Hubris: an overbearing pride that invariably destroys the swaggering figure. Is that the explanation for what has been happening to an arrogant Mumbai riding on its power-towers?

Are its serial punishments the karma sutra of a city that doesn’t care who it sleeps with, or whom it screws? If the deluge of 26/7 was an act of God (with a little help from the municipal corporation), 7/11 too could be divine retribution (with a little help from a terrorist group).

As in some Biblical replay, in the span of just a week we were visited upon by the pestilences of flood, riot and then the massacre at rush-hour.

In a shaken version of what Moses famously said to the Pharaoh, should I plead to the Almighty, “Let go of my people”? Don’t mock me if I sound demented. These have been disorienting times, and reason has been drowned, stoned and blasted out of existence.

I can only seek some supranatural explanation, for a logical sequence eludes me. Just 70 mm of rainfall makes us go under; a smear of mud on a statue paralyses a city that has just emerged from that chaotic flooding; and two days later, in seven minutes, Mumbai’s commuter life-line detonates into a ghastly death chamber.

If a perverse consolation is to be extricated from what has been dubbed Terrible Tuesday, it’s of a piece with my hubris hypothesis. Other cities might fondly presume that they have wrested the crown, but they are just pretenders to the FDI throne. The terrorists have reconfirmed that the undisputed symbol of India’s economic power is still Mumbai. So Bangalore, be not Info-proud; Gurgaon, wipe off that mall-to-mall smirk. Mumbai remains No 1 on the charts.

And therefore, also at the top of the hit list. Reporting on the RDX Armegeddon of 1993, I encountered a dazed home guard at the Worli blast site. She swept her matronly arm over the devastation splattered before us, and demanded, “For whom should I mourn? If I could find an intact person, I’d shed my tears for him or her. But do you expect me to cry over this limb charred beyond human connection?

Over this coagulated smear on the pavement? Or even that sliver of brain?” She wasn’t being callous or ghoulish. On that March 12, Mumbai had “fled to brutish beasts, and men had lost their reason”, so those forced to bear witness could not be expected to be rational.

Thirteen years later, I am forced to cite that benumbed home guard, and ask, “For whom should we mourn?” For those who became names on a hospital morgue list, of course, but much more for the undead whose stumbling, fear-chilled search also ended here.

Yes, we should sympathise with the injured whose lives suddenly spiralled into slow motion on the 6.14 Fast. But most of all, we must mourn the death of the city’s much-touted, much-tormented resilience.

Let’s not add insult to the injury we’ve inflicted on that unfortunate creature called the ‘spirit of Mumbai’. With the lethal combination of calamities and authorities, we finally killed it. Let’s at least give it a decent, non-maudlin burial.

<B>From India

Source: © Times of India - Editorial

Bachi Karkaria</B>