Zhug Zhug Gadi

So just a week ago, I had my first proper experience of traveling in a Mumbai local. Of course, I knew it would be chaotic, unruly and rather memorable but I wasn’t prepared for the insight it gave me into the mind of an average Mumbaikar.


A grain of sand in a bottle of water that had been given a vigorous stir. But what I find fascinating is that there is something refined in all of that muddled movement. As the train paces between stations, passengers glide gently, squeezing gracefully through huddled bodies and ducking elegantly under smelly armpits to reach the doors. And then things sort of reach an equilibrium (like when all of those sand grains settle to the bottom of the bottle). That is until the next station arrives. A vigorous shake. The ballet continues over and over. And in the theatric atmosphere, I notice this kid giving his shot at the tugging and pushing, his dad inspecting carefully and scrutinizing every move. After the exodus, the boy’s performance receives an appreciative pat. “Next time thoda aur jaldi jump marna.”

The everyday Mumbaikar hones a peculiar skill set of which hanging onto the train runs in the DNA. The need to develop, sharpen and pass on these fundas comes somewhere from an inbred mindset of scarcity. Well of course, scarcity exists for real and it’s blatant in the lack of infrastructure, but I feel it is overstated by the tugging and pushing in the railways, the rickshaw’s frenzied movements and the piercing honks of the city. But really, as PuLa once said, all of these things bother people outside Mumbai more than they trouble the Mumbaikar.

I wonder how an assal Mumbaikar would react if his dingy local were replaced by a sophisticated Metro system. Would he breathe freely in those smooth-sailing vaults or secretly mourn over the loss of a tradition that has come to define his identity.