Last halt to paradise

Once, not long ago, Navi Mumbai used to be a dormitory town across the harbour. Planned to be another lodestone to attract the crowds, congestion and industry away from the megalopolis, Navi Mumbai suffered for many years from an infrastructure ill-equipped to cope with its planners" ambitions. It still remains a diffidently growing settlement of neat, distempered CIDCO homes, but is now constellated with blockbusters. Stations, which many say, helped Navi Mumbai make the transition from sleepy frontier settlement to a vibrant appendage of the mother city.

So much so,that Juinagar station is now the favourite haunt of movie directors. Its colourful murals and outrageous fibreglass sculptures are a perfect foil for the regiments of dancers roped in from the mainland. It used to alarm Juinagar residents a bit to witness Raveena’s semi-nude gyrations on their beloved platforms in the middle of the day. But now whether its Urmila or Akshay, clothed or not, it"s all old hat really. These days, whenever a film crew lands up to shoot the manicured prettiness of the station and its environs, Juinagar residents are hard put to stifle some yawns…

What renders these stations extraordinary, is not only the maintenance — but also the sequence of space. Unlike the string of suburban Mumbai’s stations, which are willy-nilly the nucleus of suburban life, however functionally and aesthetically unfit they may be for the task; the CIDCO stations were erected after a great deal of deliberation. Initially planned as stereotypes, it is to the credit of the architect and CIDCO’s daringthat they transmuted the brief to become showpieces of the region they were to serve. The intention was not only to create landmarks, reference points for the populace, but also to attract investment into the region.

Much of Navi Mumbai is low-lying terrain, traversed by salt pans and marshes. So the architect developed novel approaches which heighten the sense of anticipation. One reaches the platforms either via generous subways that are burrowed into the ground, like at Sanpada or foot overbridges which command sweeping views of the railway tracks — a magnificently urban experience, like at Nerul. The entrance sequence has been thought out to incorporate layered frames of the surroundings, vistas of the tracks, quantities of pale light and hollow echoes. It cannot of course be compared to CST or Mumbai Central, the great stations of the metropolis, but neither is it a pretender.