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A couple of weeks ago, a survey branded Mumbai as the rudest city of India and it broke my heart.
This was the place where I was born. This was the city that taught me to grow up tough but always be reasonable, be professional but always care for others.
It was hardly what those cold statistics implied and although it took a shocking incident of bomb blasts to vindicate my stand, I am glad Mumbaikars got an opportunity to clear their oft-sullied reputation.
If you are to catch the Churchgate-Andheri 6.01 double fast local, and have a 30-minute walk after your office that finishes at 5.30, you cannot afford to waste time in small talk.
The city systems teach you to be calculative as people have learned to desensitise themselves to brutal landscapes, ugly shanties, open drains, failed promises, they have learnt to smile as they live on the edge, their good cheer and resilience being all spent up in the complicated act of survival each day.
Passed the acid test
But time and again Mumbaikars have passed the acid test, cleared that blot of rudeness they have been stamped with.
Be it the 1993 serial blast, the terrible monsoons of 2005 or the chilling train blasts two days ago.
No one waited for the government agencies to spring into action.
Even before the police or ambulances could arrive, the men who lived in shanties on the edges of the railway track were out in large numbers, risking their lives, climbing over the mangled remains of the compartments, pulling out the dead and injured, trying to herd out the crowds to places of safety.
Our television screens were deluged with the images of common people, with bottles of water, trays of teas, packets of biscuits, doing their own little bit in easing the pain and trauma of a shell-shocked city.
Little children, housewives, labourers all stepped out in an unprecedented show of solidarity with their city-mates doing whatever they could.
Within a few hours, the city was back on its feet, struggling to come to terms with the enormity of the situation.
Those who had reached home at 4 am were back in office at 8am.
Those who had witnessed the spirit of the people in the '93 bomb blasts, those who had seen the never-say-die will of the people of this city to stick together in the face of crisis during the monsoons floods last year watched all this with a sense of déjà vu.
Can this be the image of city that has been branded the rudest?
Mumbaikars may be stressed out, going by the watch, scuttling to catch trains to be home at a decent hour, they believe in minding their own business, allow breathing space to their fellow citizens in a city where it is difficult to even keep elbow space from each other, but beneath their rough urbane shell, they are the warmest, kindest, considerate, self respecting people I have ever known.
A big boo to those who think Mumbaikars are rude and… a salaam (salute) to the sprit of Mumbai.
Mumbai is a teeming metropolis of contrasts, with glitzy high-rise office and apartment blocks standing side-by-side with slums and pavement dwellers.
Though sometimes considered hard-hearted, Mumbai residents went out of their way to help fellow city dwellers, offering rides in cars, providing water and biscuits, and taking the dead and injured to hospitals.
“We’re used to crises here,” said Makarand Bhopatkar, a 35-year-old corporate trainer. “The city survives.”