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October 20, 2005

How Green is My Matunga

This is the new Mumbai Mirror piece.

For some time now, I have begun to believe that I know almost everything there is to know about Matunga. And then last week, I saw Matunga from such a completely different perspective, that it punctured my balloon of presumptuousness, virtually immediately.

Jehangir Sorabjee, a friend and colleague, has been clicking different parts of the city, for the last seven odd years, from the sky. Literally! Whenever he gets the chance, he gets into a chopper and flies over the city, shooting pictures from overhead vantage points. He emailed me two pictures of Matunga, centred over King’s Circle, one from the north end, just above the flyover and one, as if he was hovering above Don Bosco.

Words cannot really replace the impact of the visual imagery, but until his book “Above Bombay” is out in December, they will have to do. King’s Circle takes centre-stage, seen as a round, completely green island, flourishingly verdant, rimmed by a grey concrete road, in turn rimmed by squat, flat buildings, all around the same height. Radiating from the circle, in a Beybladish manner, are seven spidery arms, which are the seven roads, including the main arterial Ambedkar road, which in turn resembles the quadriceps apparatus, the two parts of which appear interrupted by the sesamoid patella-like circle.

More importantly, except for the main arterial Ambedkar road, all the other five exits are tree-lined and green, to the extent that you can barely see the concrete, and their existence is apparent only because of the cars and people.

He then sent me one more high-resolution photograph centred over the Matunga railway tracks looking east. In this picture, the entire Greater Matunga area looks like a forest, the monotony as if broken by the buildings and the larger arterial roads, which are the only ones where you can see the concrete on the roads. You actually get a sense of the planning and thought that must have gone in at the time when this area was being developed.

And then, as Jehangir mentioned, you come down to ground reality; to the chaos and the filth, the paan-streaks and spittle-dabs … and it makes you want to cry. The beauty of an overhead shot is that it masks the griminess of the unpainted buildings with their peeling plaster and rain-water streaks and funnily, in an aerial shot, the drab gray, which is the hallmark of virtually all our landlord-owned buildings, actually helps make the green stand out, in contrast.

I tried to see if King’s Circle would show up on Google Earth in a similar manner, but it looks as if Google Earth is run by South Mumbaiites. All the lovely, high-resolution imagery ends at Mahalaxmi, and the rest of Mumbai is seen with such low-resolution that you can barely just make out the main arterial roads. But even here, the one thing that stands out among all the brown and grey terrain, is the green blob that is King’s Circle / Matunga.

Posted by bhavinj at 03:50 AM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2005

ABC to PhD

This was published in today's Mumbai Mirror.

Quiz Question: In which part of Mumbai, do you get four major institutions, meeting at one crossroad? Answer: Matunga.

Don Bosco, Khalsa College, VJTI and UDCT, all meet at a cross-road, which would deserve its own two-page spread, in any coffee-table book on famous cross-roads in India.

Before I proceed, its high time I added one more term to our vocabulary. “Greater Matunga”. Greater Matunga is the area from just before the Dadar circle, all the way upto Sion circle, with Matunga in the centre, encompassing parts of Wadala, Dadar and Sion. Not only do these areas have a connected history, they all share the same Matunga mentality.

Since I work in Girgaum, a large number of my colleagues believe I live somewhere in South Mumbai and express surprise at my knowledge of Matunga and the Greater Matunga area. But honestly, if you’ve lived your entire educational life in this area, if “Dadar to Sion” was your entire world for 21 years, wouldn’t you know the roads, the shops, the theatres, the gardens, the paanwallas, the doodhwala bhaiyyas, the railway stations, track crossings, the lover’s lanes, the speed-breakers and the traffic signal timings like the back of your hand?

And the funny thing is, it is actually possible to live your entire life in this area, without having to move out at all, except for social and entertainment purposes. You can live in the Greater Matunga area, go to school here as well as to junior college and if it happens, as it did in my case, even to a post-graduate college in this part of the world. Two major engineering institutes (UDCT and VJTI) and the second best medical college in the city (LTMMC, part of Sion Hospital) are to be found in this area, among other institutes of higher learning.

It must have been the cheap availability of land in the past that led to so many educational institutions starting in this area. The Greater Matunga area has a disproportionate number of schools and colleges, compared to the population that resides here. Starting with J B Vachha beyond Five Gardens, past St. Joseph’s and Auxilium, all the way upto Our Lady of Good Counsel in Sion, schools in this area comes in all shapes, sizes and budgets.

Upto about 10-15 years ago, kids would come from outside Matunga, to study in the Matunga schools. However, in the last decade or so, there has been a dramatic turn-around, where, despite the large number of schools in this area, a good number of kids go outside Matunga, to schools like Bombay Scottish, AVM, Dhirubhai Ambani, some even traveling all the way upto Mazgaon to St. Mary’s. The reason? One word…ICSE.

There is just one ICSE school in Matunga…Shishuvan. The rest are all SSC schools and today with SSC schools being considered inferior to ICSE schools, the so-called, well-heeled and connected Matungaens, follow the herd to the ICSE schools outside the area. To the extent that kids last year, were uprooted from many Matunga schools and put in a new school in Mahim, just beyond Bombay Scottish, despite this school being absolutely new, with no background, no track record and no history whatsoever.

However, when ICSE boys refuse to date SSC girls (the latest one from the rumor mills), and may in the future refuse to marry them as well, can you really blame parents for wanting the ICSE label for their children?

Posted by bhavinj at 07:14 PM | Comments (2)