trying to Understand the Attempt to Assassinate a City

trying to Understand
the Attempt
to Assassinate
a City

(By KARUNAKARAN)

The dead, too, speak when their memoirs met an abrupt end. And, remembering of the dead brings the present one live in.

When watching the Mumbai of 27-28-29-30 November’ 08 on television channels, I felt myself like a dog who just lost his shelter wanders around the street. Otherwise, everybody was telling that the city lost her master. And, like a dog I, too, was looking for her master. Then the dead came with their memoirs.

I was thinking about the city, itself. Without a cup of tea in hand. With a cup of tea like you get in an ancient “Irani café’ in Mumbai will bring, otherwise, the memoirs of the dead.
I am thinking of the city, itself.

As you said, Mumbai has its street vendors and tycoons. Have its slums and sky scrapers. Mumbai has its beautiful women in the world who just returned from a Bolywood location as at the same time an assassin who just boarded in a suburban train with a task to fulfill. A city celebrates its beauty. As its bears the ugly of its. To a city, like Mumbai, the terror, too, find a time in a day which starts with the sun rise. I have been there in those sun rises of Mumbai. With the sirens of the textile mills, most of them shifted later to outside or closed down, with the sounds of early trains to all over the city interiors, I also used to stand in a long line of a slum’s only tinted toilet with a small bucket of water. For us the day begins. If you are at office your wear a decent cloth. Or you may find someone from the same slum in front of a railway station with a few to sell: the hand kerchiefs, hairpins, combs. . I once found a class mate there in a busy toilet of then V.T station (now it is Chatrapati Sivaji Railway Station) after fourteen years. A city has its secrets, its memoirs woven in generations.

The secular aspect of a city is also the process of the migrant mind which sees it a place to live. Living in a city is living your aspirations or dreams. You may find everybody from everywhere in a city after a dream. And, the metropolitnisam, as we name it, is a code of behavior a city asks from its inhabitants. There you learn to forget your cast, religion, status to fit in the dream of the city. Past is forgotten. Present is very much alive. Future, yes, is the dream. And, dreaming is freedom. City allows it. The city has all the genres of aspirations a society hold. In its job, culture, politics etc.

At Assad Maidan I used to hear the fire brand George Fernandez who spoke to a cheering crowd for a change the country wanted. At Assad Maidan only Swami Chinmayanada spoke to his crowd of a war sacredly explained in a sacred book. The city has the multitude of minds split in everything but with certain of its multi culturalism. When a Dalit come from the village of Maharashtra to Mumbai for a demonstration to be held in front of “Vidhan Sabah”, he is there to assert a fate of modernization brought: He sees a city which holds the power over him. He sees a nation which being ‘controlled’ by cities with its wealthy men. The politics you talk in a country, then, change to the power its cities hold. Then the growth one talk about a nation is also to count in “growth of its multi cultural expressions”. This is how the cities formed.

Mumbai has that power over India.

So, choosing to ‘assassinate Mumbai’ is to shake that power.

When a bomb explodes in a village it gathers a cry, a singular one. It is the cry of the loses. When a bomb explode in a city its inhabitants enter in to a fear they otherwise try to overcome with their stay in a city; precisely, they fear the loses of their ‘power’. A hotel, a Metro station, a Stock Exchange, the so called centers of power of a city been shaken by the terrorist attack on Mumbai. The money the city lost those days is then explaining the shaken power. There you talk about the general failure of a Government.

The extension of the ‘global terrorism’ is now is not merely the aspiration of religious hegemony. It is a kind of terrific experiment of ‘modern power’ we experience along with the apparatuses of the democracy. The inherent thirst of power could feel with every terrorist action like in every assassination. The spans of time of that power, how short it can be, give an unfortunate place we have chosen to live: the democracy. Hence, trying to stop the assassination of a city is then, understanding the very formation of a city. Its culture, its dreams, everything should be taken to consideration: Mumbai’s present political atmosphere went against it as we saw in past months. The attack against non-Mumbaikars was in raise. This, too, went against the spirit of a city. The power weakens there. And, the ‘terrorist attack’ came in. Military came in. They, the military, saved the city from terrorists. People praised the military, politicians been sidelined.

What are un-answered are the problems of a weakening position of the city, its multi culturalism, it’s very being as a city in making.

Then, what about the birds we saw in the sky on those smoky, noisy days? The silent migrants to the city? No commentators there for them. But they, the birds, came in groups to the photos, they, the men, taken.



December, 1, 2008