Contradictions

While waiting for my coffee at the bar of an empty coffee shop, I heard the man at the till read out a comment to the barista, “OMG! So much cheaper than $t@rbucks.” They all smiled. I got my coffee and before leaving said “Not just cheaper, much better too.” Their smiles got even broader. It’s absurd that a city of twenty million or more gets its espresso mainly from a single chain. The only competition is from a couple of other smaller chains. They are better, but when they grow their focus will also shift away from the coffee. I hear that it is hard to run independent coffee shops because the rent is so high in this city. Then you hear that the rent is high because there is no land to build on.

This is spurious reasoning. Every major road in the city is lined with condemned buildings just waiting to fall down. The whole mill area in the heart of the city is still waiting for development; the mills left the state in the 1960s. The photo you see is of a shopping center from the 1960s, when Bandra was still called the Queen of the Suburbs. It was abandoned about twenty years ago. The commerce of the city has begun to claim its space at the base. I’m sure it has not been torn down because of some dispute which must be in court. Every process in a court drags on for decades, so that real estate in the heart of commercial areas is locked up. New land is created by developers and flats sell at incredible prices. Someone once calculated that a single apartment building would come at the cost of a moon landing. If you hate hate the overuse of the adjective astronomical, try astronautical.

Other contradictions are apparent. Traffic is awful in the suburbs of Mumbai. At a busy junction of two arterial roads is the stump of a monorail service which has stood unaltered for a decade. The project is clearly abandoned! The pillars of the small stretch which was built over one of these roads now further chokes the traffic which must pass through it. Mass rapid transit still means the cheek to jowl traffic of the old suburban railways of Mumbai. The slow administration of courts or providing rapid transport are not unsolvable problems, but thinking about the reason nothing happens will take us into a swamp.

And the pollution? I got chatGPT to generate a haiku about it:

November’s thick haze,
Sparrow gasps in the still air,
Choking on the dusk.

It is much better to roam the crowded streets with a camera looking for simpler contradictions. Here is another of the incongruities. This building dates from the 1960s, as you could guess from the crazy tiling on the wall. It has been heavily modified of course. The plate glass window of a driving school was not of interest to me, nor the mass of airconditioning units which look like they can cool a data center. My attention was on the small white door. I’m sure the original architect didn’t plan that to go with that psychedelic wall. Or did they?