Global Recession in Mumbai - Where big dreams of big people come true

[Nagarjuna]

Mumbai: Where dreams can come true
By Mark Tutton
Mumbai is extreme India. In this booming metropolis all the wealth,
inequalities, colors, flavors and passions of India are magnified to
an almost unbearable degree.
For many Indians, Mumbai is the place where dreams can come true.
Somewhere between 13 and 20 million people are squeezed into the city
that is India's leading financial and industrial center and the home
of the Bollywood movie. For countless migrants from all over the
country, be they business school graduates, aspiring actors or
destitute laborers, Mumbai is the place where dreams can come true.
Those who like to think of India as a land of tradition and mystery
would be shocked by the way modern Mumbai has embraced western
consumerism. In Mumbai the rigidities of India's traditional caste
system are being replaced by a kind of brutal meritocracy in which the
winners become extraordinarily rich and the losers struggle for
survival.
While Mumbai is fearlessly embracing modernity, minting millionaires
and erecting skyscrapers, its infrastructure is hopelessly outdated
and creaking under the weight of the city's ever-expanding population.
Mumbai's road traffic is legendary -- a chaotic melange of cars,
mopeds, motorized rickshaws and red double-decker buses, seemingly
fused together in a writhing, gridlocked mass.
All big cities have deprived areas, but in Mumbai the deprivation is
impossible to avoid. Up to half of Mumbai's residents live in slums,
about a million in the shacks of Dharavi, the biggest slum in Asia. In
these cities within a city children play next to the sewers that run
through the streets, whole families often live in a single room and
clean water is scarce.
Yet while the slums can be grindingly poor, they are also buzzing with
activity. Many residents of Dharavi work in cottage industries and in
the thriving recycling trade, and their biggest threats are the annual
monsoon floods and the developers eager to clear the slum in order to
exploit the prime real estate it occupies.
For outsiders, the contrast between rich and poor can be jarring, but
Mumbaikars have learned to live with adversity.
While the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008 horrified the world,
the killings were tragically familiar to those living in a city where
hundreds have been killed by terrorists over the last 15 years and
religious and social tensions simmer beneath the surface.
Yet, despite its very visible problems, Mumbai simply will not be
denied. Constantly growing in population and wealth, Mumbai is a world-
class city when it comes to culture, commerce and consumption.
Mumbaikars are incredibly enterprising and their ability to bounce
back from tragedy is testimony to their resourcefulness and
resilience.
Danny Boyle, director of award-winning movie "Slumdog Millionaire,"
set and filmed in Mumbai, said of the city, "Despite all that has
happened there recently it is a city moving towards happiness."You
have these incredible extremes but it feels like there's a destiny
that binds it all together."

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Once I wanted in live and die in India - Not anymore - Ian Jack
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/07/india-global-recession

India's hunger for the English language is manifested in the names of
its schools. In Jaipur, the chief city of Rajasthan, under the letter
B alone you can find the Blue Bells school, the Blue Birds school and
the Bo-Peep school. Some don't sound so salubrious: the address of the
Modern Happy school is listed as "Behind Petrol Pump, Gapalpura Model
Tank Road". Many of them are likely to have been inspired more by
profit than by educational ideals, their innocent nursery names
disguising black-hearted entrepreneurs making a quick buck from Hindi-
speaking parents who are anxious to promote their children into better
jobs via familiarity with the world's most powerful language. It is
easy to imagine an Indian variant of the kind of school satirised by
Dickens and Waugh - schools born out of similar middle-class ambitions
- in which a poorly-paid Miss Gupta chants the class through
Wordsworth's Daffodils while dreaming in their inward eye of a couch
in Bollywood rather than Windermere.

The one I visited in Jaipur last month, however, seemed a model of
commitment. This was the Step by Step school, one of a chain of fee-
paying English-schools in north India, and I'd been invited to talk to
the pupils about "journalism, your life, those kinds of things".

It was nine o'clock on a Saturday morning. A group of senior pupils
aged about 16 sat cross-legged in neat rows, girls to the left and
boys to the right, all in blue uniform. They remained completely
silent through our on-stage conversation. Their questions, when they
came at the end, were sharp and well-framed. Other memories of those
45 minutes are now a blur, save for two moments. One came when my
hostess invited me to talk about nationalism and, perhaps a little too
late, I realised I was being asked to proclaim its virtues rather than
find fault with it as a political philosophy; "national integration"
has always been an important project in a country of so many languages
and creeds but the Mumbai attacks have installed a patriotic fervour
against Pakistan of a kind Britain hasn't known since pictures of HMS
Nelson were hung from the walls of Orwellian crammers.

The second arrived when in some headmaster-like spasm I talked to the
audience about their future. They were a fortunate generation, I said.
India and China were the new world powers, and India may in the end
hold the advantage over its rival because of India's expressiveness in
the English language, its democratic and more flexible governance and
its long historical relationship with the west. "You're lucky," I
said. "You were born at the right time in the right place. Seize the
chance."

"I especially appreciated those remarks," a teacher said later. "It
was good that you said them." In fact, they may have been said rather
jealously. That morning online I'd read the widely quoted remarks of
the investor Jim Rogers, who made his original fortune in currency
speculation when he founded the Quantum fund with George Soros. "I
would urge you to sell any sterling you might have," Rogers said.
"It's finished. I hate to say it, but I would not put any money into
the UK."

Alone in an Indian hotel room, aware of a bill that would show how the
pound's value to the rupee had sunk over the past few months by 20%,
it was perhaps too easy to feel depressed. Then again, all of Britain
is depressed: a well of melancholy. In this week's Guardian, Max
Hastings wrote the most chilling prognosis for a country softened and
made greedy by decades of financial illusion, now facing a future of
impoverishment and civil unrest. British workers would keep their
wages "only if they perform skilled tasks which others cannot, or
provide their services for substantially smaller real rewards than
they have received in the past". The education system was a mess,
producing young people "fit only to be global losers" when by contrast
"anyone who has met young Chinese and Indians of the new generation
perceives their tigerish hunger, as well as their skills".

The last is true. Out of Step by Step, Bo-Peep - and for all I know
the Modern Happy school, squatting behind the petrol pump - a
different kind of Indian is emerging equipped with the individual
aspiration traditionally associated with America, minus the brashness.
Thirty years ago, when I first went to India, such people were rare
and drawn either from the trading communities or the narrow seam known
as the Anglophone elite. Now the middle-class has hugely expanded and
believes rightly in its technical competence. If the age of
territorial empires were to return in a process of reverse
colonisation, Indians would be as perfectly or imperfectly equipped to
run Yorkshire as the Britons in the Indian civil service once governed
Bengal. As they may one day be happy to do, because the problems for
India (and China) in the long term make those of Britain in the medium
term look like molehills.

There was a time when I thought I would be happy to live, perhaps even
die, in India. This may have been foolish romanticism, but it was
easier then to ignore all the statistics in UN development reports;
social inequality aside, their impact was located in the distant
future. That future is much closer. Twice as many people live in India
now as when I first saw it. By 2030, it will overtake China as the
world's most populous country: between four and five times as many
people as the United States now has, packed into a land only a third
as large.

Those figures in themselves will bring intolerable pressure on the
things we consider vital to a decent life - on land, water, crops and
pleasure. Add the predicted effects of climate change, and the future
of India and China as stable nations looks doubtful. The permanent
snow cover on the Himalayas may not last beyond 2050; the Ganges,
which provides 500 million people with water, draws more than two-
thirds of its summer flow from the Himalayan meltwater that the snow
and glaciers will no longer be there to supply. Then, of course, there
is the likely influx of several million refugees from Bangladesh due
to a rise in sea level.

All things considered, I was probably wrong to tell my Jaipur audience
how lucky they were. Nowhere on earth, not even middle-class India, is
this the ideal age to be born. The economic depression will do its
worst. Britain may emerge as little more than a destination for
educational and cultural tourists (pockets of violence are a danger,
but so were brigands for gentleman making the "Grand Tour"). But the
much graver threat of unsustainable consumption and climate change
will still tower over the world, and Britain may be a better place
than many to face them. There will be copious water in the north and
more root vegetables. In the long term, taking into account the
Keynesian dismissal of that perspective ("we're all dead"), our
grandchildren will stand a better chance here than by the dry bed of
the Ganges. This offers one remote reason, admittedly an insular and
inhumane one, to be cheerful.