Life in Mumbai

“Life in Mumbai is on a fast track”. Everyone listen/tell this to their friends. I say it differently. To me, it’s on fast track because Mumbai's traffic moves slow. If you are affluent enough to have your house near your office or you are lucky to have your office near your house (both are different!), it is a luxury.

I used to travel 1.5 hours to my office and then 1.5 back to home, that makes 3 hours of traveling time a day. Coupled with your working time and then you are left with near sufficient time for sleep. Hence, you find your life is on a fast track. Still people wonder that no one in Mumbai has time to meet friends!

Once I was discussing on the same with one of my colleagues. He said the traveling time doesn’t seem too much to him. BTW, he was working in Mumbai for the last 12 years. I just told him that taking an average of 3 hours of traveling each day; he has spent 1.5 years in just commuting to office back and forth. One would have loved to see the expressions on his face then. To an extent, one can understand the reason that people cite infrastructure problems as one of the roadblocks for big MNCs opening offices in India (Mumbai). Probably they do not want their workforce to spend (waste) a third of their working time in traveling and then have an adverse impact on the productivity.

Infrastructure is changing in Mumbai but it is not paced enough to cope up with the influx (of people) Mumbai has. I do not understand whether our planning is wrong or execution is wrong. It seems we plan for future, the execution takes too long to finish that the future become present and then when the plan finishes, the complete project seems to be outdated. Now as an outsider, I and you do not know what is going wrong. One thing is for sure, the first thing that comes up with an unauthorized building (or slum) is temple/mosque. Doesn’t this seems obvious to you now, I do not need to give any reason for this, do I?