing with parallel universes, alternate histories, and intrusive governments. Many readers might be more familiar with the films made from his stories: recently The Adjustment Bureau, and famously Blade Runner. (Of course the movies are cleaned up, glamorous and less intense versions of his writing.) The stories are set in a future that’s just-around-the-corner; the cities are sprawling, dense, gray and labyrinthine; the characters are hard-working, sometimes zonked out, sometimes neurotic; and the government is simultaneously too distant (poor garbage collection and mail delivery) and too close (big-brother-type surveillance). They could easily be set in Mumbai.
After the blasts there was the usual moaning about our policing and the usual sniping at the state home minister. Frankly, I don’t see what people expect. This city is on the brink of complete anarchy. The chaos looks barely manageable; as if the city’s policemen are standing in a line, forming a human cordon holding back disorder, with the madness pushing against the human chain and ballooning out momentarily from time to time. No wonder the city has an underworld; in a perverted way it probably contributes to managing the disorder (though for a pound of flesh). The political class looks like it long gave up, deciding to profit as much as it can from the confusion. That the police reacted as fast as it did to the blasts, amidst this chaos, is actually commendable.
There might be an argument for blaming the political class in Delhi. Our home minster, P Chidambaram, a Harvard MBA and a practitioner of the law, could have put his high-IQ to solving some of the systemic problems in India’s law-and-order management (you certainly can’t expect that the venal state politicians are up to this). But the fellow seems too impressed by his ministry’s bureaucrats, pig-headed in the way that only a Delhi babu can be; he’s too impressed by their damned power-point presentations; and he’s too impressed by himself and has thus decided to devote his energies not towards solving problems but towards plotting against that other dude in North Block, Pranab Mukherjee.
But then I wonder what Chidambaram could possibly do: in the PKD short story “Minority Report” (which ends more grimly than the Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise film), even the ability to predict crimes in the future does not stop crimes from being committed. Even clairvoyance can’t stop terrorism, and Chidambaram isn’t even able to properly equip or train special anti-terrorist squads.
So there’s hardly any point in ranting against government.
Then there’s the spirit of Mumbai. It was manifest in people offering refuge or rides to those stranded in town in the wake of the blasts. But it was also manifest in the agents who fleeced the kin of the dead, or the good Samaritans who went through victims’ pockets at Zaveri Bazar hoping to hit a jackpot. Perhaps Mumbaikars are just individuals who are propelled forward with our lives because time does not move backward; that in Mumbai, wanting one’s space and minding one’s business defines the actual spirit of Mumbai. There are folks who prefer the bubble of online relationships to the web of neighbourhood ties, and it is no big secret that the lack of strong local communities guarantees anonymity to the terrorist. The spirit of Mumbai is more one of narcissism than anything else (exhibit A: Mukesh Ambani’s $100 million phallic symbol).
To return to Mumbai as a PKD megalopolis: the safest prediction about this city in the years to come is that it will grow, and grow, and grow. It already resembles the futuristic Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. I’ll bet that blasts and such will be a regular occurrence in Mumbai that we will begin to take in our stride (if we haven’t already) in the way people take heinous crimes like serial killing and gang-rape in their stride. People will go on with their lives, and some of them will applaud it as the resilience of Mumbai. Philip K Dick, however, would see in it something far darker and dystopian.
Aditya Sinha | Sunday, July 17, 2011
The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai
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