Dignity in Anonymity

Part of my New Year’s Rs is to read as much as I could. And this means also that I would not stick to one author (like Stephen King and Sidney Sheldon back in those days). I’m trying to pick the best-rated book by one author and plan to read it: I now have in line three authors; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot,’ and Jodi Picoult’s ‘Nineteen Minutes.’

However, I am also trying to touch base with local articles, opinions and news on the side. I tried to look for magazines, digests, circulars, etc., which is actually is quite hard since most of them are written in Arabic. But I found one, a back issue (my initial reaction was disappointment), but I got to like the magazine, i.e., Arabian Insight. I now have two issues and I found a very good article on the first issue. I took the liberty of posting it here for wanting to share it with you (friends) so easily.

I can relate to the article, especially when the author phrased “the dignity of anonymity.” And when he said that migrants “suffer the indignities of sleeping in shanties, on sidewalks, on the hoods of their own taxis in order to earn respect in villages they may never revisit.”

Couldn't’t we all OFWs relate to this ideas, either partly or wholly?

It would be incomplete to take these two without the context of the whole article… so here it is…

MUMBAI, STRIVING AND SINKING

Today, it is India’s financial capital and the home of Bollywood. So why does Anand Giridharad call it a city of paradise and of hell?

Mumbai, India – This city, before it was a city, was a dusting of seven islands in the choppy brine off India’s western coast. Beginning nearly three centuries ago, it was gradually reclaimed from the sea, seven masses forging one, and claimed by the teeming country at its back. Dangling in the Arabian Sea, it has become Mumbai, India’s stock-trading and filmmaking capital and its window to the world.

But if the reclaiming was complete, the claiming never was. The city was tethered to the subcontinent by a land bridge in the northern suburbs, 32 kilometers from the upper-crust stronghold of South Mumbai, where mainland India felt remote.

The rich were in India but not of it. When news arrived of distant floods and famines, malfeasance and malnutrition, they told themselves that theirs was a world apart.

Escapism was constant. In the 1960s, young elites observed the Western music hour on All India Radio like a religion. In the 1980s, wealthy women flew to London to avoid the steamy bazaars. Recent years have brought diversions like gelato, sushi, fashion shows with Russian models exclusive nightclubs, restaurants that cook the ever-less-sacred-cow medium-rare.

Here the highest social boast is that you “just got back” from abroad; the loftiest praise for a restaurant is, “it’s like you’re not in India.” Mumbai’s globalised class hungers for it to be a world city, and its leaders pledge to make it Shanghai-like by 2020; the plan is, to put it gently, behind schedule. The rich blush when Madonna dines at Salt Water Grill and Angelina Jolie drinks at Indigo: portents, they say, that Mumbai will join New York, London, Paris in that coterie of names emblazoned on the epidermis of boutiques everywhere.

Arriving from overseas, one encounters first this outward-looking city. But in the layers below, a strange truth is buried. If the elite live in virtual exile, seeing Mumbai as a port of departure, the city teems with millions of migrants who see it as the opposite – a mesmeric port of arrival, offering what the mainland doesn't’t; a chance to invent onself, to break destiny.

For the writer, the Dickensian lens offers an easy view of Mumbai: wealthy and poor, apartment-dwelling and slum-dwelling, obese and malnourished. In office elevators, the bankers and lawyers are 30 centimeters taller, on average, than the less-fed delivery man.

Luscious skyscrapers sprout beside mosquito-prone shantytowns. This is at once a city of paradise and of hell. But Mumbai’s paradox is that it is often the dwellers of paradise who feel themselves in hell and the dwellers of hell who feel themselves in paradise.

What you see in Mumbai depends on what else you have seen. For those who grew up in Westernized homes, the standard is New York. That comparison is hard on Mumbai.

To be sure, in my five years here, which are now ending, the city has gravitated toward world-city status. Restaurants began to serve miso-encrusted sea bass, Indian-Western fashion boutiques started to attract global jet-setters.

But it takes a muscular suspension of disbelief to pretend that Mumbai, which used to be called Bombay, is what its elite wishes it were. Residents will tell you that Mumbai is “just like New York,” before launching a tirade about why it isn't’t: nowhere nice to eat, same incestuous social scene, no offbeat films, no privacy. There is a sense in this crowd of a city forever striving to be what it isn't’t.

Still, minute after minute, migrants pour in with starkly different pasts and starkly different ideas of Mumbai.

They arrive from India’s 660,000 villages. Perhaps the monsoon failed and crops perished. Perhaps their mother is ill and needs money for surgery. Perhaps they took a loan whose mushrooming interest cannot be repaid from cow-milking and wheat-sheafing. Perhaps they are tired of waiting for the future to come to them.

They arrive by train and locate relatives or friends to help get them started.

They walk the streets asking building security guards if the tenants inside need a servant. They live in cramped rooms or huts in a vast slum like Dharavi, where 1 million people pack 2.5 square kilometers.

In these labyrinthine hives, spaces and lives are shared, card games last all night and rivers of sludge navigate the gullies. And the slums ever metastasize.

These dueling claims on Mumbai explain its mongrel look: like a duty-free mall in parts, in parts like a refugee camp. The wealthy complain that the surge in migration has strained public services, turned 15-minute drives into two-hour odysseys, rendered real estate into slum estates. They say migrants spit, steal electricity, commit crime, harass women, drain the public dole.

Perhaps this is why the affluent dream of New York.

But the migrants relish Mumbai, for they know other places. Places where tradition tells you to die where you were born and live as your parents lived. Places where a son of a leather-working caste with a scientific mind must let it atrophy. Places where unapproved love can bring murder.

And in these squalid places they savor what the wealthy take for granted: the ability to get a job without “knowing somebody: the lightness of being without roots; the possibility of reinvention; the dignity of anonymity.”

Yet it is a strange, absentee dignity. They suffer the indignities of sleeping in shanties, on sidewalks, on the hoods of their own taxis in order to earn respect in villages they may never revisit.

Walking amid the polychromatic chaos of Mumbai, one might ask: What other city so concentratedly distills the human predicament, in the fullness of its tragedy, its comedy, its absurdity and its promise?

Mumbaikars, as they are known, cannot resist one another, cannot resist Mumbai. Those who crave departure could depart if they wanted. They are still here.

The newly arrived could have stayed in the villages, basking in their certainties. They too, choose to invest themselves here.

Neither investment is total, unreserved. But Mumbai works on the agglomeration of these hopes: Because so many take their chance here, it is a place worth taking a chance.

The longer you remain, the less you notice what Mumbai looks, smells, sounds like. You think instead of what it could be. You become addicted to the companionship of 19 million other beings. Surrounded by hells, you glimpse paradise.

© 2008 New York Times News Service