As a child growing up in the city and as an adult working there, Bombay has always been a place that gives me a very real, physical, buzz. There is a magical energy about the city that gets under my skin. Yes. it also smells stinks of shit and fish and the economic disparities are so in your face that its like a swift, unexpected nut-kick sometimes. But you have to love the city.

Not anymore. Not for me.

First the Marathi Manoos’s went and renamed everything in city to ‘Chatrapati Shivaji something-or-the-other’. Then they renamed the city itself as Mumbai and went about redoing all the boards in Marathi and thrashing couples and all pretending they were Bal-fuckin-Thackeray themselves. What happened to the city I grew up in? What happened to all my Maharashtrian friends who spoke English as well as I did and Hindi and Marathi way better than I ever would. All those people who were very distinctly Marathi but were also highly intelligent, cosmopolitan and never said a single word about Bombay being only for Marathis. I guess their voices got drowned out in all the jingoistic, partisan bull-shit being spouted by the MMs.

And as always one form of extremism just engenders another and so now there is terrorist attack after terrorist attack in a city where we used to think explosions were something that happened in the North, in Delhi, in the Valley.

Today there seems to be a passable imitation of an all out war going on in the city. I’m looking at the feed from people’s twitter posts and its hard to believe this is happening in Bombay.

What happened to the city I grew up in? The city I would proudly claim to be from even after living in Delhi for many more years than I ever lived in Bombay?

Bombay used to be a place where everyone would let everyone else just be.

I have an idea. Lets fucking divide up everything on the basis of some fucked-up, only-exists-in-our-mind ideas and then lets start just killing each other.

Oh wait. We already have that. Its called religion.

The follow up to this post can be read here.

Irrelevance personified: The Indian elite, the media and the politicians.

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