Life is cheap in Mumbai. This could have been a tagline for an advertising campaign, but will obviously never be because honesty has never had any place in the advertising industry. The fact remains though because people die around us all the time and we don-t get as worked up as we once used to. Consider the monsoons every year, where poor folk routinely die because buildings collapse, and better off folk die in freak accidents related to open manholes or potholed roads. Death is a great leveller, aided by the kind of incompetence and apathy that has long made Mumbai infamous.

I can-t recall if people always died as easily as they now do. There must have been similar tragedies in my childhood, of course, because it-s not as if the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has ever been an efficient organisation, but I don-t seem to recall any major tragedies the way I remember the floods of 2005, for instance. Over 1,000 people died that day, July 26, and experts placed the blame not just on the eighth heaviest-ever recorded 24-hour rainfall but on factors such as an inadequate drainage system, unplanned construction, and the illegal destruction of mangrove ecosystems.