…”come and join me.”
Many years later, a kid turns to his papa and asks, “Why is this silly narrow land-locked elevated road called the Sea Link? Where is the link to the sea?”
“Have you heard the story of South Extension in Delhi, son?”
***
Mumbai is in many ways an epitome of India’s modernisation – the old versus the new and all the change it brings.
Mumbai. How can it be an epitome of anything except disaster? After all, it’s got nothing going for it. Everything creaks or has broken down long ago. There are so many people that they now stack vertically. Property prices have gone upwards and have probably reached Adam Smith their maker by now. Daily life is an incomprehensible struggle that leaves you waking with a start in the middle of the night with fists clenched. The only thing that functions is the train and I’ve had enough of it already, fists or otherwise. By all reckoning it’s more like the armpit of modernisation.
No. But still. Even though I suffer from all of these and a few more, I still think things are poised for change, even if the rate is glacial. These things may never change, but something else will.
Let me explain.
What’s holding Mumbai’s modernisation efforts up is the lack of land, clearly. There is not enough of it, and not in the places that matter. They tried to fix this by selling Navi Mumbai as a Realtor and Business Dream, but it didn’t work. It might have if enough families and businesses with people-pulling-power had moved there, but then who would leave the warm embrace of Cuffe Parade? As a result, Navi Mumbai is full of either shmucks or people taking a bit of time off from the city. As a result, it is more like the Suburban Householder’s Post-Lunch-Daydream. (No I haven’t been to Navi Mumbai yet, so feel free to prove me wrong.)
The other way out of the land problem is of course to make more land. This isn’t all that farfetched; after all, it has been a solution of choice for the past 300 years or so – you know, the whole seven-islands-become-one thing. Now this hasn’t been done for a while, not least because those who currently inhabit sea-facing property are not much enthused by the idea of suddenly living inland.
What this has meant is that sea-facing property has seen a rapid upsurge in price, which has in turn pulled up property prices in neighbouring areas; naturally, since the space is the same while incomes and populations have expanded. In the same way as water does, prices tend to find their own level, so rents have gone up across the board.
This upward movement has continued pretty much unabated. Prices have been propped by people who can pay them. Those who can’t, squeeze in somewhere or the other. Yet people keep coming.
Why do they come? Because fundamentally Mumbai is an attractive place. The churning in the services and the financial sector that we have seen in recent years is heavily based here. This is where you come if you have ambition (or where realise you shouldn’t be if you don’t, as in my case.) Our own land of opportunity, but there’s no land to be had.
So there are two sides in conflict. On one hand there is the landed establishment, set in its ways, reluctant to see change. It uses several arguments to bolster its case, including the preservation of the beauty of the current coastline. On the other hand there is the milling, jostling crowd, aching for just that little bit of additional space. And in the middle is the land that they fight over, and its price.
In the final analysis things are determined by who wields the political battle-axe, and so far there has been only one winner. Now I won’t go so far as to say that the balance of political power itself has changed, but a recent (and somewhat insidious) development might be the first throw of the dice.
I mean, as you will have gathered by now, the sea link. I spent many days wondering how this project will work. Given that the road arches out into the sea and back again, there can’t possibly be stops along the way. Moreover, if there are no turn-off areas, a single car stalled can back the traffic up for miles. Not just this, it seems to me that all this will do is take some of the load off the inner roads and instead dump it on the meeting points of Bandra, Worli, and Nariman Point. If traffic comes flying along the sea link and comes to a dead halt two kilometres from land with nowhere to go… well, you get the unpleasant picture.
But that’s not the point. Like everything else in this city, this project too will somehow work. Maybe they’ve even thought of these problems. But what they probably haven’t thought of is what I feel is likely to be the biggest and most unintended consequence of this project.
See, the unbroken sea view is gone. No longer will you be able to sit on Worli Seaface or Marine Drive and stare unfettered into the horizon. Now, at some (perhaps considerable) distance, you will see a road, with lots of cars going up and down.
The unbroken sea view, the greatest attraction of the really expensive bits of Mumbai, what in my opinion was the single biggest factor in holding the coastline to its present shape, is gone. They’ve given an inch. The yards will follow. The sea link beckons.
How long will it be before economics overpowers the establishment? How long before the huge pressure of space, and the huge increase in the number of people able and willing to pay for it, changes the Mumbai landscape? Maybe the next generation of homeowners will not be quite so averse to selling their land. All we need is a pioneering real estate developer, preferably someone with political connections.
In any case, as you move outwards, there will always be a coastline to fight over. There will always be pretty bits. Meanwhile prices inland will fall, and more people will live happily ever after.
And all it will have taken is a sea link. And the spoiling of a view.
Many years later, a kid turns to his papa and asks, “Why is this silly narrow land-locked elevated road called the Sea Link? Where is the link to the sea?”
“Have you heard the story of South Extension in Delhi, son?”
***
Mumbai is in many ways an epitome of India’s modernisation – the old versus the new and all the change it brings.
Mumbai. How can it be an epitome of anything except disaster? After all, it’s got nothing going for it. Everything creaks or has broken down long ago. There are so many people that they now stack vertically. Property prices have gone upwards and have probably reached Adam Smith their maker by now. Daily life is an incomprehensible struggle that leaves you waking with a start in the middle of the night with fists clenched. The only thing that functions is the train and I’ve had enough of it already, fists or otherwise. By all reckoning it’s more like the armpit of modernisation.
No. But still. Even though I suffer from all of these and a few more, I still think things are poised for change, even if the rate is glacial. These things may never change, but something else will.
Let me explain.
What’s holding Mumbai’s modernisation efforts up is the lack of land, clearly. There is not enough of it, and not in the places that matter. They tried to fix this by selling Navi Mumbai as a Realtor and Business Dream, but it didn’t work. It might have if enough families and businesses with people-pulling-power had moved there, but then who would leave the warm embrace of Cuffe Parade? As a result, Navi Mumbai is full of either shmucks or people taking a bit of time off from the city. As a result, it is more like the Suburban Householder’s Post-Lunch-Daydream. (No I haven’t been to Navi Mumbai yet, so feel free to prove me wrong.)
The other way out of the land problem is of course to make more land. This isn’t all that farfetched; after all, it has been a solution of choice for the past 300 years or so – you know, the whole seven-islands-become-one thing. Now this hasn’t been done for a while, not least because those who currently inhabit sea-facing property are not much enthused by the idea of suddenly living inland.
What this has meant is that sea-facing property has seen a rapid upsurge in price, which has in turn pulled up property prices in neighbouring areas; naturally, since the space is the same while incomes and populations have expanded. In the same way as water does, prices tend to find their own level, so rents have gone up across the board.
This upward movement has continued pretty much unabated. Prices have been propped by people who can pay them. Those who can’t, squeeze in somewhere or the other. Yet people keep coming.
Why do they come? Because fundamentally Mumbai is an attractive place. The churning in the services and the financial sector that we have seen in recent years is heavily based here. This is where you come if you have ambition (or where realise you shouldn’t be if you don’t, as in my case.) Our own land of opportunity, but there’s no land to be had.
So there are two sides in conflict. On one hand there is the landed establishment, set in its ways, reluctant to see change. It uses several arguments to bolster its case, including the preservation of the beauty of the current coastline. On the other hand there is the milling, jostling crowd, aching for just that little bit of additional space. And in the middle is the land that they fight over, and its price.
In the final analysis things are determined by who wields the political battle-axe, and so far there has been only one winner. Now I won’t go so far as to say that the balance of political power itself has changed, but a recent (and somewhat insidious) development might be the first throw of the dice.
I mean, as you will have gathered by now, the sea link. I spent many days wondering how this project will work. Given that the road arches out into the sea and back again, there can’t possibly be stops along the way. Moreover, if there are no turn-off areas, a single car stalled can back the traffic up for miles. Not just this, it seems to me that all this will do is take some of the load off the inner roads and instead dump it on the meeting points of Bandra, Worli, and Nariman Point. If traffic comes flying along the sea link and comes to a dead halt two kilometres from land with nowhere to go… well, you get the unpleasant picture.
But that’s not the point. Like everything else in this city, this project too will somehow work. Maybe they’ve even thought of these problems. But what they probably haven’t thought of is what I feel is likely to be the biggest and most unintended consequence of this project.
See, the unbroken sea view is gone. No longer will you be able to sit on Worli Seaface or Marine Drive and stare unfettered into the horizon. Now, at some (perhaps considerable) distance, you will see a road, with lots of cars going up and down.
The unbroken sea view, the greatest attraction of the really expensive bits of Mumbai, what in my opinion was the single biggest factor in holding the coastline to its present shape, is gone. They’ve given an inch. The yards will follow. The sea link beckons.
How long will it be before economics overpowers the establishment? How long before the huge pressure of space, and the huge increase in the number of people able and willing to pay for it, changes the Mumbai landscape? Maybe the next generation of homeowners will not be quite so averse to selling their land. All we need is a pioneering real estate developer, preferably someone with political connections.
In any case, as you move outwards, there will always be a coastline to fight over. There will always be pretty bits. Meanwhile prices inland will fall, and more people will live happily ever after.
And all it will have taken is a sea link. And the spoiling of a view.
