Glorious colonial architecture abounds in Bombay, but I think my favourite is the BMC building, the Gothic classic right opposite the legendary Victoria Terminus. It’s one of those buildings that lifts the spirits every time you see it, another intricacy revealing itself on each inspection, a different random association coming to mind – yesterday it made me think of St Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest, the finest building in a fine city.
And I love the name Bombay Municipal Corporation – it’s got that Chamberlain-esque late-Victorian can-do civic attitude ring to it. No nonsense. Does what it says on the tin. These are the guys that make the city tick: these guys work so that we can play.
Except, that is, when they get spooked by a single new addition to the thousands of other communicable diseases already swimming merrily in our city’s human swamp. Yes folks, swine flu’s hit town, mask-sellers are making a killing, and the BMC has decided to try and shut down Bombay. They closed cinemas and theatres over the long Janmashtami weekend, asked malls to shut and generally said everyone should stay indoors. I suppose the idea is that if nobody meets another human being for three days, then those that have it will stop being infectious and those that don’t won’t ever get it. Bravo.
Except that there are twenty million people here and half of them live practically on top of one another. And swine flu has already shown itself to be practically unstoppable in countries that have far better healthcare systems and far lower population density than here. And, as luck would have it, swine flu isn’t half as nasty as any one of the hundreds of other diseases you can already catch here. All in all, the BMC are spouting nonsense.
Thankfully, they underestimate the spirit of this city: a place that wasn’t cowed by the murderous riots in ’93, or the floods in ’05, or the bombs on the trains in ’06 – not to mention the events of 26 November last year – certainly isn’t going to worry about a new germ to add to all the ones we’ve already got. The malls have been overflowing and the city’s a-buzz. It seems that India, just like the West, is a country that greets authoritarian idiocy with the raised middle finger it deserves.
The only real downside is that I was supposed to go to the theatre on Saturday, and sadly it was one of the venues that is more readily influenced by political pressure. So my play was cancelled. Gah. It would never have happened in Chamberlain’s day.
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