Friends (Almost) Lost

The attacks on Mumbai have stirred memories of friends lost, and almost lost, to terrorism in South Asia. I will never forget the morning in 2002 that I strolled down to my paper-wala’s newstand in Dadar and saw the horrific photo of Danny Pearl in a track suit with a gun to his head, on the front page of Mid-Day. I had just met Danny at a party a few days before he left for Karachi, where he was later kidnapped and killed. He and his wife Marianne were a beautiful couple and the toast of Mumbai’s journo scene — and the Wall Street Journal bureau in Mumbai remains the best foreign press outlet in the city. Marianne, a film-maker by training, worked with students at Wilson College produce a film on Bombay’s historical Irani cafes called Aur Iraani Chai in 2001-2002 in the Neighbourhood Project. You can see the short film made with her inspiration and guidance on YouTube. Their apartment in Malabar Hill was the scene of many wonderful evenings where Danny would play his violin and Marianne would dance into the night with journalists, writers and hangers-on of Bombay’s dotcom boom years.

Several years later, I was in Mumbai on 11 July 2006 — exactly one year before I got married — when a series of bombs went off at rush hour in the packed trains of the Western Railway. I was, in fact, waiting for a train at Dadar Station, travelling in the other direction, to Victoria Terminus (site of the recent attacks by gunmen). I learned weeks later that A.G. Bapat, engineer and manager of the National Textile Corporation in Mumbai, was killed on one of the bombed trains travelling to his home in the suburb of Kandivali. Mr Bapat was a friendly public sector official in the bankrupt NTC, the government company formed by the takeover of half of Mumbai’s failing inner-city textile mills in the seventies. NTC was one of the city’s biggest land-holders, and behind their mammoth compound walls and factory gates lie the crumbling treasures of Mumbai’s 19th century industrial architecture. I spent a year from 2002-2003 photographing several of these mills with the help of Mr Bapat, who was eager to support a proposal we developed for an Industrial Museum in one of the closed mills. This never materialized, and many of Mumbai’s grandest Victorian mills have been torn down in the past three years. See the photo albums in the collection Mills of Mumbai and the individual albums for Tata Mills, India United Mills no.1, Kohinoor Mills no.1-2, and the most remarkable, Elphinstone Mills, which was sold and demolished two years ago. Thanks again, Bapat Saheb, for all your help.

Another friend and colleague whom I surely thought lost in a 2005 attack in Bangalore was the brilliant scientist and entrepreneur Dr Vijay Chandru. Chandru, as he is known to everyone, was one of the inventors of the Simputer, a visionary open source hand-held computer for agrarian and rural uses in India. He now manages Strand Genomics. His wife Uma and I worked together at the Srishti School in Bangalore, where I was a part-time consultant. Chandru was sprayed with automatic gunfire at close range in a daylight attack on the auditorium where he was attending a conference, across the street from the leafy canteen at the Indian Institute of Science, where I had lunch as I stayed nearby. Much like my beloved Cafe Leopold, the Iraani cafe in Mumbai which was attacked by gunmen last week, the canteen and auditorium was open to the street. Chandru’s arms and torso were hit hard by an AK-47 shot from this street. I was not in Bangalore then, but learned on the news he had somehow survived the attack. Miraculously, less than a year later, I sat across the table from him in the Stata Center here at MIT, where he spent an hour describing his surgery and recovery at Mass General Hospital, where he has come to be treated by a renowned surgeon, Jesse Jupiter. He had already regained control of his arms and was walking, and was working at MIT LIDS.


Filed under: main — Tags: , , — Shekhar @ 4 December 2008 9.00 am

Bombay is Still Burning

The attacks on Mumbai are unbelievably gruesome and at this point hard to comprehend. I am not there right now, and am writing from faraway. I was quickly able to (recursively) account for all my friends and family with a single message “are you safe?” sent to all my loved ones in Mumbai. Everyone is. Thank you, all, for asking.

The nature of this attack is globally unprecedented. This is not even like 9/11 — it has lasted three days,11/26-11/28, and is still not over. The first news I heard on Wednesday afternoon, was of gunmen opening fire with automatic weapons and throwing grenades in Victoria Terminus at rush hour. This immediately reminded me The last time something like this happened was July 11 2006, or 7/11, when I was on the railway platform in rush hour at Dadar, and the overhead electric lines suddenly popped and the station went dark. After learning of bomb blasts up the line at Matunga Road, I walked home amidsty an enormous jam of vehicles, as all the train commuters emerged onto the streets. It was only when I came home that I learned what had happened. Bombs had gone off all over the line, killing and injuring hundreds of train commuters.

The signature of 7/11 and terrorism in Mumbai were their attacks on the city’s vital arteries, its train and bus network, where most Mumbaikars spend hours everyday together.The nature of the targets is very different from previous terrorism such as 7/11 or the bus bombs, or at least the news coverage here would have us believe. While its sister station in India, Channel 7-IBN, is leading in their coverage in Mumbai, CNN here has focussed largely on the shootout and hostage situations Taj and Oberoi hotels. The dramatic photos of the Taj Hotel dome draped in smoke and flames on today’s New York Times front page has already become the signature image of the Mumbai attacks.

There are other ways in which these attacks are remarkable, and different. The attackers apparently arrived by sea, landing in the very heart of the Indian Navy’s Western Naval Command in Colaba, in the Sassoon Docks, where a busy traffic of fishing boats, country craft, and small vessels land everyday from Bombay Harbour. There’s been a lot of news recently about piracy in the Indian Ocean near the Gulf of Aden, where the Indian Navy allegedly sunk a pirate “mother ship” last week. In signs of the hyperbolic tendencies of Indian journalists, there were reports yesterday of a terrorist “mother ship” detained off Gujarat, a Pakistani merchant vessel.

While images of mother ships in the high seas of the western Indian Ocean might be an exaggeration, there is no doubt that strategically, an arc of coastal states from Aden to Muscat, Dubai and Karachi are key nodes in a region where Bombay has been the largest coastal city. The Taj and Oberoi hotels are perched at the very southern tip of Mumbai’s Island City. And while these hotels — and Nariman House — are located in one of Mumbai’s most posh central business districts, at their feet and edges cling crowded colonies of fisherfolk and slum-dwellers who regularly venture out to the seas. These attacks were a brazen assault on some of the key symbols of the financial, military and commercial architecture of Mumbai, and its role as a regional and global capital. But anyone who has walked the streets of Colaba or Cuffe Parade can tell you that this regional command and control centre has feet of clay

Here in the US, the attack has coincided with the Thanksgiving holidays, when many families are at home glued to their many plasmas, tubes, and flat screens. The coverage here is banal at best, parachute correspondents or terrorism experts who know little about India, using the famous backdrop of the Taj Mahal hotel — now exploding, now on fire, now duck they’re shooting. For once I wish I could watch Rajdeep Sardesai shouting his way through the crowds, or even my buddy Sreenivasan Jain on NDTV. While I am not in Mumbai today, all Mumbaikars are part of a real-time news space that is following events as they unfold. Some of the more amazing moments so far have been the top cops shot as they let down their guard outside Metro Cinema, NSG commandos landing by chopper at Nariman House and storming their way in. Stay safe friends, and pray it is all over very soon.


Filed under: main — Tags: , — Shekhar @ 28 November 2008 11.38 am

Mumbai and the Global History of Urban Disasters

Whether you consider the recent floods in Mumbai to be either a natural disaster, or a man-made crisis — or a bit of both — most will agree that we have just been through the biggest social crisis to face the city since the communal riots and bomb blasts in 1992–1993. It is not often in history that an urban disaster prompts wide-ranging public reflection and institutional changes. There are many contemporary lessons to be drawn in Mumbai from the global history of urban disasters, from floods and famines to terrorism and riots. Crises such as these prompt immediate action, but often the most sweeping and epochal changes they inspire happen once the original impulses to act are forgotten. These impulses are buried away in subsequent events and history, obscuring their effect in prompting wider, often revolutionary changes. The catastrophic earthquake which destroyed most of the Portugese capital Lisbon in 1755 and wiped out most of its population — and the philosopher Voltaire’s satirical reflections on its causes and consequences in his novel Candide, or Optimism — inaugurated the Enlightenment in Europe, the tradition of thinking which questioned the divine right of kings and priests to rule. While continental monarchs were overthrown by the post-disaster polemic of Voltaire, three centuries later, disaster relief has become a golden opportunity for modern elected leaders to shore up their reputations, playing politics while appearing above it. Consider Rudy Giuliani’s live calls to the media from the New York Mayor’s Office hours after 9/11, and his constant and reassuring presence on live television in the days and weeks afterwards, constantly answering calls and questions from shocked and angry citizens. While George W. Bush seized this moment of crisis to repackage the his presidency as a permanent war on terrorism, Giuliani will probably now make a bid to succeed Bush in the White House in 2008, with the image of him in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks still vivid in the public memory of 9/11.

Compare the response of our leaders and officials in Mumbai in the days and weeks since the flood disaster. Unlike in New York, the common man’s desire for symbols to assuage their grief, and faces to address their complaints, were conspicuously absent. On 26/7, the BMC shut its offices early, and its engineers and officers waded home, while politicians didn’t emerge into the limelight until days after the calamity. By then they were too late to do a Giuliani. For lack of braver faces, that weekend the newspapers ended up featuring two men on their front pages, both tottering on inflatable boats in the water-logged lanes of Kalina, on very different rescue missions. While Shiv Sena chief Balasaheb Thackeray was evacuating himself and his family, Police Commissioner A.N. Roy was helping stranded families and overseeing relief operations. It is a strange paradox of our democracy that our institutions remain faceless at the times when we most need them to respond with a human touch. In contrast, our leaders reach out the most when we least need them, staring down at us with their vote-bank agendas, while our institutions continue crumbling under their populist promises. Why do our institutions respond in this way?

During a visit to India last week, economist Amartya Sen argued that democratic institutions such as regular elections and a watchful media have banished the endemic threat of famine, a spectre which had plagued the Indian countryside since colonial times. By focussing pressure on politicians to act early to prevent such disasters, popular franchise and a free press have effectively regulated the performance of public institutions. However, Sen argues, while democracy has banished famines from postcolonial India, the state has been singularly ineffective in dealing with chronic undernourishment and malnutrition (in which India lags behind sub-Saharan Africa). Real development, according to Sen, means changing everyday conditions such as basic health, environment, and livelihood. The analogy with our own situation in Mumbai is instructive. For the public of the city, the monsoon flooding has provided an impetus to action, which could result in much wider changes. But while we can force action in the wake of crises like famines and floods, transforming our everyday life and infrastructure requires a much longer term effort at changing institutions.

The plague epidemic in Bombay in the 1896, which prompted an exodus of half the city’s population, and the demolition of most of the inner city north of the Fort and Native Town, gave birth to the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) in 1898. In the thirty years of its existence — before being absorbed into the BMC in 1933 — the BIT doubled the number of roads in the city, acquired and reclaimed vast lands for development, and laid the foundations for land and housing markets on which Mumbai still operates. Many of our best-known roads — Hughes, Turner, and Cadell — still bear the names of former BIT Chairmen and Trustees who had them built. The origin of such wide-ranging reforms, and the political will to develop modern Mumbai, was not in some lofty vision plan, or in the public spirit of prominent citizens. The BIT was borne of the paranoid fear of the city’s elites of disease spreading to their bungalows from overcrowded slums in the inner city. The plague was an airborne disease, and the cure prescribed was to allow the sea breezes into the inner city, through new arterial roads and well-spaced building and plots. After ruthless demolitions of tenements and seizure of lands in the name of public health and open spaces, the BIT planned and developed most of what we still recognise as the Island City from Chowpatty and Lamington Road to Shivaji Park and Five Gardens. Crisis gave birth to change, and transformed the city in the decades that followed.

There is reason to hope that the recent floods in Mumbai, like the nineteenth century plague, could result in similarly wide-ranging reforms, in a city which has been lately preoccupied in debating its future as a global metropolis. There has been much attention given the public interest litigation (PIL) recently filed by prominent film makers and socialites on the failure of the state’s disaster management plan. What has not been pointed out is that three additional PILs, filed earlier this year on much longer-term urban development issues, are about to be given their final hearings by the Bombay High Court and Supreme Court — on land planning for the Mill Lands, on the protection of coastal mangroves and wetlands, and on redevelopment of cessed buildings as high-rises. The recent infrastructural crisis will give a much greater relevance to these judgements, which impact policies meant at regulating the abuses of private builders, land speculators, and corrupt local authorities. Also on the cards is the National Urban Renewal Mission, a central Government programme for local urban bodies to reform through better implementation of laws already on the books, of which most citizens remain unaware. Most important among these laws are the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments on decentralisation of local decision-making to non-party ward committees, which municipal corporators and political parties have actively prevented from forming in the past five years in Mumbai. Ward committees would have been a much more effective mechanism for immediate relief during the floods, and a persistent watchdog on the local elected representatives and ward officers before and after the disaster.

Long-term changes such as these are often improvised in the wake of disasters, unaware of the historical script they may be following, or their origins in immediate crises. But there are real reasons to be optimistic. It was his horror at the 1943 Bengal famine, and the flood of refugees sheltering in his childhood home in Calcutta, that prompted Amartya Sen’s lifelong academic work on hunger. This won him the Nobel Prize more than fifty years later, when he is one of the most influential voices in policy debates on social development. The plague panic in colonial Bombay set in motion the formation of the modern city, through the agency of the BIT. Today, while everyone is raising their voices, we have yet to find our Sen, or even our Giuliani. We can, however, take hope from Voltaire’s post-disaster philosophy of Enlightenment. His own literary response to the destruction of the medieval city of Lisbon in earthquake and fires scripted the next two hundred years of political change in Europe, and the birth of modern democracy. The protagonist of Candide stubbornly refuses to accept the explanations of the ruling priests and aristocracy that the disaster was ordained by either or God or Nature, mocking them with the repeated question — “is this the best of all possible worlds?” It is our own answers to this age-old question that will determine the future of our shared institutions and everyday lives in the city.

(Published as Some Reasons to be Optimistic, or, Mumbai and the Global History of Urban Disasters in TimeOut Mumbai Vol.1, Issue 26, 26 August to 8 September 2005)


Filed under: journalism, main — Tags: , , — Shekhar @ 16 August 2005 12.00 pm

Bombay’s Blame Game: On the Recent Floods

Who is really to blame for the floods and chaos in Mumbai this week? The monsoon downpour last week was not strictly a natural disaster. It was a man-made crisis, and the public have spent the past week searching for explanations and solutions to this human disaster. The answers provided have ranged from the opportunistic to misinformed, and almost all are lacking in a longer term perspective on institutions, particularly those concerned with urban infrastructure in Mumbai.

The latest assertion, by environmentalists and activists opposed to the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, is that the overflowing of the polluted Mithi River can be solely blamed on reclamations for the Sea Link and the Bandra-Kurla Complex. While this is plausible, the claim is being made without any scientific or ecological evidence to substantiate their arguments about the effects of reclamation. But then where are the real experts? In a city which boasts some of the nation’s finest institutes of technology — insular enclaves of global expertise which rarely interact with the city’s public problems — very few academics or qualified engineers are to be found raising their voices.

What of politicians and bureaucrats? Disaster relief is a golden opportunity for political leaders to shore up their reputations, to play politics while appearing above it. Consider Rudy Giuliani’s live calls to the media from the New York Mayor’s Office hours after 9/11, and his constant and reassuring presence on television in the days and weeks afterwards, constantly answering questions and providing information. However in Mumbai, the average person’s desire for symbols and faces to assuage their grief and address their complaints were conspicuously absent. On Torrential Tuesday, the BMC shut its offices early, and its engineers and officers swam home, while politicians didn’t emerge into the limelight until days after the calamity. So for lack of faces, the papers featured two very different men on their front pages, both tottering on inflatable boats amidst the waterlogged lanes of Kalina — Police Commissioner A.N. Roy and Shiv Sena chief Balasaheb Thackeray — one on evacuation, the other on a rescue mission.

With officials absent and information scant, the media let loose many wild myths in place of hard facts, such as that the city’s drainage system was built by the British a hundred years ago and has not been upgraded since. This claim, repeated over and over on a national news channel last week, is baseless. The most serious flooding happened in the suburbs — which were either sparsely populated hinterlands or unreclaimed swamps and scrub in colonial times. Since suburbanisation began in the late sixties, storm water drains and infrastructure have indeed been developed north of Bandra and Sion — however clogged, encroached, and dysfunctional they are today (and to the credit of Victorian engineering, the post-colonial Island City, with its large underground pipes, drained more efficiently than the suburbs). Unable to source information under the pressures of covering the crisis, the media often resorted to commonplace myths about the city rather than getting the story straight. For instance, not a single newspaper or channel has yet covered in detail the Brihanmumbai Storm Water Drainage Project (BRIMSTOWAD), a major infrastructure investment which has been stalled for more than a decade because of the state’s inability to satisfy World Bank loan conditions.

For the public of the city, the monsoon flooding has provided an impetus to action, which could result in much wider changes in governance and our everyday life. It is not often in history that a natural or human disaster prompts wide-ranging institutional reforms. But often the most sweeping changes happen almost by accident. The plague epidemic in Bombay in the 1890s, which prompted an exodus of half the city’s population and the demolition of most of the inner city, gave birth to the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) at the turn of the century. The BIT acquired lands, built roads, parcelled out plots, and laid the foundations for land and housing markets on which the modern city operates. The origin of such wide-ranging reforms, and the political will to achieve them, was not in some lofty vision plan, or in the public spirit of Bombay’s prominent citizens. The BIT originated in the paranoid fear of the city’s elites of pestilence and disease spreading to their bungalows from poorly ventilated and overcrowded slums in the inner city. After ruthless demolitions of tenements and seizure of lands in the name of public health, the BIT planned and developed most of what we still recognise as the Island City. Crisis gave birth to change, and transformed the city in the decades that followed.

Long-term responses to disasters are often improvised, unaware of the historical script they may be following. In addition to the colonial legacy of roads, pipes and sewers laid down by the British, we have also inherited and are replaying a century-old drama of authoritarian responses to urban crises initiated by the BIT. The political responses also follow a familiar script. Earlier this week, Fali Nariman made an eloquent plea in the Rajya Sabha for a constitutional amendment to make Mumbai into a Union Territory. This predictably stirred the pot of urban-rural, rich-poor, and English-Marathi divisions in the house, quickly seized on by Pramod Mahajan. Both of these positions belong in history’s dustbin. Centralising authority in a new Union Territory Government, which would presumably replace the present administration by the BMC and Maharashtra Government, will not bring about any serious changes.

Better implementation of existing laws already on the books, of which most people remain unaware, is a more practical and effective solution. The Development Control Rules (DCR) which monitor and steer local planning and development are routinely violated and overriden by builders and politicians, through dereserving plots earmarked for open space or infrastructure. The abstract numbers game of floor space indices (FSI) and transferable development rights (TDR) which regulate construction across the city are calculated without regard to local infrastructure, environment, and densities.

The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments on local self-governance and decentralisation have not been implemented in Mumbai or most cities, and municipal corporators and political parties have actively prevented the formation of non-party ward committees in the past five years in Mumbai. Ward committees would have been a much more effective mechanism for immediate relief during the floods, and a persistent watchdog on the local corporators and ward officers before and after the disaster. The media does not usually cover such longer-term issues of laws and institutions that govern our everday lives. Rather than pleading with government to take more control of our lives through creating a new City State or Union Territory bureaucracy, there are many more small but sweeping changes which we must ask for at the local level. Otherwise we are all sunk.

Originally published as an editorial in DNA (Daily News and Analysis) Mumbai, 5 August 2005


Filed under: journalism — Tags: , — Shekhar @ 29 July 2005 12.00 pm