All my life I have lived in many cities across India. Life, like a brook, has taken many twists, turns, swirls, leaps but has kept me afloat all this time. Every moment in life are instances of struggle and survival.
Opposites in English literature has always amused me. I remember how we used to cram them up in our Primary classes from our four lined English notebooks.
Opposites
small * big
tall * short
fat * thin
win * lose
rich * poor
Did I say amuse? I am not trying to get philosophical here, but something makes me think does this cut right definitions or rather opposites exist in life? For example, does my friend being tall mean I am short? Relativity says, I may be taller to some other friend of mine. Hence technically speaking I am neither tall nor short.
Does an athlete winning a race make the person coming second a loser? Or does it make the second athlete a winner compared to the person coming third? Not at all.
So there is nothing like winning or losing, isn't it? Life as people say has hardly got anything to do with winning and losing, so what is life? As I see it, it is a platform for staging various struggles where survival is the key. Now the big question is, can everybody become a survivor?
Management taught me something in negotiations. A Win-Win situation! For every scenario the parties sit across tables, discuss and come to a so-called solution which is a Winner for both! A very important discussion between two governments has come to a Win-Win resolution, as government and media quote. But to whom is this a win-win situation? For the people sitting across the table or for the millions who await such decisions? If it were for the people sitting across the table, then the answer to my earlier question as to "Can everybody be a survivor?" is a big NO!
So what is a Hypothetical situation? A Win-Win situation!!!
I started blogging here of me being a cosmopolitan. All cities are in one way or other interesting, but the most interesting one is where I live currently. Yup, Mumbai, the economic capital of India, the city of Bollywood and city of dreams for many. Huhhh! Yeh hai Mumbai meri jaan! This city interests me not because of what my fellow Mumbaikars boast about like "safe city for women", "lotta opportunities", "get to meet the stars" etc. What I am curious about this city is what they mean by economic prosperity and how this has shaped up in Mumbai?
I stay in a place called Bhandup, technically suburb, in a society that has about sixteen buildings, twenty floors each and four flats in each floor. You could say Posh!
Every morning I stand in my balcony and watch the other side of my flat. I see the rising sun, the ever busy Bhandup station, the chugging trains and beyond this railroad is the other side, where people stay in small huts or kuccha houses, grow Paalak(green and red spinach) in the land they have and sell the same in the evening in the market by the station road. Sunrise and sunset here is so beautiful, the lush green fields in the backdrop and the Spinach gardens glisten to the ever glowing sun! Mother Nature is so beautiful! That was Bhandup(east) for you!!
Bhandup (West) on the other hand where I stay is where people are better off, normally the buyers of the Spinach grown in the east. What I see is how a railroad has divided the whole city into East and West!
Bhandup(E) vs Bhandup (W)
Kurla(E) vs Kurla(W)
Vikhroli(E) vs Vikhroli (W)
Wooww! Am I seeing another amusing sets of Opposites here? Opposites in terms of economic conditions, standards of living or disparities? Ding Dong!!
Has one whole side of the city grown at the expense of the other? What is so attractive about the word West? Or is it the work of many filthy insecure bureaucrats who managed to borrow the so called Idiosyncrasy of the West along with gold loans? One never knows. The truth is nobody really wants to know. Survivors! Phew!!
And we just keep talking about more and more reservations and inclusive growth? How are these synonyms? Paradox! Paradox of a Paradoxical system!!
