Last week, I was in Borivali with a couple of friends. All I knew about this place then was that it's a major terminus on the north Mumbai suburban rail network. But having spent half a day there has left me amazed by the diversity of Mumbai’s landscape.
I’ve spent most of my life between Andheri and Dadar. Occasional visits to So-Bo hotspots are restricted to old-world cravings with family. So I found it embarrassing to realize that I didn’t even know the order of the stations after Jogeshwari. Nonetheless, the work that took us to Borivali wasn’t meant to be, so when we saw a board that read ‘Sanjay Gandhi National Park’.
Voila! The last time I’d seen Borivali National Park, it was in my school textbook. It was a shame I hadn’t been here inspite of being a Mumbaikar for the past twenty years. Not having anything better to do, we decided to walk in.
We were not even 10 kms from Borivali station and this is what the place looked like…
It was unbelievable to be amidst nature in this form, right in the middle of a city buzzing with activity. And though I saw a few boards warning me about wild cats on the prowl, I was lucky to get away with spotting only a random bunch of monkeys on my impromptu expedition. A major attraction inside the National Park, is a group of 108 caves collectively known as the Kanheri caves. On my hike to Kanheri, the raingods were kind enough to let me enjoy the magical journey in all its glory.
I was at the highest point above sea level in Mumbai. The view was magical. But even at this height, people don’t cease to give up their charlatan ways. At the only canteen available there, I was being charged Rs. 18 for a bottle of mineral water whose MRP was Rs. 14. That sort of turned out to be the dampener and I decided against giving in.
But at the end of the day, what mattered was that an unplanned outing turned out to be the perfect adrenaline rush for the rest of the week. I returned home with even more love for a city that hides within its monotonous shell, a landscape that is so similar, yet so different...
Inspite of being a Mumbaikar, it’d been years since I paid any of the local beaches a proper visit. My most recent outings to the beach were either limited to dumping ritualistic garbage into the Arabian Sea or were cut-short by sudden cravings for a gola (kala khatta masala maarke!) at Juhu beach. So when my family decided to spend the weekend at Madh Island, I jumped at the prospect of revisiting the good old days. Spending Sunday evenings with my toy spade and plastic bucket, making sand castles by the sea, admiring the beautiful sunset is one of the most beautiful memories associated with my childhood.
It made for a really sorry sight and all I could do was just stand and stare in disbelief as endless streams of polythene flowed past me. Like all other beaches in the city, Madh also serves as a free public toilet for the locals who still don’t have any sanitation facilities whatsoever.
I know blogging about issues like this is not the solution. But here are a few questions that we must ask ourselves:
How long will it take us to start caring for our city in particular and our country at large?
How long will it take us to understand that the boundaries of our houses do not end at our backyards?
Can we afford to spray our paan pichkaari on the roads in Singapore or litter in the bylanes of Dubai?
Will we ever learn or we’re always going to find the easy way out by saying, “Oh Darling, yeh India hai, yahaan sab chalta hai!”
It’s soon going to be that time of the year again, when the city will be bustling with activity at Ganpati pandals, each one trying to outweigh the other by claiming to be bigger (and supposedly)better than the others. And God will be laughing from Heaven up above, wondering what has come up to be of his beautiful creation.
But it’s still up to us to decide whether this is the way we want to wish our beloved elephant-headed God adieu...
