'Not a city for losers'

For Mid-Day’s anniversary issue, July 1998. Bombay had been renamed Mumbai, but Shobha was not yet Shobhaa.

If Mumbai is the city of glitz, then Shobha De is its virtually undisputed queen. Her novels wouldn’t be the compelling reading they are if they were not set in this chaotic, pulsating city. And the Shobha syndrome wouldn’t have affected any other city as much as it has this maverick place.
Is the place, then, part of the personality? A chat with the pop writer reveals what she thinks of the city, and why she loves it so much.

How much is Mumbai a part of Shobha De?
Let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t have been me, for better or worse, in any other city in India. I don’t think I would have written the way I do, would have had the opportunities I got, the same kind of options and choices — which to me is really what defines the spirit of the city; that you can be who you are, what you are, and the only limits you set for yourself are those that you impose, and your imagination imposes. It’s a city that respects professionals, with no gender bias, and that in itself is saying a lot. I mean, I can’t imagine a Shobha De in, say, Allahabad, or even Delhi.

For whatever it is that I represent, it wouldn’t have been possible in any other city, no other city interests me as much. This has been the city of my formative years, of my organic growth, it defines me in every which way and I hope I define it too.

Wouldn’t this have happened if you had settled in any other city?
Definitely not. There are aspects of other cities that intrigue me, that I’d like to tap into at some point in my writing. But in all my novels Mumbai has not been merely a locale, it’s been a character. It’s a visible, throbbing, real presence, as important as the people I’m writing about within its context.

And it’s perhaps the only city that does not bore me for a minute. I like it in all its moods. I like it in whichever avatar it presents itself to me. There’s nothing I find even offensive about it. I’m more forgiving because I understand the city. Any other city gets my hackles up: when I go to Delhi I’m instantly on red alert. With Calcutta, of course, there’s a sentimental and emotional reason for my liking the city and accepting it. Technically it is my maike so when I go there I go into my Bengali bohuma mode – and mood.

But if there was a second city option I think for me it would be Pune. Bangalore collapsed into its own black hole and no longer is what it once was. There was a very young spirit to Bangalore which is no longer there – it’s like any other overcrowded polluted city. Pune retains its Maharashtraness, which is what I respond to on a very subliminal level. Though it is now becoming a Sindhi enclave, much to my regret, even so when I go there I feel very much a Maharashtrian. Whereas in Mumbai I don’t feel I belong to any particular community, the atmosphere here is so amorphous. You just feel a ‘Mumbaiwaali’, which is no slot other than the uniqueness of being a Mumbai person.

Why has Mumbai succeeded so much as a city?
It takes its chances, it has a cutting edge to it – it pushes you to your limits. It’s not a complacent city, it’s not a city that’s tolerant of failure. It’s not a city for losers, which is the tough part, because it’s very make-or-break, and it’s not kind to those who don’t make it. You don’t really stand much of a chance unless you’re perceived as successful. Which is why people try harder, which is why the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and well today. People cannot afford to be lazy, or smug, because there are always ten others standing right behind, ready to trample over your body and dance over it in their rush to get ahead. So it keeps you on your toes, and I like that quality. I would hate to be in a rut, because to me, complacency is death.

How much is Maharashtra a part of Mumbai’s psyche?
This is a cliché but needs to be said over and over again: Mumbai in no way metaphorically or even physically has any but a tenuous link to Maharashtra. Mumbai is really many cities within a city and many cultures within these seven islands that are so loosely linked. It exists on so many different levels, seamlessly and simultaneously. That is what makes the city so fascinating for someone who observes social change – that it is unpredictable at all times. There’s no one label you can stick on it. I like its diversity, its plurality. I like its energy, its ferocious spirit of enterprise, its evil underbelly, its rough edges. I like it because it’s crude and vulnerable at the same time.

And its gloss?
The gloss, I think, is largely exaggerated. I don’t really perceive it. There’s more grit than gloss. And that is again one of the tricks that Mumbai has successfully pulled off on the rest of India – an image of glamour and gloss which is grossly exaggerated.

Does Mumbai have what you could call a literature of its own? Is there something like a city’s literature?
I don’t think Mumbai has been exploited at all, in literary or even cinematic terms. When I see films made out of New York, or Rome, or Paris, or San Francisco, where the city comes alive in all its beauty, maybe its grottiness, but still it’s palpable. You can sense the city. I don’t think we’ve managed to tap into that. It has happened in regional writing, in Marathi or Gujarat, but not in English, and for some reason we’ve shied away from exploiting the potential of the city. Even our cinema doesn’t reflect that. What it does reflect is a Punjabi version of Mumbai. Most of the film makers are from the North and they come with a certain vision of Mumbai which they then recreate in their studio sets, but it’s not Mumbai at all, it’s Haryana with a Mumbai veneer; which is very disappointing. The mean streets of the city are never exploited. Its bazaars, its buzz, its contradictions, its strange landscape which is bizarre by any standards – we have the neo-Gothic, and the Marwadi Gothic and the Parsi Gothic and the wadas. Even the architecture of the city is so eccentric. It has not been captured, either in writing or in cinema.

Do you think it’s because nobody has really tried or is it because of the city’s elusive quality?
With a skilled pen, the elusive quality should not be difficult; it should be inspirational. The elusive quality should be the challenge. It is, for me, but then my forte is different, I’m not a descriptive writer. For me it’s dialogue and people, and having a ear for conversation and for characterisation rather than long, descriptive, narrative passages. So though I try I don’t think I’ve succeeded to the extent that the city deserves. In the hands of a far more descriptive novelist it could...

Who do you think would fit the bill?
Well, Vikram Chandra has attempted it, and successfully so, but even then he’s not quite ... we need a Pico Iyer, but a Pico Iyer who resides in Mumbai, not who comes here as a tourist and does a take on his American vision of the city — which is what he has done, and eloquently, but it’s not an insider’s look at Mumbai, it’s through American eyes. He is an Indian writer but who’s lived all his life in America. Salman Rushdie has done it, too, but again his Mumbai is a nostalgic Mumbai, he doesn’t know what contemporary Mumbai is.

A lot of the writing about Mumbai has been nostalgic.
Yes, fifties and sixties Mumbai. Rushdie’s portrayal of the city in the sixties would be hard to match, or compete with, but I’m talking about the nineties Mumbai, which is harder to define because it’s still a Mumbai that’s happening, that’s finding an identity, finding its feet, and has not yet defined itself. Whereas it’s very easy to place Mumbai of the sixties – the parameters were better defined.

Do you think Mumbai will remain in this uncertain state, or will it find its character and grow into it soon?
I think it’s a city in flux at the moment, there have been far too many upheavals. I perceive a strong sense of insecurity, there’s an identity crisis. Mainly because it’s grown beyond reason, beyond imagination, beyond proportion, it’s like a pressure cooker about to explode. It’s difficult to find the appropriate peg under these circumstances. It’s a little disorienting even for its own people to know where they stand in the context of the city because there’s so much change, and I think there is a feeling that we’ve been left behind somewhat, even in the glamour stakes. What the city is clinging to is its filmdom status. So long as Bollywood rules, Mumbai is okay. But otherwise, whether it’s fashion or even business, a lot of it has moved out. There are other power centres now; in fact, each metropolis has developed its own set of celebrities and people who are feted in their own cities. They don’t any more peg their success and self-worth onto how Mumbai perceives them, which has caused the shift. Look at Delhi, today it has marginalised Mumbai on so many levels, including in areas which Mumbai used to think of as its own – fashion being the main one.

Delhi has its young, very upwardly mobile crowd, there’s a lot more visible money, people are flaunting it, there are more options. When you’re judging a city by its status symbols, Mumbai is emerging rapidly as a poor relative. That has shaken its confidence, and of course we’ve had unfortunate incidents, our gangland wars ... there was a time when Mumbai aspired to be New York or London, but now it’s heading to be the new Chicago. I don’t think that’s what we had bargained for, that wasn’t our aspiration. That has disappointed people.

How much do you think the attempt to give Mumbai a Marathi identity is contributing towards this?
It’s a very artificial imposition, like a bandage you’re putting on the city, saying that whatever the wounds underneath, this should take care of it all. It doesn’t work like that. People have to feel it from within, it’s not something you can induce. I don’t even see why it’s necessary. Mumbai’s strength has always been its cosmopolitan character and if you take away from that, I think Mumbai will be the loser. We don’t need to confuse people with this kind of labelling and pigeon-holing.

Mumbai has been a free-floating city. It should be left to go about its business, which is really to make money, to contribute to the country’s income tax coffers. We should just be allowed to get on with that, because at the end of the day it’s the bottom line that counts. What is happening is cutting into that bottom line, which means that people are going to start questioning whether this is really the ideal environment for business. And if that is eroded then there is nothing left in Mumbai, nothing else to fall back on.

Do you think making Mumbai a state would help?
I am all for it. I think it would free it of various constraints. Also I feel it has received very offhand treatment from the centre. It has never been given priority status. We deserve better infrastructure, considering what we contribute to our national economy. It’s amazing that a series of chief ministers have not seen it as a priority, to improve the basic standards of living in the city, and make life easier for its people, in basic areas. We’re not asking for anything unreasonable or unrealistic. Commuting itself has become hazardous and time consuming. So how is a business nerve centre of our country going to function and compete in an environment that’s so hard-driven, if we don’t have the tools with which to compete?

Why haven’t you gone into script writing for films?
There are several offers but I haven’t come across a project that is attractive to me. I personally believe that we are ready to do, within the commercial format, films which have some degree of credibility and which are sophisticated and mature in content. There is room for that kind of cinema along with the fluff and juvenile fare. There can be something like cerebral entertainment, films that make you think but which are not arty films, like The Usual Suspects, or Seven – or just about any film that starts Robert de Niro or Al Pacino, films featuring men and women of a certain age which aren’t mindless. No film maker seems ready to try.

I remember a project some time ago, to do a script keeping Amitabh in mind. I met Amitabh and I told him that if anybody could make that switch and do the kind of roles that a Paul Newman, or a Dustin Hoffman, or a Robert de Niro, or Bruce Willis is doing – they’re all seen as super heroes. They’re all at a stage in their lives where they call the shots. Films, scripts are written around them, which suit their age and their status, and he is the one person who could make the difference and lead us into a new millennium doing the kind of films that suit him. But he’s not ready to do it. Even if the script is written around a hero in his fifties, he will still want to be teamed with a girl in her twenties, and that defeats the very purpose of projecting a mature kind of a package, which I believe the audiences are ready for.

So I wouldn’t want to do a film just for the heck of it. If it was something which I believe could pull off, and which would use whatever potential I have as a storyteller, then I would jump at it, but not just any old script that comes my way because I don’t think I’m sitting in a mithai shop distributing laddoos to all who come by with the right amount of money.

The all-pervasive spirit of Mumbai can best be expressed with this little episode which occurred even before the meeting with Shobha. When Mid-day called her home for an appointment, her first question was, What is your deadline? Quizzed about this, she admits that thinking this way is not even second nature to her any more; it’s her way of life.
I’d be dead without time management. At any given moment I’ve got fifty balls up in the air, and if even one of them falls I’ve had it. These are the kind of pressures that Mumbai does impose – or you choose to impose on yourself. It’s been the pace of my life for far too many years, I wouldn’t know how else to do it. Prioritising is very much a part of living in this city. I think that’s how it works for all those of us who have fifty balls up in the air; we’ve all become expert jugglers and tightrope walkers. That’s what the city demands.



(First published in Mid-Day, Bombay.)