Roaring With The Metro Lion

<div class="section0"><div class="Normal"><span style="" font-size:="">The city of Bollywood has a new big-time production house: Metro Gold-win Mayor. In the week that I''ve been back, I''ve discovered that everyone''s become a metro lion, talking only about land sharks and zebra crossings. There''s no business like civic business. Which should suit me fine since that''s been my professional specialty for the past 20 years.But it doesn''t. So many people have jumped on the bandwagon that I''m being squeezed off it.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">When I first became a gutter-sniper, I had little competition. Civic issues were too pedestrian a concern for anyone to want to walk over. The political writer — and politician — was on his power trip, or junket. The corporate writer — and czar — was on the business pages. I was in my potholed heaven. All was well with the world.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Then globalisation glamorised sewers, and civic issues began rising like a tower from a razed slum. Dilapidated buildings have been canonised for corporate sainthood. Tenements have become CII seminars.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">And I have to compete with Anand Mahindra. Tell me, is this fair? Am I permitted to hoist the Bombay Club with its own pet line, and demand a level playing field?</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Answer a simple question. Doesn''t Mr Mahindra have enough loaded on his Blackberry without piling the entire Mumbai Task Force into his SUV, and running over my humble pavement dwelling? Can''t he be content with driving his company to fame and Fortune, being the poster-boy of Davos, and playing patron of the arts? Why must he also start writing on slums, hawkers and inner cities, trampling over my only turf? Must the capitalist roader become a road saver? Do I take up the matter with the tribunal on unfair trade practices, or seek recourse in TRIPS citing a patent violation? He''s Shanghai-ed my job!</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">It''s not just industrialists. Politicians have abandoned all the weighty matters of state and seem to be talking — and writing of nothing but the metropolitan manifesto. OK, Sheila Dikshit is prone to wading into the Yamuna sludge to fish out plastic bags like some ragpicker, but in Delhi they don''t abandon the bigger issues of China, Pakistan and summer chiks and chikankari kurtas. Does Dharam Singh think it''s his job to go fill up Bangalore''s potholes as foolishly demanded by Nandan, Kiran & Co? Buddho-babu quite rightly believes that the world must first come to Kolkata, and the roads can come later. But in Mumbai, restoring civic order has become an endemic compulsive obsessive disorder.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">At first it was only Shabana Azmi marching for pavement dwellers and paying for promenades for Bandra''s well-heeled. But now every celebrity, regardless of his/her original profession, has become an urban planner or spanner. Vilasrao Deshmukh seems to have made a full-time job of writing articles on his expressway vision for Mumbai. Despite — or maybe because of — all this high-profile concern, ordinary people are still in a jam. And hacks like me are jacked because these fancy names have grabbed all my stories. As a self-styled civic expert I should have seen it coming. I should know that, more than any other city''s, Mumbai''s DNA is made up of encroachments.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">***</span><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Alec Smart said, "What do you call the attack on party seniors? ''Old Boys Clubbed."</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Erratica and Juggling Act, compilations of best of Erratica and Jugular Vein, now available at leading bookstores. Or log on to www.books.indiatimes.com.</span><br /><br /></div> </div>