What a week it’s been. Full of violence, ambition, politics, deceit, land grabbing
What a week it’s been. Full of violence, ambition, politics, deceit, land grabbing.
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Kind of sums up two possible scenarios.
Season 4 of Games Of Thrones (GOT). And a regular week in Greater Mumbai.
Illustration/ Amit Bandre
Scheming politicians, spoilt super brats, stalking boyfriends, spurned lovers, soccer studs. The last seven days have seen them all in action.
Take the dangerous trend of the upper-class young resorting to unprovoked ego-driven, alpha male violence at the drop of a Coke can. Two-25 year-old louts bust a man’s nose for pointing out their litterbugging tendencies. These are boys supposedly from ‘good families’, whatever that means these days.
And then continue to be remorseless, flatly refusing to apologise post the event.
Twitter trolls were aghast. “How can two of our own resort to such behaviour?”
Much hurried ‘unfriending’ was done on Facebook.
Begs the question — give a wealthy kid money, meth, marijuana, teach him mannerlessness, and Mumbai city is his playground to do whatever he pleases. His motto — the law is an ass and my father has the assets to bail me out.
(By the way can the Carter Road residents arrange for a few more trash cans?)
Just when you thought that violence was a male prerogative, the Li Bai Bar witnessed two women flinging glasses and badly injuring three others for pulling them up. Ladies, you were breaking the rules by dancing madly behind the bar. What happened to responses like ‘Okay we got carried way’ or even ‘Mind your own business’?
Nope, now we throw glasses and flee the scene when we’re ‘told off’!
Then there were our politicians, who never lose an opportunity to promote the self under the guise of the public good.
The audacity of wanting to convert part of our hallowed Turf Club into a helipad because Bombay traffic slows them down. Where are you charging off in your chopper anyway? Stay put in Mantralaya and do some work perhaps.
Of course, we have the odd politician who tries to play activist.
Wow, you say, one voice of reason. Then you read the fine print – he wants to build a shopping mall. Listen to me all of you – the racecourse will stay a space for horses not a landing pad for helicopters.
(I wish our mayor had the power of his New York contemporaries to just put his foot down. Don’t mess with our green).
Then there’s Ness Wadia-Preity Zinta mess. Enough already. The duo share a life, then share an IPL team, then they spat, then she sues, then he’s stunned, the scandal unfolds as skeletons tumble out of the cupboard. Now his old man is getting extortion threats. What’s left?
And finally on a happier note when did football become this obsession in mother India. My godson turned five, his room is full of mini soccer fields, and ‘Ronaldo’ T-jerseys and footballs. Not a cricket bat in sight. Are we IPLed out, and FIFAed in. Is Neymar the new poster boy of ‘cool’?
And with Van Persie, Ochoa and other hotties, even the women are hooked.
(No one cares that we have a cricket team winning in Bangladesh).
Chalo, I’m off, the new season of GOT has got to be downloaded.
Rahul da Cunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, photographer and traveller. Reach him at rahuldacunha62 @gmail.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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