Maximum City, Invincible People & their Lifeline

On Tuesday, that lifeline was cut, savagely severed by a hand that obviously knows Mumbai’s anatomy well. Seven serial bombs at seven stations—all key nerve centres—in peak-hour traffic. When in doubt, aim for the jugular. Hannibal Lecter couldn’t have done better.

It isn’t the first time Mumbai has been mortally wounded. Exactly 13 years ago, 13 bombs brought India’s feisty financial capital to its knees. Back then, the prime target was the Stock Exchange, that impudent icon of progress and prosperity. The aim: to symbolically cripple a newborn economy, taking its first baby steps towards globalisation.

But this time the target is a much more priceless asset: the ordinary men and women who are the flesh and bones of India’s most spirited city. Yet, today, bathed in blood, and battered by wanton violence, that spirit still shone.

No wonder. After all, the Mumbaikar is, in all probability, the most hardy specimen known to mankind. We are a species smelted in the furnace of privation, people who have simply got used to living—nay, thriving—in Hell. To dodging lethal potholes, sidestepping broken pavements, circumventing decomposing refuse, commuting like refugees, waking up at ungodly hours to fill our buckets before the municipal pipelines run dry, drinking jaundiced water, hoping against hope that our kids don’t catch malaria from exposed sewage, and watching shanties come up for free outside our matchbox apartments, while we sweat to pay off an astronomical loan for a home that may collapse the following monsoon.

It is the spirit that contributes Rs 58,000 crore to the national exchequer, and expects almost nothing in return, except the permission to aspire.

That’s why when our main artery was ripped, no one even waited for administrative first aid. The dead were shrouded in bed sheets borrowed from the neighbourhood, and the injured were ferried to hospital on the shoulders of more fortunate fellow citizens—while the railway authorities looked on languidly, and the state government debated on whether a muddied statue in a local park should be given police protection. That’s why, in the space of a week, Mumbai has been through a flood, a political riot, a serial blast—and survived. And that’s why, it will take more than seven deadly bombs to snuff out this invincible city.