Rude city? You bet, says Mumbaikar Jerry Pinto in defence of a metropolis too busy to mind its manners but always ready to help when trouble comes
Reader’s Digest, which interests itself in these things, tells us that Mumbai is the rudest city in the world. This is also the magazine that carried a story saying that global warming might be good for us. I swear, they did this in May, when my cousins in Nagpur were reporting that the city was burning up at 52 degrees centigrade. I come not to praise Mumbai, however. I come to ask whether the Reader’s Digest editors really mean it when they say that New York is the politest city in the world? What is it to be polite?
In London , a terribly polite city by my experience, a young woman refused to lend her scarf to be used as a tourniquet when a man was stabbed on the bus. He bled to death. I am sure, the young woman said, “I’m sorry but it’s an expensive scarf.” The person who asked for the scarf probably said, “Right. Cheers.” Meanwhile, the blood pulsed on from the dying man’s neck.
In Mumbai, my mother once was forced to go to a public hospital with a torn-up leg. In front of her, the poor waited in the way that the poor wait, endlessly, patiently, quietly. When she joined the line, they all assessed their need, assessed hers and stepped out of the way wordlessly. She went to the top of the line, protesting quietly all the way. She did not bleed to death. Perhaps, she even forgot to thank all those people. Perhaps, they did not expect to be thanked.
But since no one seems to have bothered about definitions, let’s dump them too. Perhaps it is polite to be a city like New York where all the shop assistants say thank you and please and the doormen are ready to open the door for you but there are 55,000 violent crimes a year. And that represents a 10-year low. Perhaps Mumbai with its 122 murders in six months must be significantly ruder but less lethal.
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