The Silent Mumbai

There is a paradox in the tile of this blog itself. Mumbai a city that keeps buzzing can never really be silent. Even at night as the eye lids get heavy, you cant escape the energy in the air that resonates along with your morning alarm giving you another purpose to begin a new grind. Pu. La. Deshpande once described that, "Mumbai is the only city that knows that the clock has a minute's and a second's hand. This is a place where a watch is tied not just to a person's wrist, but also to his destiny." In this city of dreams, running is mandatory. If you are not connected with this essence of a Mumbaikar, you will certainly misunderstand a Mumbaikar's resilience towards terrorism as his/her apathy towards a subject of national grief.

I was buffering a clip where actor Siddharth was incorrectly canvassing Mumbaikar's inherent nature to work for himself as a stone cold heart that turns a blind eye towards a scar just cast on him.
I highly despise such insensitive comments. The actor sensing the lively energy in the city, concluded that the city has forgotten about its scars within a month's period. I have read and listened a lot of Mumbai bashing off-late. Critics have been heavy on this 'zindadili' attitude of Mumbai. I would want all of those guys to leave their comfort zones for once and get on field here when Mumbai is actually at seize.

When the terrorists were spraying their bullets across the city, there were stories of the common man on the road being brave enough to be at ground zero to help the injured. The city has never let the blood banks go dry in such times. Donations flood not just come in form of money, but also in form of volunteering. During every bomb blasts, it is the locals who have done the first aid even before the police or the paramedics arrive. When we are flood victims, the able cook food and pass it on to the needy. The next day we make a tally of our losses and make a new plan on how to run our lives bearing the catastrophe. Please don't blame a Mumbaikar of forgetting his/her scars.

I have friends who have taken months to recover from the trauma of 26/11 before mustering courage to take a glance at The Taj and The Trident. So Siddharth, if you think that people forgot about 26/11 a month later, then you are sadly mistaken. Do not expect an event of grief to be a piece of conversation on every dining table every single day. And talking about the issue over and over again is certainly not justified. You should make an attempt to give a vent to your grief and look towards the time ahead. As far as actions of Mumbaikars are concerned, you should have been there at the rally of 3rd December 2009. The anger of an average Mumbaikar was pretty evident in the posters, slogans their acts and voices. The aam junta this time was not blaming Pakistan, nor did it booed the terrorists. The protest constructively demanded justice and security from the government.

Yes I agree, the anguish did not reflect in the General Elections that arrived few months later. However I do not still attribute the low turnout as Mumbaikar's indifference towards emotional issues. I think that an average Mumbaikar does not consider politics as an answer to his/her questions a misconception that needs to be changed.

Overcoming yesterday's tragedy by setting out to work is a need in Mumbai. It is this need that drives its engines and makes Mumbai what it is. The resilience of the city begins its day 2 in remembrance of the tragedy, with high emotions, with fear but with a grit - a grit to work for myself, my family which in its own fraction adds some activity towards the nation. I see no reason to discourage this bounce back attitude of the city that in effect destroys the sole purpose of terrorism. I, a Mumbaikar, salute the spirit of the city.

Salaam Mumbai!!

Where Einstein Meets Hinduism ...

If someone asks you and me, “What time is it?” we would involuntarily check our wrist, or roll our head to the grandfather clock on our wall. But there was a man few decades back who would have snapped back, “You need time in relation to what?” That geeky German / American with innovative hairstyle and a thick moustache acknowledged as world’s most intellectual brain was none other than Albert Einstein. The old man in his”theory of relativity” went down to the pendulum of our grandfather’s clock and changed the definitions and the very foundations of the concept of time. He said that time is different for different people. “Well of course!” you might say “it is night in the USA right now while its day time here.” Please step back from that door in case your thinking is heading there. Do you think someone like Einstein would come up with a world renowned theory to prove that? What the genius meant was that what felt like 2 seconds to you might well be 2 days, 2 decades or maybe 200 years for someone else. “How can that be?” “Is he nuts to think something like that?”

I know, it is something difficult to imagine and understand, but needn’t be difficult to digest, after all even Joey the dumbest of all characters amongst the FRIENDS could assimilate the concept in one of his roles. Joey, acting as Victor on one of his stage performances in season 3 of FRIENDS gets on a spaceship to some BlogOn 7 planet in search of alternative fuels and is set to return back after 300 years. “And, when I return 300 years from now, you would have been long gone, but I wouldn’t have aged at all. So you tell your great, great granddaughter to look up to me. Because Adrian, baby, I would want to meet her.” This concept even decades after Einstein released his papers of “Time Dilation”, is found amongst comic series. People even today find it difficult to understand and easy to mock at. So guys, a standing ovation for the genius who could actually do an out of box thinking and come up with this theory. Come on, get up and applaud the man’s creativity and his efforts to prove that thinking.

But a Hindu would find a man in orange robes, with garland on his wrists and a pair of chaps in one of his hands that when stroked together add background music to his rhymes of, “Narayan, Narayan!” smiling at this discovery. Ladies and gentlemen meet Mr. Narad Muni, a divine sage in Hindu scriptures given the powers and the ability to travel between different planes and planets of the universe. If the Hindu mythology really exists then Narad Muni is the one who should know about this and the means to tackle with this kind of physics, mainly because the Hindu scriptures have professed this theory more than 5000 years back. “Now what was that?” Let me tell you a short story found in the epic of Mahabharata.

Once upon a time (isn’t this how a story should always start?) there was a kingdom beneath the oceans. It was ruled by a nice benevolent king called as Kakudmi who had an extremely beautiful daughter Revati. Kakudmi finding none amongst the earthlings as a capable life partner for his daughter, decided to consult Bramha the creator of the universe himself to find a capable groom for Revati. Since Lord Bramha was already engrossed in the music of the Gandharvas (yes, Gods rock too), Kakudmi decided to wait patiently for Gandharvas to finish their concert. After applauding their performance, Lord Bramha was amused to see King Kakudmi an earthling waiting at his door step with his daughter. Kakudmi sought consultations of the Lord Himself to find an appropriate groom for Revati. Bramha laughed at that moment and said, “O King, you have come to my door step. Here on this plane of the universe, time is different from what it is on earth. In the time that you were waiting here, 27 chaturyugs have passed by on earth. Your kingdom is long gone by and all of the grooms existing in your era on earth are now dead. All of your fore generations are already dead and an altogether different kind of human life is now growing itself on earth.”

Now let us dig deeper into this concept of Chaturyugs. 1 Chaturyug is actually 1 Mahayug made up of the 4 Yugs viz. the Satya Yug, Treta Yug, Dwapara Yug and the Kali Yug. 1 Yug equals to 432,000 human years. But the Hindu scriptures shaking hands with Einstein’s theory of relativity assert that these 432,000 human years are nothing but 0.01% of 1 day of Lord Bramha.




While 1 Maha Yug is 0.1% of Bramha’s day. So if you calculate backwards, 27 Chaturyugs (27 Maha Yugs) roughly turn out to be 78 minutes of Bramha’s day and that is the time King Kakudmi was waiting at Bramha’s doorstep with his daughter while the earth below spinning itself while revolving around the sun successfully completed 432,000*10*27 years of its life (1 Maha Yug = 10 Yugs). I am sure Einstein must have applauded this story. Now what happens later to King Kakudmi?

Lord Brahma assures him that the Lords themselves are now set to take an Avatar on the earth and thus you can marry this pure and pious Revati to one of them. King Kakudmi after setting back on earth finds a complete different picture from the time he left. Not just that the landscape and the places have changed, but the striking difference is the change in the human race itself. Instead of progressing, the human race has degraded itself. People now are that of lower intellectual and physical capabilities. But then comes Lord Balaram, the brother of Lord Krishna himself who is one capable person to marry Revati. So as per Brahma’s suggestions, Kakudmi marries Revati to Balaram.

This Yug philisophy is very much in sync with the Greek mythology where the Greeks have divided the life of human race into 4 ages viz. the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze age and the Iron Age. The Greeks profess that humans have degraded way of life from the Golden Age to the Iron Age. Each of the ages can be related to each of the Yugs in the Hindu philosophy. So when the Greeks say that we are now living in the Iron Age, Hindus christen the current time as the Kali Yug. The definitions and the descriptions of each of these Yugs do go hand in hand with the Greek Ages.

The difference that I would notice in the philosophies is that Hinduism drags the concept further to a cycle of Maha Yugs that come and go every now and then. And all of these 432,000*10 human years are nothing but few minutes of Lord Brahma. As per the calculations made in the Hindu scriptures, we are currently living in the 51st year of Lord Brahma and Lord Brahma along with this materialistic Brahmanda or today what we call as the universe, is set to live and exist for another 49 years. Ah well, excuse me, ‘Ahem!!’ 49 Brahma’s years.