There’s MUIP – Mumbai Urban Infrastructure Project. Then there’s MUTP – Mumbai Urban Transport Project. There’s also a BUTP – Bombay Urban Transport Project. There’s MUDP – Mumbai Urban Development Project. And then there’s the queen mother of them all, MMRDA – Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority. Sigh…trust the pan-chewing, Ferrari-red-spit spewing Babudom in Mantralaya’s air-conditioned chambers to come up with more innovative acronyms than those well-heeled marketing maniacs that the FMCG’s employ at heaven-kissing salaries. Sample the ingredients of Surf Excel for a start – Powerboosters, Crystalline Grease Cutting white-washers, Super Anodized Hyper Multiplying Mega Dirt Busters, and their innumerable brethren. Mantralaya’s Marathi Maanus has nonchalantly obliterated every acronym that the marketing maniac from IIM-A created by sheer force of the innovative use of English synonyms to create thousands of “Projects” – significantly, all pointing to the one (the only) thing that the Government of Maharashtra is doing, screwing the masses by looting them left, right, center and every other direction one can think of.

At this point, I decided to go to MMRDA’s website to see the status of the various “Projects” that they’ve undertaken. I could already visualize myself composing sentences like – “With the Bandra-Worli Sea link now a few decades behind schedule, and a few billion rupees over-budget, all we have a convoluted flyover that goes round and round in circles and finishes where it started off, a promenade for kissing couples and oldie-goldie uncle-aunties, and a dismal piece of incomplete road hanging over the Arabian Sea”. However, the content I stumbled across on the website flabbergasted me to the mighty heavens. As I wipe tears my eyes have produced to counter the uncontrollable laughter, as the muscles of my stomach, (stop laughing there, at the back – I do have a few stomach muscles, its not just FAT) I realize that the Mantralaya’s Marathi Maanus can write far better humourous fiction than P.G.Wodehouse himself. Helmets off to you oh famed emperors of Babudom!!

Sample these rare masterpieces; all of them verbatim from www.mmrdamumbai.org –

· The ever growing vehicular and passenger demands, coupled with constraints on capacity augmentation of the existing network, have resulted in chaotic conditions during peak hours. (Are we glad you guys finally realized!)

· The five main north-south roads in the suburbs are not fully developed to the planned width, have many bottleneck points and constraints due to large number of intersections with major and minor roads. (Looks like you got a PhD armed committee to do research for you! Bravo!)

· The major east-west links proposed in the Wilbur Smith Associate Study of 1962 have not been finalized. (1962?? Not finalized?? Should we be surprised, or is that a typographical error? If its not, should we expect this sentence to be there on the website till the generation after ours sports gray hair??)

· The World Bank funded MUTP focuses mainly on strengthening of mass transport particularly improvements in suburban railway services in terms of efficiency and capacity, with very few proposals of road improvements. (The World Bank!! They got conned into it?? Very few proposals of road improvements? Of course, our roads don’t need improvement at all)

· It has been considered necessary to take urgent steps to strengthen the road infrastructure in Mumbai. (See! They’ve used figures of speech even. This one – “Transferred Epithet” – the adjective “urgent” is transferred from “the act of making money by illegal means” to “steps”)

Half past six on Sunday mornings then is the best time to zip through the city on a set of four wheels. The roads are still dug up (A recent ad spotted on a billboard – “What is the BMC digging for? Gold, Oil or Fun), and the one’s that the set of four wheels is expected to go over resemble the moon surface in more ways than one. “Zip”, then, is not intended to conjure up images of sane road cars zooming at insane speeds of 160 kilometers per hour. 40 would be a closer guess, but what the heck, 40 in Bombay is as exhilarating as 160 in Santa Monica (wherever that is).

My Sunday mornings are therefore reserved for a good two hours with the car, and a generous dash of exhilaration thrown in for good measure. Oh yes, the subliminal drive is my way of connecting with the higher force, the God we worship. After I have connected sufficiently with the Almighty, my car and me go to the mandir, to connect in a more tangible (and conventional) way. We pray for world peace and we pray for some good sense to be bestowed upon the babudom that runs BMC and other infinite acronyms. No, we don’t pray for the Lord to give George W. Bush to grow some brains, we’re sure He is yet not capable of achieving that feat.

Of late though, these trips to the famed Siddhivinayak Temple in Bombay are turning out to be awfully similar to second-class local train journeys that the MUTP (or was it MUIP) promises to improve vastly within the next few millennia. It is difficult to fathom why people would jostle, wrestle and generally be ready to beat the daylights out of any buffoon who dares to come in the way. That too in the sanctum sanctorum of a temple. It wouldn’t take the brains of a chess champion to figure out that its something that is ingrained in the psyche of the city now. The thing is that since time immemorial, we, the citizens of this great city (ahem!) have been subject to countless sufferings, which include hanging out of local trains, shoving people while getting into BEST buses, and getting the spinal cord pulverized by the merciless jerks from the moon-surface roads. Consequently, even before a baby can start to utter “mama” or “papa”, he has been imparted sufficient training (by his bitter parents). So much so, that he has already mastered the techniques of getting into a BEST bus by wriggling under the arm of the uncle in front, or deftly jumping in and out of a local train within a few eye-blinks; all that, even before he’s potty trained.


Recognize this place, bereft of the masses??!?!


What results is a spiraling culture of creating an inhuman, inconsiderate species; members of which will stop at nothing at all to get ahead of the next man, not even in a temple. Needless to say, the best place to observe a colourful potpourri of such humans (or is it the runners in a rat race?) is Siddhivinayak Temple on Sunday mornings.

Check out India’s next Olympic medal hope. With a bouquet of flowers for the deity in an outstretched hand, he has already slithered under my armpits and is slicing through the crowd with the alacrity that would put the United States 4x100m relay team to shame. Absolute contempt for any kind of human presence characterizes the way Mr. Olympics is behaving. Utterly despicable, I say! By the time I come back to my senses, Mr. Olympics is already on his way out, grinning ear to ear, as if he’d just beaten Tim Montgomery in a 100m dash by an hour. Looks like his only objective was to sink his elbow into a few people’s bodies (I am sure he found the masses of fat around my tummy quite enjoyable. Ugh!), bulldoze by a couple of God-fearing citizens, and generally leave a bad taste in people’s mouths (and that’s only because of the stinking eucalyptus oil that his hair was dripping with, and he kept stuffing it into honourable six feet tall giants’ faces).

Don’t miss the mighty Gujju aunties (with due respect of course, to their entire clan). They come in a mighty explosion of colour, noise and err…eucalyptus-oiled hair. They enter the holy place like a pack of disgruntled bulldozers on a mission – to wipe out all traces of humanity. They turn around in the mandir like a full cavalcade of multi-axled, eighteen geared, thirty-four wheeled massive American trucks trying to do a U-turn in Juhu Gully. The moment there’s contact (which, considering their sizes, is bound to happen more often than not), check them out screaming like a bunch of deranged mutant elephants, trying (unsuccessfully) to make you feel like you were the most lecherous example of humankind on the face of the holy earth.

As I stagger out of the temple, I realize that in the mad rush, I didn’t pray; I didn’t even look at the orange idol of Ganpati Bappa, which kept smiling benevolently upon me. I was busy avoiding Mr. Olympics and his brethren, who kept trying to slide in through every inch of space that was available to them (and a few more which weren’t). I kept fighting bravely against the immense onslaught of the Gujju aunties, trying hard to keep away from their humongous anatomy at all times. I was trying hard to win the rat race that kept unfolding; that will keep unfolding before the smiling idol, day after day, year after year.

Like everyone else, I had forgotten to pray. Which is why we get no world peace. Which is why the babus running the BMC continue to be bereft of their top floors. Which is why a brainless idiot runs the most powerful country in the world.

But I’d already savoured my two seconds of bliss, with my car, as we zipped through the city. Sigh…it made me see God.

Then again, I have just two words to say to the MMRDA and its kin. The first one ends in a “K”, and the second one is “You”.
THANK YOU, MMRDA. It is you who gets me out at half past six on Sunday mornings.