The Harbor Line 3/8 - My Ex-Girlfriend

Over the course of my life, I’ve seen a lot of cities. I’ve studied in Shanghai, worked in Lucknow, partied in Delhi, cycled across the streets of Kharagpur, and even lived through Calcutta! Usually, I have loved the cities I’ve lived in, and I’m not kidding, I’ve loved them to the point of topophilia. I loved Kharagpur like a first girlfriend, often referring to the town as “she”.

But Mumbai is a different ballgame. I can’t bring myself to call this Monstrosity “she”. I do love it, but not like a girlfriend. It’s more like the love one bears for an ex-girlfriend. You can’t forget her, at times you feel that you still love her, sometimes you really miss her, and time and again she will piss you off. So I thought of the ways in which Mumbai was like my ex, and came down with a hefty list.

1. Both have short-lived mood swings; both don’t know when to drizzle, when to rain, and when to pour
   
   
2. They’re both mean and heartless, and try to push me around for no reason 
   
   
3. They’re both hot as hell
   
   
4. Both have often asked me to pay their bills
   
   
5. They both fuck with me on a regular basis. However, in both cases there’s no sex involved
   
   
6. A lot of times I want to run away from it (“it” refers to both of them); but I stay, not knowing why
   
   
7. Both hardened me for times to come; giving me the lessons I needed to live a great life elsewhere
   
   
8. Periodically, and somewhat predictably, they’ll pour down and when they do all I can do is sit back in terror, trying to pry my way through life
   
   
9. Both have often asked me to help them out with excel modelling
   
   
10. I do like being close to them, and when they’re away I do miss them
    
    
11. Both are carelessly beautiful
    
    
    

“Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahan

Zara hat ke zara bach ke

Ye hai Mumbai meri jaan!”

The Lonely Traveler

The Harbor Line 2/8 - Changing Times and Changing Trains

It’s easy to lose yourself in a chain of thoughts sitting in a long ride on a local train in Mumbai.

That really doesn’t happen often. Because often, you’re not sitting.

‘They tell me it used to be different earlier. I heard stories of travelers having fun along the way. They used to sing bhajans, play cards, talk… now it’s very different.’

I was listening to a stranger about 10 years my senior. We’d fallen into conversation somehow when I shared my observation that people in trains seldom spoke to one-another. Most people were glued to their “smart” phones. A lot of screens showed WhatApp and Candy Crush during the 90 minute journeys. Some would plug the phones to their earphones and close their eyes, preferring to stay alone in the crowd. Some would fire up Kindles and tablets and read through the time. In that scenario I don’t exactly remember how I’d come to talk to this middle-aged man who came to Mumbai, just like me, for his own start-up and had stayed ever since. He couldn’t have come more than 5 years ago. How can I say that? He waited till the train stopped at CST to get up from his seat.

But coming back to the issue here, it’s a strange sight in these local trains. Often, you don’t find a single head looking up; not even to ogle at the girls. Personally I find the ladies compartment extremely welcoming to look at. Mumbai girls are a different kind of hot… but more on that later. I shouldn’t keep digressing from the topic. Indeed smart phones have provided with the extraordinary comfort of not being bored at any point of the day, especially during everyday long train journeys. But somehow it feels inhuman to see so many people looking down into their phones. People are kind and respond well if asked a question and no one seems bothered by one-another. Mumbaikars bear their pains diligently, I grant them that. But if indeed Mumbai once led a life when you could befriend a stranger over a train ride, or have an interesting conversation with a peer in a 90-minute long journey; then it has clearly lost that culture. And I consider myself unlucky to not have been a part of that culture.

Mumbai railways have often been called “the Lifeline of Mumbai”. Even their website heralds the words. I guess it is from a time before the phones, when they truly represented the life of Mumbai. Now it’s different. The Mumbaikar I see looks serious. A lot of travel involves earphones, tablets, and candy crush. The life has gone out of the lifeline.

Much like Brad Pitt’s iconic movie, there are rules in the train.

1st RULE: There are no rules while getting on and off the train, it’s a no-holds-barred situation.

2^nd RULE: There are NO rules while getting on and off the train.

3^rd RULE: If you’re the last one leaving the train (in the way hours of the night), switch off the lights and fans

4^th RULE: If you’re sitting, you cannot mind the standing guy’s ass in your face

5^th RULE: 3 people to a seat. No more, and never any less

6^th RULE: Get up on when the train stops at the station prior to yours, so that you make it to the gate by the time yours comes

7^th RULE: If you forgot an umbrella on the seat, you should forget it

8^th RULE: If you’re new in Mumbai, you HAVE TO ride

But this was just what I saw in the first class of the trains. An amateur’s view from the most neglected train line in a compartment that makes up for 2/9^th of the train and used by an even lesser proportion. Statistically, my observation can be accounted for as an aberration or a minority at best. The culture might be different for the other classes. This was just the first class. Let’s keep the better one for later.

The Harbor Line 1/8 - Monstrosity

Mumbai is not a city. It’s a monstrosity. Before I begin, let’s look into the need of this article. With a whooping 1,300 km² of area inhabited by 19M people and 2M cars with 1,889 km of roads to run on. Just to put that into perspective, Mumbai is larger than Singapore, Maldives, and Macau combined; more populous than Sweden and UAE combined; and has (believe it or not) over a thousand cars for every kilometer’s stretch of road. That when only 10% of the city’s population owns a car. And hence, Mumbai Trains.

The Mumbai railway line extends in 3 major railway lines known as – 1. The Western Line also known as “The Black Dread”; 2. The Central Line also known as “Khopoli jayegi kya?”; and 3. The Harbour Line also known as “Which Line?” Together with only 427 km of tracks, they cater to 8M Mumbaikars every day.

I came to Mumbai in my mid-20s. Most people say that I was late. The best time to come here was 20 years ago. And that has been the case for the last 50 years. Mumbai was always a better place 20 years ago, with lesser people and more space. Mumbai has always attracted people to itself for passion or for pleasure. But no one who has come here has ever avoided the local train, except perhaps Barrack Obama (because he has Air Force One). But for lesser beings like me coming from Calcutta without a personal Boeing aircraft, I was subjected to the Harbour Line.

When I shifted here I met a girl who seemed to be impressed that I worked near Nariman Point. Even though most of us have never been there, the name does sound impressive to most Indians. She pulled out a map from her pocket (one of the things you can simply do in the 21^st century) and asked me to show her my home on it. I took the opportunity to sit close to her, hold the phablet (another invention of the 21^st century) together, and zoomed out of the map of Mumbai. That wasn’t enough though, I had to zoom out again. Then I swiped left to show her the suburb where I “lived.” In all honesty, I lived at my office. “Home” was only a place with a bed and a bathroom. Every other activity of mine was at a place where I could sit close to young girls and hold their hands at the pretext of holding oversized phones. But somehow, I saw a look on her face which I can dare to call a frown and that was the last I saw of her. Perhaps she was from Delhi.

On my first day here I took the advice of my boss and bought a monthly first class pass for the Harbour Line. Mumbai has a splendid system of tickets. A 2^nd class ticket costs ₹10 one way, totaling to about ₹600 per month for to-and-fro journeys; while a 1^st class counterpart of the same would cost as much as my rent. Well, to be fair I did spend a lot of my living time on the train, so perhaps rent was applicable. But the monthly pass costed only 10% of that, and still double of what I’d have paid in the 2^nd class. This was a brilliant mechanism to match supply and demand using pricing, as my MBA knowledge told me. Even after paying millions of rupees to get that piece of paper which certified that I was now capable of handling a business, I couldn’t have created a better pricing system myself; to handle the entire business would be a long shot.

So here I was. In the 2^nd largest city in India by the Arabian sea, where rains were like Zeus’ wrath and roads defeated their purpose – swift movement. I looked at the literal and metaphorical Harbour Line, took a deep breath in, and got on!