I wrote the following poem and article about three years ago. They were published in St. Xavier's College's (my Alma mater) Sociology Magazine, Ethnocentric.

In Helpless Disappointment---The Bombay Dream, Shattered…

There is anger in my thoughts...the red haze enshrouding all consciousness...
And an unseen pain wracks me from within...

A silent wail seeks to part the lips that will not open,
And the clenched fists cause pain only to themselves...

There are no tears, no tantrums and none to blame...

In a moment, I realise that I am left alone...silent and aching,
No physician possesses the balm I need; none may prescribe a remedy...

I alone must confront myself...as cause, as effect and as the cure...

Strangely, in that moment of choice, the gloom is broken, the haze lifted...and I can breathe again!

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I dedicate this poem to all those individuals who come to this city, dreaming about and hoping for the future that they never actually realise. This place, the economic capital of India, is more than just the cash-rich, glamorous metropolitan that it is made out to be. It is a city in whose streets you will find traces of lives that rose from almost nothing to dizzying heights and it is also a massive cemetery of countless aspirations that could never see the light of reality. The bright lights of the Queen’s Necklace and the proud skyscrapers that dot the skyline, seem to mock the vast slums in many parts of the city where often, a family gathers under the flame of a lantern and eats the one meal of the day, cooked on a kerosene stove.

My intention is hardly as socialistic as it may sound; I do not mean to say that the opulence of the rich in this city is undeserved and needs to be redistributed. Wealth, in Bombay, can hardly be gathered without hard work, intelligence and significant risk- taking. Those who have achieved it, are certainly worthy of respect to a certain degree. Regardless of their professions, the rich were not always as wealthy as they are today and would have had to start somewhere. There must have been something in their thought and actions that took them far ahead of ‘square one’ when millions still struggle in the same place.

In this, my reasoning may have a somewhat Functionalist flavour. I do not want to dismiss any aspect of the life of this city as an aberration, and I likewise refuse to believe that any individual has a life devoid of meaning. There is a greater scheme to things that we may not always look at, and when we do, we may find that we do not always like what we see. The drug addicts, who sprawl helplessly on Marine Lines, languishing in their self wrought filth and gloom, seem to serve no purpose at all in society, apart from being blemishes and social malformations. However, if there was some way of knowing it, one might be able to calculate the number of people, who, looking at them, realised the ill effects of drug addiction, and made a silent mental resolve never to touch the substances. In this way, even these apparently pathetic and useless individuals, serve a purpose…they have made examples of themselves, however unintentionally, and their lives are constant reminders of what can happen if you are not discerning enough.

The reason I am taking this convoluted stream of thought, is only to arrive at one conclusion…the fact that no life is meaningless, no matter how weighted it may be with failure. This city attracts people from all over India, possibly even from neighbouring nations, all of whom wish to strike gold and make something spectacular of their lives. Most of them fail to do this, because Bombay is most unforgiving to a man who gives up hope. When starting small, as is usually the case with all newcomers here, there are bound to be serious setbacks, failures, instances of being cheated etc. The difference between the man who will rise as a phoenix and the one who will flounder in the ashes of defeat is that the former will never give up on his dream and will refuse to blame circumstances for what has happened to him. In the last lines of the poem I offer an alternative, a solution to the person who feels that situations have just worked against him. To look at oneself and one’s miscalculations as the root of the problem might be quite easy, but many will tend to leave it at that and drown in their self-pity/loathing. Instead, one must learn to believe that he is the only one who can really make a difference to life. Life in a place like this is going to be full of hurdles…ultimately we are the only ones who can carry ourselves over them.