Life in Mumbai - Survival of the (Un)Fittest!

Firstly, most of us think the term 'Survival of the Fittest' is coined by Charles Darwin who authored the Theory of Evolution, but in reality it was Herbert Spencer, a British philosopher, who has coined this term.

I have been born and brought up in this blissful city (or that is what we want to flaunt it as) called Mumbai. The word Mumbai is derived from the words Mumba + Aai, which means mother Mumba (Koli goddess) in Marathi.

Mumbai has been the financial and entertainment capital of India since a long time and today contributes approximately 5% to the GDP of the country. It houses various important institutions such as Reserve Bank of India, Bombay Stock Exchange, and National Stock Exchange and is the hometown of the most famous institution in India - the Bollywood.

Now you must be wondering why am i giving you such information that you can also find on more authentic websites such as the Wikipedia and the like. The intention is not to provide information, but to show what people around the world perceive the city as. A person who stays in the city for a long time will know what the real shape of the city is.

I will try to describe a day in the life of an average middle-class person who stays in the city and wants to lead a decent livelihood. This description is not representative of the masses in the city as more than 60% of the people stay in slums. There are also around 8-10% of the people who lead a much prosperous life in the same city. This is an example of a day in the life of a person who is familiar to all the voices of the city. Also, i will refer to the below example as a person (she) but it doesn't necessarily mean it's an example of a woman's life because that's not the basic motive behind the exemplification; please don't read much into it.

The person wakes up at 6 in the morning in her not more than 500-600 square feet house. She drinks milk (tea/coffee) that is not according to the health standards followed in the rest of the world, but she doesn't care. Most of the houses do not have a 24x7 supply of water, so most of the people (as well as this person) bathe with the water stored in small containers. She gets ready and leaves home in a hurry (people in Mumbai are always in a hurry). She waits for an auto-rickshaw but none of the unengaged rickshaw drivers want to take her to her destination. With no choice left, she then waits for a public transport bus in a never-ending queue and after much effort gets into an overcrowded bus. The bus either takes her to her office or to the nearest railway station. During her journey, the bus is stuck numerous times in unimaginable traffic (you should see the traffic to know it). She then gets down from the bus and runs (literally) to board a public transport train. 

 The trains in Mumbai are so crowded that a cockroach might change its travel timings to avoid the rush. She gets into an overly crowded (which is an understatement actually) train and reaches her desired station soon. The trains in Mumbai carry more than 300-350 people in a single compartment, whose seating capacity will not be more than 60-70 persons (no kidding!). This happens although the difference between 2 trains at peak hours is not more than 2-3 minutes (on the clock). Conversations among people in Mumbai about the train often sound like - "Tomorrow I have to catch the 8.43 am Churchgate(a station) local." or "if i don't catch the 9.57 am CST(another station) i will miss my 10.28 am Borivali local."  

When she gets off the train, she smells like a pig who is back from its wonderful time at the nearby muck. No perfume or deodorant can sustain the test of Mumbai local trains (perhaps that's one marketing strategy that a perfume company can never use). If her office is near the railway station, life is heaven for her. If not, she has to repeat the auto-rickshaw and the bus cycle. She reaches her office in that messed up state at, let's say, 9.30 am. Let's not get into what happens at her office, because that is well-known to people across locations. During lunch she goes to her office canteen that serves abysmal routine food.

If she carries her own lunch and thinks she is eating healthy food, then she is living in a state of enigma. Because the food in our country does not pass any quality check before reaching the common people and much has been said and known about the quality of the food, i don't want to get into that.

She leaves her office to repeat the same commute cycle in the evening, just that now she is tired of working more than 9 hours in her office and is in a cranky mood (most of the people in Mumbai go through this cranky demeanor every day). She gets irritated with people pushing her around in the trains and buses and with small things that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. She transfers this frustration onto other people and the crankiness is highly contagious. The streets are now full of hawkers who want to sell all kinds of things from vegetables to cutlery, from toys to books, from street-side junk food to mobile phone accessories and list goes on and on. They yell at the top of their voice to publicize their products because that is the only mode of marketing they know of. Amidst all this craziness she reaches home and her spouse is equally frustrated of his day. Her kids are complaining, and so are her parents, her neighbors, her friends and even her dog. She eats her dinner watching the television, which shows her a parallel world that is filled with things that she wishes to have in her life. She complains about her pathetic life and blames everyone around her for the same. She waits and dreams for tomorrow when her life will take a 180 degree turn and she'll live her life happily ever after. But tomorrow never comes. The next morning she wakes up at 6, and the rest - you can guess it.

This cycle repeats every day in the life of more than 10 million people residing in this blissful city and they (whoever they are) call it the dream city. Wow, what a dream to have! I have mentioned a day in the life of an "average" person, so you can imagine the ones living below poverty line. Thus, I feel the fittest of the people live in this city and the ones, not-so-fit, are just surviving.

SQL - the database champion

SQL - stands for Structured Query Language, is a programming language to handle DataBase Management Systems (DBMS). The above sentence might ring a bell in many of the geeky minds, but may not be perceived in the same way by a non-geek. Let me handle this definition in a more simplistic manner.

Let’s imagine a small 10-page book with minimal words and a few pictures (more like a comic book most of us read in our childhood). If we are given a task to find a particular unique word within those 10 pages, it might take us not more than 10 minutes (much lesser if it’s an interesting comic book that we have read repeatedly). Now let’s increase the difficulty level a bit. If we are given a 100-page book and asked to again find a specific unique word within those 100 pages, it might take us a couple of hours (if the book is one of our academic books, then it might take a few days as well). And finally, if we are given access to a library that contains more than a 100 books and we are now asked to find a single unique word among them - that can be a month-long arduous assignment. This is where database management technology comes into the picture.

To be Silent or not to be...

It's often said that Silence is a virtue of Fools. But is it really? I have pondered over it a few times and have realized that being silent is actually the virtue of the most intelligent and rational people. To know when to speak up and when not to takes a lot of intellectual understanding of the situation one is into.
As children, we often answer all the questions that we are asked rather innocently thus blabbing out the truth. Since childhood, we're always taught that we should not lie to people, but nobody stops us from being silent. Being silent is not equivalent to lying. But one learns when to keep mum only with experience.


The best example when to keep silent is when one is an argument. More often than not, we regret what we say in an argument, because we are angry and we do not have control over our thoughts. We often hurt our close ones by saying things we don't usually mean. There are times when we speak thoughtlessly in our professional life and occasionally pay the price for doing so. Silence comes in as a very handy tool in such situations. Silence has the power to solve the most complicated issues, as it helps you gain control over your mind and think rationally.
Silence doesn't always mean not talking to others. It even means to calm your own psyche and ponder over your own thoughts. Metaphorically, it means to turn the vigorous sea of thoughts in your mind into a state of a composed lake.


Having said that, being silent is sometimes perceived as a sign of shyness or cowardice. Thus, one needs to maintain an equipoise in one's actions and her expressions. People who manage to achieve this equilibrium emerge as great leaders, as they can maintain their authority as well as be mindful of not revealing more than what they should.


Essentially, silence helps us contemplate over our past actions, gather our current thoughts and contrive what our future actions will be. Don't you think?

Viswanathan Anand - the profound genius!

I am inspired to write this blog post today because yesterday this genius - Viswanathan Anand, has defended his World Chess title for the fifth time (and fourth time in a row) since 2007! That's miles ahead of being spectacular. It's what Neil from 'How I Met Your Mother' would call it - Legen....dary!! And yet he's not as renowned in our country as he deserves to be. 

As we all know, Google searches are location/country specific and the results vary across regions. I stumbled upon this array of astonishing facts when I went to Google search on my computer. I punched in the following letters for eminent people in our country and this is what i found :

Click to Enlarge

I was exhilarated with Viswanathan’s achievement yesterday, and hence I punched his name first and pressed enter. I was shocked to look at the result. The first post from Places in India (highlighted below) is from a news channel - NDTV, and it's headline says, "Who is Viswanathan Anand"(highlighted above). That is one of the leading news channels in the country and their headline just depicts how ignorant we are about the greatest sportsperson our country possesses today (with all due respect to Sachin Tendulkar). He has carried the torch of India single handedly in the World Chess arena and has not let the fire perish until today.

Then I thought to myself, let’s give others a try; so I typed in just 3 letters to search for Sachin Tendulkar - the Demi-God of Indian as well as World cricket. And I need not enlist here the pages that I saw on the Google search page, because he needs no introduction in India.

Trust me, it gets better...

This time i had to punch in just 2 letter to search for Kareena Kapoor - an actress in Bollywood again, who belongs to a star-studded family and who is surprisingly famous even though she can get an Oscar for being unfit to act. But regardless of her acting skills she is well known to people residing in the remotest of the villages in our country.

So why don’t we know the guy who earned India such great respect globally in his sport and has been consistently doing it for so many years? Why don’t we know the guy who became India’s first grandmaster in 1987, 24 years ago? Why are we not aware of the person who was the first recipient of the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award in 1991–92, India's highest sporting honour? If we worship cricket and its demi-gods, why do we not worship the guy who was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, making him the first sportsperson to receive the award in Indian history?

I think he deserves every bit of our attention and every bit of glamour that our cricketers get for contributing far much lesser than him. I think it’s high time we divert our attention to other sportspersons in our country who have given a lot more to our country than fame, such as Viswanathan himself, Saina Nehwal, Vijender Singh, Mary Kom, etc., don’t you think? And I am sure there are many more unnoticed people who have devoted their life to earn respect for our country. I’ll try to write about as many of them as possible in the future - just a small way of acknowledging their achievements!