Of course, there are the masks, the appearance of at least four different varieties at pharmacies, hospital outlets, grocery stores, street corners where upstart political parties organized impromptu free distribution and asked beneficiaries to remember this during the impending assembly election, even at bus-stops. No one is hawking them in train compartments yet, but that too may not be far away.
Mumbai , simply, isn’t the city it used to be.
This is now a scared, panic-stricken, driven-to-the-edge kind of city. Many are afraid to show their fear, some laugh it off and circulate poor SMS jokes on the parallels between the H1N1 and BIWI, few are nonchalant enough to see the swine flu as “yet another common cold and flu” as a country’s leading epidemiologist remarked in this morning’s papers. As with everything else in Mumbai, H1N1 must also be endowed with a status hierarchy: Where one got the virus is now the marker of one’s social standing – was it on the family vacation in Europe or from the filth that’s irregularly lifted from outside your one-bedroom-hall flat in a poky-stinky suburb? Some fashion designer must surely be working on ideas to make the masks attractive and colourful enough to be worn to the next party that simply cannot be missed by those who picked up H1N1 on their foreign vacations. This, admiring self-appointed pundits, almost all of them non-Mumbaikars, will hold up as “yet another demonstration of Mumbai’s spirit”. Those who lost the battle to the garbage dump outside their poky flats will scamper to get their tests done, procure Tamiflu and buy the coveted masks, just so that they can go about their daily lives. This too, the pundits will testify, as the “spirit of Mumbai”.
In November last year, people say, the terror was from outside the shores of India and took the sea-route into Mumbai. In July-August this year, terror sneaked through lackadaisical airport screenings and wormed its way into our homes, schools-colleges and offices. Now, as then, the authorities were caught unawares. Preparedness was negligible. Strategy to combat the adversary was conspicuous by its absence. Emergency response from the authorities – in both instances, ironically, citizens were asked to stay indoors till it was safe to be out – laughable and thoroughly confused.