Survival of the Fittest, Redefined

I have often marveled at the thought of meeting a sane person hailing from a busy city like Mumbai and a crowded country like India. I didn’t realise it much till I actually opened my eyes and started taking notice of activities around me. Right from the morning when I wake up and not get water in the tap to the minute when I step out of my house to catch a bus to work to going to a trial room in a mall on a Sunday (or any other day of the week, it hardly makes any difference really) to watching a cricket match in the stadium to getting sweets from the shop on a non-festive day to even waiting for the elevator in my building to reach my home in the evening, I realised – I.Live.In.A.Very.Crowded.City!

So what is it like to live in a country of nearly 1.21 billion people, a country that’s one-third the size of Canada, yet has thirty times the population? What is it like to live in the second most populous country in the world, dangerously close to the first one being China and very far from the third one being United States of America? And to top it all, what is it like to live in the most populous city of India-Mumbai?!

It’s not that bad. Really. It’s not all that bad (as people think) even if you happen to be the last person on the bus. You can very well enjoy the view on the last step of the bus while hanging to the door and convince yourself that getting on the bus is much better than getting in the bus. Sure you cannot stretch your hands and your legs, sure you will be travelling with a few others on the outside of the bus, sure you will be grabbing on to whatever you can, be it the frame of the door or the next person’s shirt sleeve, but you will actually be one of those many who know what it means to “catch the bus”.

Buses and trains in Mumbai pronounce our population better than any other medium. Although rickshaws are fast catching up with people spilling out of them at any given time. Trains are often crammed with people, beyond their capacity. While some passengers get the seats, many others are pressed together in the aisle, close enough to know what each other had for lunch.

When the bus is packed to its maximum capacity, getting on and off is a major challenge, but so is getting in and out. You could try to empty the bus by screaming out that there is an explosive in the bus. However, with the frequency with which they are found almost everywhere in the city, yelling out “Oh my God! Amitabh Bachchan!” will empty the bus faster than anything else. Another method could be to drop to your hands and knees and crawl between people’s legs and reach the exit. Although, experience teaches that this method doesn’t work that well, considering the women of our country wear saris.

While Amitabh Bachchan can very well empty a bus, what he cannot empty are movie theatres. We love movies and we love cricket. So when half the population wants to watch every latest blockbuster, the chances of getting tickets on the first day are similar to the chances of running into Rakhi Sawant at a ghazal concert.

In India, you stand in the line everywhere. You stand in the queue to get a movie ticket, you stand in a queue to take a leak in the public toilet, you stand in the queue to vote for your candidate at the general elections, you stand in the queue report a stolen bike at the police station, you even stand in a queue to get out of a boring lecture by any renowned philosopher. Long queues are a norm. If you accept the fact, you save a lot of energy spent in cribbing about it everywhere.

When you visit a doctor, the receptionist may be poor in grammar but she’s not incorrect when she asks, “Are you patient?”

It is a fact that Indians encounter crowds almost everywhere. With this sudden revelation, I marvel at how everybody is dealing with the immense population and its exaggerated growth of 10 million every year. So much that if rabbits would be having general meetings, they would use the phrase “breeding like Indians”.