Think of a word to describe….Bombay.
Dave says:
Bombay, India provides the brain with more stimulus than it can possibly handle. So, in an attempt to ease my cranial meltdown, I have decided to tackle the impossible: boil this sensory bombardment down to its essence, take it to one concept, something as simple as say, one single, solitary word.
I’m a lost cause before I even start. Not even the city name itself can be just one word. In 1996, as part of India’s re-indianization, Bombay was renamed Mumbai. Both names are used interchangeably and provide the inspiration for my word of the day: “elasticity”. Bombay (or Mumbay as I have started to call it) is a spralling mass of humanity, a city of infinate wealth and of absurd poverty. It is the New York, Los Angeles and Miami of India. It is home to the largest number of billionaires in the whole of Asia, its movie industry grosses more money each year than Hollywood yet the slums of Bombay are as extensive as those in Sao Paulo or South Africa. 16 million people call this city home, ironically many of them don’t have a structure to actually call home.
You can see elasticity everywhere on both the micro and macro scale. 16 million people moving around a geographically constrained city and rarely do people bump into each other and when they do, nobody pays it any mind. Imagine the chaos of Xmas shopping at Bellevue Square or Oxford Street, multiply it by 100 and now picture no visable annoyances when someone’s personal space is invaded. That’s what parts of Bombay are like every single day of every single year. However, unlike a major western city during rush hour when everyone is heading in almost the same direction, there is no flow here. People walk, drive, ride and take their oxen in any direction they please at any time they please. The crowd just convexes like a rubber balloon, absorbs the bulge and returns to its previous shape.
Traffic is, of course, insane and our taxi was involved in a minor scrape with another car. The resultant sound was that usual horrible metal on metal crunch but when we looked out the window elasticity has already occurred and we couldn’t see any damage. Both drivers gave a thumbs up and moved on.
The architecture in Bombay is wonderful. When the British arrived with all that Victorian pomp and circumstance, it never occurred to them they should do anything to reflect the local culture in their new buildings – nope, they basically rebuilt London but with wider streets and bigger round-abouts. The buildings are huge, massive domed libaries, train stations, town halls and museums built in finest sandstone and granite. The leafy side streets contain lovely Victorian town houses with room for servants and personal transportation. But these buildings are all in decay now – they sit there waiting for elasticity to return them to their former glory.
The young, rich Bombay-ites don’t appear to be interested in the buildings that their British counterparts would, in a heartbeat, turn into London apartments worth millions of dollars; they’re more interested in building up. Upwards from the dirt and the grime, upwards to a better life. Malabar Hill, overlooking the fascinating but grotty Chowpatty Beach, is turning into a high-rise comdominium conundrum. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of world class living and world class deprivation. Some would say this is urban renewal, the new Mumbai making its way into the developed world. I call it elasticity. When something stretches it doesn’t become something new, it is just an elongated and strained version of its former self. The upper class of Bombay are no better than the colonial British that came before them. In fact, they could be worse: at least the British were interested in building infrastructure. When elasticity strikes, when all that potential energy is released, Bombay is going to snap back hard. However, unlike the British, the Indians appear to be the masters of elasticity so I’m sure they’ll roll with it, give each other a thumbs up and move on.