Matiyaburj

Bombay does not have heroes, people who are larger than life. The megapolis cannot support any hero because every person, every clog in the Bombay wheel, is rotating on his axis. Like the hotel liftman going up and down all day. Like auto driver retracing paths. The tiny life circles merge into each other in trains, streets, buses, ferries and, after this shared journey, become whole again.  

There is another reason. The roads are too full. The street has every possible face and physique and every possible emotion, from Colaba to Bandra to Mahim, and in this jamboree of survival, even a person walking in the streets in the most outrageous dress will go unnoticed. As he would pass, his oddity would flicker like a lighter and vanish as instantly. His oddity will not be acknowledged. And that’s an insult to the hero– his failure to lure.  So the hero lives elsewhere, outside the city he is manufactured in.

Larger than life posters of Bipasha Basu and Sachin Tendulkar look comic and even ridiculous on Marine Drive. In Jalandhar’s Model Town, people won’t take their eyes off.

The city is not in awe of its Amitabh Bachchan, its Anil Ambani, its Hafeez Contractor and its Raj Thackarey. The outside is.  The outside is the market. The city is the factory.

You have to be a wannabe actor or a wannabe entrepreneur to know this.  An unknown Shah Rukh Khan from Delhi had to come to Bombay to tell Delhi who he is. The hero of every other place except Bombay has to be in Bombay to lure every other place. So, in a way, Bombay is like America.

Here are the studios where everyday the fable of SRK is manufactured, shot-by-shot.  Like a factory where a tractor is manufactured every five minutes, assembly-by-assembly. What will happen if the tractors do not get exported? The owner will go crazy. What will a factory do with a product it cannot send out?

What will Karan Johar do if his film does not get screened outside? The filmmaker will go crazy. 

A factory does not use its product. A factory is not meant to do that. It is meant to send the product outside.

Hence Bombay, which is a factory, has no use of its hero. It sells the hero outside.

The city has the expertise to vivify your unrequited imagination and toss it back.  If you accept it, this new experimental film, this new fairness cream, it becomes real.  

And the factory does not even know how beautiful, lethal its product will turn when it hits the market. From the factory of the newsroom to the market of the newsstand, do we journalists really know?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.