I went to R-City mall in Vikhroli a couples of weeks ago. Inside the Shoppers’ Stop at Franco Leone store, a stud-looking salesman tried to arrest us with his pseudo-dude accent and fake charisma. After being confronted with a few questions, he gave in to display his ignorance about salesmanship. This is just one example amongst millions of Mumbai (well, almost) youth who get ready in the morning for their so-called jobs.
You cannot take a restful ride in an auto or train or anything for that case because of this army of youth (and old alike). They seem to be in a perennial hurry and point of agony is that they take pride in it. I have been brought up in Assam and spent last three years in Goa. So you take surely take a rightful guess about my attitude towards rashness in daily life.
It is not that I am complaining. There has to be a momentum in life. But at the end of the day I should also evaluate what I got after I rushed so much throughout.
If I end up in a meager salary, that too in a shitty job which I don’t enjoy, tell me how is it better to live in a big city than to live as a farmer in the village. At least you get to enjoy your years of life living in a village. And probably you won’t die of cancer unlike in a city.
And tell me how it feels to stand up for ten hours in a mall as the above Salesman or as a security guard in Kanjur Marg. Isn’t it all shitty? In a Vodafone store which needs at most two employees, they have kept four employees. If it is not pseudo-unemployment then what is? Should they not seriously evaluate their otherwise and perhaps better lives at their places of domicile? Instead they are supposedly proud of their ‘Maximum City’. I call it ‘Maximum Stupidity’.
Not even yellow-collar jobs, I have seen scores of people in IT jobs that spend their most precious time of the career in deplorable conditions doing stuff that doesn’t matter to the world. I seriously think that had they been pursuing some other stuff, they would have been definitely earning more and living a better life.
One funny flip to this story is my inability to protect my feet from the Mumbai crowd. You might escape a stampede or religious attack unhurt but you cannot walk through a crowd with your slippers and jeans in clean condition. Somebody or other will eventually be tramping onto them every ten minutes. One time I was thrown out of train in Andheri along with others while the platform people were chanting some strange hooligan mantra. I was clearly bewildered. But only after being thrown out of that train, I landed in a very awesome (albeit, I wish to keep it secret) situation.