3 min readJan 21, 2026 01:21 PM IST
First published on: Jan 21, 2026 at 07:38 AM IST
Oddly, and quite unexpectedly, the act of going to cast my vote in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation election was a surreal experience.
For those few minutes, it felt as though I had been transported into an alternative reality. Everything was neat, orderly, fully functional, and peaceful. It was a textbook illustration of a worthy civic situation, at least in the citizen interface.
Yes, this did happen at the pinnacle of privilege. The polling station for my address just happens to be inside a residential colony for Reserve Bank of India officials.
The moment I stepped out of the polling station, I was back in my actual, daily-life reality. No smooth pavement to walk on, road construction work being done with barely any regard for the safety of local residents, infrastructure in disrepair, air thick with cement dust from multiple under-regulated construction sites, litter, uncollected garbage.
It’s a long list that gets worse when you consider the conditions under which the overwhelming majority of citizens, the utterly-not-privileged and under-privileged, live. When you add the horrors of traffic congestion, vehicular pollution, and the combination of long working hours plus gruelling commutes, the reality is actually a textbook case of structural violence against the human body and spirit.
No wonder there are friends who chose not to vote and looked upon those of us who did as being delusional.
But is it delusional to do the very least you can? Voting is just that, the bare minimum. The big unknown is why the millions who inhabit the Greater Mumbai metro collectively fail to do more than the minimum.
Over the last four decades, Mumbai, like other metros, has seen citizen initiatives that have made an attempt to work with the formal structures of power to make the city more livable. But the needle has not moved in any significant way. Treading the streets of Mumbai, it is impossible to believe that this is Asia’s richest municipality with a budget of over Rs 74,000 crore. The efficiency of new infrastructure like the coastal road and metro rail does not compensate for the miseries rampant across the city.
Therefore, it is no surprise that over 1 lakh voters who showed up at polling booths chose NOTA, that is, about 1.83 per cent of votes cast. Likewise, the sentiments of those who treated the election as a farce and chose not to vote at all are entirely understandable — if only at an emotive level. Even if Mumbai is a painful illustration of the old saying about getting the government you deserve, does that mean we should give up?
There is no shortage of competent people who want to make this a livable city. These bravehearts have to overcome the overlapping complexities of bad design and petty, institutionalised greed, along with the hopelessness-driven apathy of citizens.
Then again, there is that voting experience, which was not perfect at many other polling stations. But it was still a glimmer of light which shows that in parts of the system, there is energy to do it right.
Bakshi is the author of Long Haul: The Bombay Textile Workers Strike
It is no surprise that over 1 lakh voters who showed up at polling booths chose NOTA, that is, about 1.83 per cent of votes cast. 
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