BOMBAY AND DELHI - A COMPARISION.

 

I have gone many times to Bombay, but the city never ceases to fascinate me. It is a blend of all the Indian cultures and its inhabitants have their own unique behaviour and are very cultured. Unlike Delhi which has a strong Punjabi culture, Bombay is very metropolitan and is a mixture of all cultures.  

Ask anyone a location in Bombay and he would take pains to guide you there. So mutual cooperation between people at Mumbai is its first tenet. This is in typical contrast to Delhi where people don’t even respond to you, or even if they do it would be very cursory. Speech wise the Bombayite is soft and understanding while a Delhiite is rough and  loud.

This in fact reminds me of what one of my daughters classmates from Lucknow surname Nigam (I don’t remember her first name now) told me. They were originally from Lucknow but her father was working at Delhi so she comes from there. She said uncle most of our time is taken up at Delhi in trying to watch our step so that no one would cheat us and that always keeps us busy.

Bombay is the safest city in India for women. They roam freely even after 12 PM in the night returning back from parties and nothing happens to them. One day one taxi driver from UP told me that it is common to get drunk girls returning from parties much later than even 12 PM. 

He told me that one day one girl got into his taxi at about 2 AM fully drunk. So drunk that she could hardly tell him her address and then passed out on the backseat. That guy half carried her to her house and her family appreciated him very much. A Sub Inspector of Police from Bombay told me that if any girl complains of harassment, the first thing they do is to catch hold of the guy and throw him in jail without asking any questions. That is the extent  of safety girls have in Mumbai.

Yes, in the year 2014, one AP girl from Machilipatnam was killed at Mumbai, but that happened only because she rode a bike with some unknown person at 5 AM in the morning from the Lokamanya Tilak station.

The first time I ever went to Delhi was in 1987. I did not know any Hindi at all and I was right royally cheated by one Sardarji auto driver. It was January and I was not knowing about the extreme chill of Delhi and was wearing a casual half sleeves shirt. The train was supposed to reach Delhi at 8 PM in the night. There was some derailment and our train was halted at Bina for quite some time. Finally reached Delhi at 3 AM.

By that time it became very cold and I was shivering from it. I got down at Nizamuddin Station and got into an auto driven by a Sardarji, but only after asking him as to how much he would charge to the nearest Hotel for staying. Of course this I conveyed only with broken Hindi. He promptly said pay me as per the meter. I felt very happy that I could get such a nice auto driver as friends have warned me that Delhi auto drivers are notorious and I have to be very careful. The Sardarji saw me shivering and even offered me the blanket with which he was covering himself. I was very happy with his behaviour.

Then he took me to the Jungpura Extension hardly about 2.5 Km from the station, one hotel was full, so he took me to another hotel in the next lane. We would have hardly travelled about 3 Km in all. After confirming the hotel had a room I came to pay the driver and asked him how much. That guy tells me Rs 80. Now in 1987 that was a big sum for payment to an auto. It would have cost me no more than Rs 12 from the station to that place. Petrol was costing only about Rs 8 per litre at that time. So that is like asking for some Rs 600-700 of today.

Immediately I looked at the meter and found that it was showing Rs 82 something. Actually in that cold and shivering I never bothered to look at the meter and it must have run even before I got into the auto. Then I explained the problem to the Hotel fellow in English and told him that I came only from Nizamuddin station and requested him to tell that to the auto driver that he is charging too much. 

However, the hotel guy did not speak a word to the auto guy probably because he brings customers to him. I then went to the Sardarji and told him that I would pay no more than Rs 20 for the ride. Even that is like paying Rs 200 today for a 3 km drive. That fellow said no you keep it yourself I don’t want it. With that I just turned back to go in disgust when that fellow came to me again and accepted the money.

Then I asked the room tariff. The guy said he only had deluxe rooms left and the charge is Rs 1600 per day. That got me floored. As a PO of State Bank, I was just drawing a little over Rs 2000 then and the room tariff was as good as my monthly salary. But I had no choice as I was shivering with cold and was frustrated and did not sleep in the night. 

By that time it was 4.30 AM and the check out time was 12 noon which means for 7.5 hours I am shelling out Rs 1600. The room was beautifully furnished and had a thick carpet on the ground and was large. But when I slept on the bed only one thing kept coming back to me Rs 1600 for 7.5 hours. I could not sleep at all thinking about it. I vacated the room at 12 in the afternoon and shifted to one of my relatives house instead, to where I could not go late in the night.

So that was my first experience at Delhi which certainly introduced me to the place and its pitfalls. It is not my intention to say that all Bombayites are good and all Delhiites are bad and there are certainly many exceptions in both the places. Nevertheless, I found that a large number of Bombayites are more cooperative and soft than the Delhiites. 

No doubt at teh time of Dawood Ibrahim etc. things were pretty bad at Bombay, but with time the city evolved out of such violence with the help of a very tough Police force which brought all the gangsters to heel. 

I give below a short history of Bombay as I have a particular liking to the city. 

The 7 islands of Bombay were earlier inhabited by Kolis. It consisted of the 7 islands of Parel, Mazagaon, Mahim, Colaba, Worli and Old Woman’s Island.

Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat ceded the 7 islands of Bombay to the Portuguese in 1534 AD. 

In 1661 the islands of Bombay were passed on to the English as dowry by Catherine Braganza of Portugal who married Charles II of England. The population of Bombay was then only about 10,000.

In 1668, England leased these islands to the British East India Company for an annual payment of just 10 pounds. The population rapidly grew to 60,000 by 1675 AD. In 1687 Bombay has become the headquarters for the East India Company in India. By the middle of the 18^th century it started growing into a major trading town.

By 1845 the 7 islands of Bombay came together by way of large scale land reclamation by the “Hornby Vellard” project. In 1853 the first passenger railway line between Bombay and Thane was established. During the American civil war, Bombay became the worlds leading cotton trading market resulting in a boom to its economy.

The opening of the Suez canal in 1869 transformed Bombay into one of the largest seaports in the Arabian sea.

The years between 1990 – 2010 saw and increase in violence and terrorist activities in Bombay.

After the Babri Masjid incident, there were Hindu Muslim riots in 1992-93 in which 1000 people died.

In 1993 13 bombs went off at several places in the city killing 257 people and over 700 injured.

In 2006 when 7 bombs exploded in the city’s suburban trains another 200 people were killed and over 700 injured.

In 2008 a series of 10 coordinated attacks by armed terrorists for 3 days resulted in 173 deaths and over 308 wounded.

In July 2011 3 coordinated bomb explosions in Opera House, Zaveri Bazar and Dadar killed 26 people and injured over 130 people.

However, after 2011, Bombay had been quiet and hopefully would preserve its peace.