Urban legend

One sunday morning in 1951 Detroit, Michigan, Harry Shiovitz, a 32-year-old salesman, was celebrating the bris of his son Nathan. The dining table was stacked with traditional Jewish dishes: blintzes, kugels, cheeses, pastries, and smoked fish. Even as the family was chatting and eating amid shouts of Mazel Tov, Shiovitz and his wife knew his house, for which he had borrowed the US $500 down payment only a year earlier, would not be home to Nathan. This world, the northern frontier of Detroit’s Jewish neighborhood, was coming to an end. “We were already planning to leave,” he said.

Over the last 50 years, Detroit has lost almost a million of its former 1.85 million people. About three-quarters of that million were white. What made the world’s “arsenal of democracy”—the city had emerged from World War II as the international capital of the booming auto industry—alter its role? The Blacks were moving in and, according to the newspapers then, the Blacks meant crime. “Genug iz genug,” as the Yiddish saying goes: “enough is enough.”

Immediately after the terror attacks in Mumbai, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg put New York City’s subway system “on high alert” based on “an unsubstantiated report of potential terrorism here in New York,” Bloomberg said in a statement. Across the pond, London’s Underground was reminded of the attacks on King’s Cross and Edgware Road stations in 2005 and upped its security manifold. Islamabad is sill ringing with the gutting of the Marriott in September this year.

The solitary question that seems to be on everyone’s lips: Are our cities safe anymore?
First it was a collapse in urban infrastructure, then health-related environmental pollution, and now terror attacks: the bane of civilisation has hit our megapolises, turning them into centres of carnage and decay.

Actor Akshaye Khanna, who currently lives in one of the most beautiful apartment buildings in Mumbai, in the tony neighbourhood of Little Gibbs Road, has purchased land in Alibaug, a village outside Mumbai, and plans to make it his permanent residence. He has top architects Bijoy Jain and Pinakin Patel for neighbours, as well as model coordinator Rasna Behl. All of them have given up city life in favour of an idyllic landscape and an easier pace.

Actress-turned-producer Pooja Bhatt left her bad-girl image in Bandra, Mumbai’s Queen of the Suburbs, to move to a village called Kalote, on the outskirts of Khopoli. She used to write a column in a local tabloid not once lamenting her immigration from “mad Mumbai”.

A minor exodus seems to be on its way.
Venkat Iyer is a 42-year-old gent who moved out of Mumbai and his high-paying software project manager job at IBM to take up farming in Dahanu, on the border of Maharashtra and Gujarat, four years ago. “The job was good but something was missing: the need to find time for myself,” he says.

The stress made Iyer think about what he wanted to really do. In 2002, his wife Meena Menon did a project on organic cotton and published it in book form called Reinventing the Wheel. She went to villages in four-five states in India, for periods of 10-15 days and stayed with farmers and returned to give her husband raving accounts of how wonderfully the villagers lived. “In 2003, my work pressure was becoming unbearable. Then I asked her what if I became a farmer. She thought it was a wonderful idea,” says Iyer.

The couple found a 4.5 acre plot at Dahanu, 110 kilometres from Mumbai. “It was enough for me,” he says with an eerie sense of content. Iyer grows his own food, organically. Rice during the monsoon, pulses, green gram, urad, tur and seasonal vegetables. In the winter, it’s oil from groundnut, sesame and mustard.

Everything he grows is for consumption. If it is beyond the couple’s usage they sell it directly to others. For example, if he gets a lot of oil and pulses, he sends an SMS or e-mail to people who he thinks will be interested. “I do need money but I only want a little of it. If you stay in a village, what will you buy?” he laughs.

The Iyers figured they needed less than Rs6,000 a month to live in a village and they had more than that if they put their savings in a bank and lived off interest. Meena got a job at a newspaper and lives in Goregaon, a far-flung Mumbai suburb. Iyer visits on the weekend, often with farm-grown veggies and fruit. “I buy sea salt for Re1 a kilo, and there’s also a barter system in villages,” he says, thrilled with his minimal lifestyle.

Joining him are Michelle and Hemant Babu, who’ve also moved from Mumbai to Dahanu. In a sleepy hamlet of Sogve village, the Babus have started Tamarind Tree, a back-to-the-land philosophy that’s opted out of a routine-like existence of the Mumbai mega-city. The organisation is an experimental initiative towards creating reflective thinking and a critique of our current milieu.

“The link today is different; the motivation was different,” says Hemant, 42. “Mumbai life was too stressful. But now we also have the added advantage of safety versus the insecurity that has cropped in people’s minds.” The couple work with tribals, revive crafts like Warli, conduct student exchange programmes and aid energy applications for rural India.

TimeOut Mumbai editor Naresh Fernandes feels Mumbai has historically used adversity to rebuild itself. “After the plague at the turn of the last century, the government set up the Bombay Improvement Trust that cut down hills so there would be better ventilation,” he says. “No matter how bad things are in Mumbai, it’s worse in the hinterland. Mumbai is about livelihood over lifestyle; here too, a large percentage of people don’t have toilets in their houses.”
Babu says rural India is hardly safe. “A very high number of armed robberies occur in Thane district,” he says. “But you exercise your choice.”

Almost as a tribute to big cities and their landmarks, a text from fashion designer Rohit Bal reads: “Let’s get together at 5 pm on Dec 6 across the nation at the landmarks of our respective cities to tell perpetrators that nothing will come in the way of an intelligent united India. India Gate at Delhi, Gateway of India in Mumbai, Charminar in Hyderabad. And all landmark locations in each city.”
In many ways, a big city is still very much like a small town. .