November 9: When Charles Correa, the reclusive genius, started highlighting the malady which is slowly destroying Mumbai city the audience at NCPA were all attention.Dressed in a white shirt, trousers and a sleeveless jacket, Correa spoke for over an hour. Drawing the audience attention he said, unless Mumbai becomes a city state, like Delhi, where the citizens elect those in charge of the city, improving the lot of the average Mumbaikar will be an impossible task. "All Indian cities should be like their counterparts in the USA where the mayor has more power in the city than the governor of the state. Simply because state governments face no threat of being ousted if they ignore individual cities and they do that," said Correa. Correa was talking during the release function of MARG's new book Bombay to Mumbai: Changing Perspectives at NCPA's experimental theatre on Friday. It is a two volume compilation of essays by various authors on the city and is priced at Rs 3,000. And among the bigwigs who had gathered there to listen and talk to him on the subject Mumbai, Looking ahead, were Shabana Azmi, Mulk Raj Anand, Jamshed Kanga, Alyque Padamsee and Cyrus Guzdar.But not all of Correa's arguments were received unanimously. Talking about the opening of the blocked urban land in Mumbai, i.e the Parel Mills triangle, which is more than the area from Back Bay to Apollo Bunder to D N Road and the 25 percent of the land owned by the Bombay Port Trust, Correa said it could solve all of the city's space problems. And Mumbai could be refashioned into a well-planned city along with low-cost housing built for the homeless. Here Shabana Azmi raised the point of the slums which have to be demolished in the process of replanning and lashed out against the idea. "Shabana, you don't really believe that slum-dwellers should be allowed to remain where they are just to save them the pain of moving to a new place, do you?" replied Correa and the audience broke out in an applause in agreement with him.But towards the end, he raised a more hypothetical question, "I often wonder why I continue living in this city - is it the power, the money, the brilliant conversation of my friends? What is it? Just ask yourself that question and it will tell you a lot about yourself." But in the end Correa himself zeroed onto what keeps Mumbaikars going on day after day and drew people from all over the country like bees to honey, "It is the hope which gets to me, you know, not the despair. That's how I feel about Bombay."
