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June 16, 2006
Thoda hai, thode ki zaroorat hai
This appeared in today's Mumbai Mirror.
Stanmore is a suburb in North London, where I was vacationing last month. My niece and her husband had moved into their new home just a fortnight back and still hadn’t gotten around to knowing the area well.
The holiday was a lazy one, but like a fool, since I had brought my running shoes along, and that too, after a lot of struggle and acrimony over their presence, especially with the already over-loaded baggage, there was no way I could escape not using them. Which meant I had to go out running in the mornings, whilst everyone else was sleeping away till as late as possible.
I ran thrice on alternate days for about 45 minutes each, until I finally (thankfully) fell down while playing football in a parking lot and injured myself enough to have an excuse to avoid running for the rest of the holiday. Each of those three times though, running in different directions within a mile’s radius from the house, I found a new park. The first was a school-ground, belonging to a regular middle school – the ground was larger than Don Bosco, which we proudly claim to be the biggest in Matunga and Mumbai. The other two were community parks, each larger than all the gardens in Five Gardens combined.
Three large parks in a radius of 1 mile from the house. And just was one small part of Stanmore, which still had other parks and gardens further away as well. Typically, as one of my uncles told me, it is unlikely that you would have to walk more than half a kilometre to get to a park, anywhere in London.
Open spaces make a difference. On multiple levels. Whether they are for kids to play in or for adults to run and walk in, or for grand-parents to have a place to congregate in or just to fulfill our need for greenery and openness – their presence determines the quality of the area that you live in.
People crib about the high taxes in London. But those high taxes get you gardens, clean pavements, good-quality roads, uninterrupted electricity, regular waste pick-up…you get the picture. Small things that make living easier and less of a struggle.
We also pay our taxes in Mumbai…which go mainly towards the salaries of the BMC employees…who then convert our gardens and open spaces into shopping malls or parking lots or building complexes or open toilets…and leave us with cratered roads and pavements.
Yet, despite the apathy among the authorities and the lack of planning in the past, Matunga is still one of the few places in Mumbai, with decent open spaces. And this is one of the reasons that Matunga is still a popular place to live in. We have Maheshwari Udyan and Five Gardens, other smaller gardens nearby in Parsi Colony, gardens such as the one near Nappoo Hall, the Cosmopolitan grounds, the ground opposite Ruia and Poddar and the one outside Indian Gymkhana, apart from the many private grounds of all the eight or ten schools in the area as well as the colleges such as Khalsa, VJTI and UDCT. Which isn’t such a bad tally, when you think of it!
So though Matunga can never be Stanmore, very few places in Mumbai can be like Matunga as well. Which is actually a shame...both ways!
Posted by bhavinj at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)
