<img alt="" src="http://images.mid-day.com/2012/oct/Rahul-da-Cunha.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 63px; float: left;" />I&rsquo;m going to say it, call me outspoken, outdated, old fashioned, out of touch with the new Bombay. We&rsquo;ve become &lsquo;Minimum City&rsquo;. We&rsquo;ve become restless, ruthless, reckless, rash, rude people. The soft underbelly has got hard. &ldquo;We The People&rdquo; has morphed into &ldquo;I The Person&rdquo;. <img alt="" src="http://images.mid-day.com/2013/aug/bigflag.jpg" style="width: 500px; height: 333px;" /> &ldquo;Love your fellow man? Sure, as long he helps me triumph in my endeavours.&rdquo; The moral fibre lies tattered. We&rsquo;ve become amoral, antiseptic, anarchic, illicit, sab chalta hai, anything chalta hai, as long as the Self benefits. I will blow my car horn, even if amber has just turned green, because I cannot wait a second to get ahead. Our kids run amok in restaurants, we watch, and say adoringly &ldquo;Papoo, don&rsquo;t throw the butter chicken on uncle&rdquo; and all is kosher. We&rsquo;ve forgotten the niceties. The politeness of the &lsquo;thank you&rsquo;. The dignity of the &lsquo;sorry&rsquo;. Grace is about as extinct as the Gir lion. The semi-fact. The half measure. The white lie. Chivalry is pass&eacute;. Opening doors for women, thanking a liftman, it&rsquo;s just disappeared from our etiquette manual. We cut lanes. We undercut. We short cut. We Short Message Service mid-conversation. Dads ask the question of kids buried in their phone: &ldquo;I&rsquo;m talking to you, can you take your head out of that handset for just a minute.&rdquo; &ldquo;Chill Pops, I&rsquo;m multi-tasking.&rdquo; Breeding&rsquo;s gone bonkers. Bring up your child anyway you want, he will lose your upbringing at the altar of &lsquo;The Ruthless Age&rsquo;. Our kids want easy success, the easy way out, &ldquo;Dad, I plan to retire at 40,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Who wants to be in the same job in seven years?&rdquo; Forget slog, struggle, forget the 1,000 hours required to truly hone a skill. &ldquo;What a waste of time. I can do 50 things in that time. Get a life, dude.&rdquo; Jumping queues. Jumping lights. Jumping women. All fall under the bracket of, &ldquo;I am entitled, no one will stop me.&rdquo; We tweet, we text, we interrupt, we intercept. We talk loudly in movie halls. No time for sensible &lsquo;Ship of Theseus&rsquo;, nonsensical &lsquo;Chennai Express&rsquo; is time-pass. We don&rsquo;t want silences, no serenity -- just white noise in a world that&rsquo;s lost its grey. We&rsquo;ve dumbed down -- Manmohan Singh has 650,000 followers, and Shah Rukh has 46 lakh. Take the long way home? Forget it, there&rsquo;s always a short cut. So what&rsquo;s the one point I&rsquo;m making? -- I don&rsquo;t have a single point. I reside in 2013 Mumbai. It&rsquo;s our 66th Independence Day week. I have a right to Sunday rant, I&rsquo;m a free man. With the freedom of expression, that I hope still exists. Rahul da Cunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright,u00a0photographer and traveller. Reach him at rahuldacunha62 @gmail.com The views expressed in this column are the individual&rsquo;s and don&rsquo;t represent those of the paper.u00a0

I'm going to say it, call me outspoken, outdated, old fashioned, out of touch with the new Bombay. We've become 'Minimum City'

Minimum City

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