So far and yet so near - also vice versa

Lord Shri Krishna and my ophthalmologist would have spoken of 'detachment'; the former would have advised it, the second cautioned against it. I found both irrelevant as I fretted in Delhi, unable to fly back to Mumbai. Its airport had turned into Santa Cruise.
If I was high and dry while my fellow Mumbaikars were forced into a life amphibious, why was I complaining? I could easily work out of the Delhi office; my nuclear family was currently fissioned in other directions; and my friends had too many distractions to miss me.Even my worldly belongings weren't in any danger of being swept away like a disaster management plan. So, then, what was making me so antsy, and anxious to return?
Was it my conscience prodding me back to the battlefront with my valiant colleagues? Guilt over my secondhand struggle? Homing instinct? All? One? None? No matter. The only option was to reconcile myself to vicarious despair, and ponder over some imponderables.
Like Mumbai has been under a malevolent star, and I don't mean Salem Salman. With the deluge, came the oil-rig inferno, ironically in conditions you'd think would douse any flame seeking its 15 minutes of fame. Then, the tsunami-scared stampede.
Like the only person thankful for Mumbai's deluge might be Dawood Ibrahim, because the preoccupation with the waters has washed away the preoccupation with his daughter's wedding. Everyone on its zardozi tail got so diverted that you'd suspect the Don actually engineered it. Improbable, but not impossible considering his alleged clout and connections.
Like Busybee, the city's late, much-loved and still-missed chronicler, had got to the gut of this issue as of much else. Long ago, he wrote that the difference between those who love the monsoons and those who hate it is the difference between rich Mumbai and ordinary Mumbai.
Like it's all very well to go into raptures over raindrops that keep falling on your head if you don't have to worry about your dilapidated building doing ditto. It's one thing to watch 30-ft waves through the reinforced plate-glass, scenic windows of The Oberoi or your NCPA apartment; it's quite another to tremble over the likely prospect of a 30-ft-high rock sliding down to crush your not-reinforced-everything to smith-ereens. It's easy to wax eloquent over poetry, eroticism and bhutta in the rain if you don't have to walk down the waterlogged railway tracks to get home to your distant suburb worried sick about your kids, your home and the loss of daily earnings.
Like this time the bloated cars floated like carcasses, but usually the rain god sucks up to privileged South Mumbai as much as the most sycophantic seeker of a celebrity party invitation ��� or the municipal corporation which expends so much money and energy to keep it paved and un-potholed. On Traumatic Tuesday, the Met office in suburban Santa Cruz recorded 668 mm of rainfall compared to the sybaritic showers in Colaba counterpart. Wet 'n' Wild clearly has very different connotations on either side of the North-South divide.
PS: If Mumbai gets rid of its 'eyesore' slums, next time who will push its stalled SUVs?
Alec Smart said, "KPS: A pain in the neck (or lower), but not Gill-otined."