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January 01, 2000
At home in an alien city
It is not just the old-style privileged corporate employee who is coming
to Mumbai these days but also the young job seeker competing for jobs
and accommodation with his or her Indian counterpart
For many years, Mumbai was considered a hardship posting in the international market. This meant that anyone working in a bank, multinational company etc. liable to be posted to the city could expect a hefty financial incentive and many would still refuse to come. I always found the idea of hardship a bit hard to swallow. I mean look at the lifestyle of the average firang. They get to live in the best residential areas, have well-trained household staff, get easy entry into clubs, get invited to homes and parties. Is that so hard?
But okay, one must admit, there are certain negatives such as lack of greenery, fresh air, schools, the difficulty of negotiating one’s way through an alien language, an alien mindset, traffic etc. etc. Of the many foreigners I’ve met who at some time or the other made Mumbai their home I usually found one of three approaches. There were those who threw themselves headlong into the local life. Jonah Blank, anthropologist and author, for instance, spent some months in the city studying the Bohra community and still talks nostalgically of his home in an old creaky Colaba flat, the colourful ambience and the old lady beggar on the street he virtually adopted. Then there was this young French boy who used to zigzag all over town on a scooter on which he had installed a miniature temple, drawing curious stares from passers-by.
Compared to such robustness is the moony-eyed approach. As editor of a magazine it was my fate to wade through many contributions from Westerners clearly labouring under the impression that a few months amidst the squalor of Mumbai had taught them the meaning of life. But terribly written though they usually were, they at least represented a desire to explore and expand horizons. My least favourite city guests are the ones who I guess most closely represent the old-fashioned NRI abroad. An American girl I met recently for instance told me she had lived an entire year in Mumbai but could not name a single locality outside Juhu, where she had lived with a Gujarati family. Then there was Ian, who came to India via South East Asia and spent all his time grumbling about the weather, the pollution, the lack of hamburger joints and massage parlours.
All these briefly known acquaintances and others floated through my mind a few days ago. The cause was a somewhat startling discovery. I had been to a Manglorean restaurant a few days before. And while we were waiting for the food to arrive I noticed that I was one of probably half a dozen Indians. Everybody else — and the restaurant was full to bursting — was either Caucasian or from South East Asia. Now I know this is tourist season and fried fish and gassi is a bit of a hit with travellers. But my fellow diners looked far too comfortable to be just passing through. They were clearly here to stay. Nor was it the first time I’d noticed them. Go to Trishna, Apoorva, Mahesh, Geoffreys or any other pub and you see them — young and not so young professionals in advertising, finance, social studies — in large numbers and not out of place but very much at home in what should have been alien surroundings.
This is the effect of liberalisation. With India opening up its economy, its jobs too have been floated in the international market. I don’t know how Mumbai rates these days on the hardship scale but my guess is it isn’t doing as badly as it used to. Also it is not just the old-style privileged corporate employee who is coming to Mumbai these days but also the young job seeker competing for jobs and accommodation with his or her Indian counterpart. The bottomline is that we are going to see a growing influx of foreigners in the city. I have no problem with this development. Mumbai has always thrived on the energy of migrants. And yet, given the complex relationship India has always had with the foreigner, it will be interesting to see how the city changes to accommodate this phenomenon.
The writer is former editor of Elle.
Other columnists:
| M.V.Kamath |