Friday 12 December 2008

While I was away...

I'm back in Bombay this weekend for a friend's wedding after more than
a year away, and it feels like the whole city has just fast-forwarded
into a state of decay. There's this grey haze rising up all over from
the airport all the way at least to Goregaon and everything looks like
it's crumbling-the roads, the fly-overs, the older buildings. The only
things that seem to be be untouched by the sense of disrepair seem to
be the new malls, full of foreign brands and their cheaper Indian
knock-offs. It's like people just gave up on the city. Kind of sad,
really.

5 comments:

  1. i always saw bombay look like that. esp the suburbs. now i prefer going by train and staying south
    -sneha

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  2. Yeah...compared to the other big cities Bombay can look a little decrepit.

    But is this just a general impression or do you think things really have gone to seed over the past year?

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  3. It used to be that there used to be some form of balance - there would be an air of decay hanging around some places, but there would also be some new development going on nearby. The basic amenities were passable - the Western Express Highway was fairly smooth at one point, but now it's more like a patchwork quilt, with the flyovers also beginning to crumble. I think there was a traffic jam on the highway at 1 AM on one of the nights I was there. And the air was hazier than I recall - if you get up onto the flyover near Bandra Reclamation that leads into the WE Highway, you'll get to see the haze over both North and South Bombay.

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  4. maybe bangalore's clean air is making all the haze appear brighter this time around

    or could it be the new construction?

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  5. Well Bangalore's air isn't always much cleaner, although it definitely is much cleaner than Mumbai's. There wasn't much construction going on either. I don't know why, but the traffic is worse - a whole lot more jams all over.
    Did you see the snap on facebook?

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