In 1-Above, Burnt was City's Past and Ethos For Social Equity

.Chinmay Borkar

N. M. Joshi Marg, where Kamala Mills is located, is named after famous trade union leader who is considered as a pioneer in social work and especially trade unions which were the hallmarks of the city decades after the independence. On the campus of those narrow lanes, dilapidated chimneys and skeletons of their inner beams, erected are those posh glittering clubs, splashed with wealth, power and sheer opulence. These new symbols of development are built on vestiges of the same mills that once dominated Mumbai's multicultural, multilinguistic and egalitarian ethos. The trade union movement that underpinned those mills were forces of social equity and a deterrence to power structures of the wealthy and the politicians. They formed the middle class and lower middle-class base of the city's accommodating life.

That changed after trade union strikes in the late 1970s and went into reminisces of times in 1990, after real estate of those thundering mills acquired the status of gold mines in this cramped city. With the insanity of real estate in south 'Bombay' , the mills were replaced by high rise vanity structures, shopping complexes, software and servie industry, media houses, sprawling pubs and the old was systematically dismantled, often citing their inability to adapt to changing times. Overnight the mills caught fire and turned to rubble opening their vast terrain to the debauchery of the class that now demanded the sheer dominance over city's resources. The Congress party, then in power, had changed the development rules -- DC rules -- to suit that smooth transition. All parties, including Shiv Sena and BJP colluded with them. Sharad Pawar was the architect of the “vikas” then.

In September, I attended IBM Developer conference in one of those swanky buildings on the 14th floor. The conveyor belts of yesteryears remained fixed on the ceiling and huge pipes supporting them were now being used for fiber optics cables and air conditioning. They just coalesced the old and new realities into the new transforming world, and yet there was something so unrealistic, unjust and grossly abominable about them.

The two worlds never merged; they were forced to separate, and thousands of lives were cut short in abjectness. Some existed, and many died in anonymity.

Two soaringly disconnected realities existed. The vanquished were easily forgotten.

Just a few miles away in Worli, one of the Mumbai's symbols of the powerful, all of few handful residents lived in such a huge apartment complex called Campa Cola deemed illegal and therefore had to be demolished. The complex lacked several environmental clearances and other formalities.

The Supreme court itself has now given "hope" to those powerful residents that their super expensive, plush interior flats won't be demolished, unlike millions of other slums and structures in Mumbai, for they lack what is required to 'live' in Mumbai.

With extremely unfortunate deaths of 15 young lives in Mumbai, the safety of those mills will now be questioned in the newsrooms and debates of the media. None other than Narendra Modi has tweeted promptly, and so has the President of India. Aditya Thackeray, the new heir of Shiv Sena was a vocal proponent of reviving the nightlife of Mumbai in those very hubs. He is now busy in visiting hospitals and consoling the family members.
One of the many unfortunate women caught up in that horrifying fire with debris falling from above, and people running over said: "Some supernatural power was definitely protecting me".

The pub that caught fire and claimed so many lives is called "1 Above"