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 21st 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
21st 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 2nd class ticket costs ₹10 one way, totaling to about ₹600
per month for to-and-fro journeys; while a 1st 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 2nd
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 2nd 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!
