Apun ki Mumbai ….

Whatever happened to the bindaas Bombay spirit...Oops...... Sorry .. I mean Mumbai Spirit … I remember a time when we had this city , gateway to India, located like a cradle , beside the sea, and opening arms to everyone and anyone who had a dream in his eyes and a wish in his heart.
This is the city where people came to see dreams come true, ambitions roar, and success materialize. The city that gave us the movies that weave magic in our lives, that was the symbol of a growing and leading India.
This proud and integral part of modern India has fallen from its glory… and the fall has been slow and steady .. till it became drastically unnerving…. Unfortunately, most of us downplayed the intensity of events, or were too busy to notice...Did any of us have alarming bells ringing the day Bombay was renamed ‘Mumbai’ ? Did we get it then …? The very fabric of integrity and diversity was being threatened under the grab of regionalism…. Bollywood didn’t react to it … Some even cracked a few jokes about it .... What happened next was easy to predict .. from humari Mumbai, it became Marathi Mumbai… North Indians being beaten up black and blue, not getting jobs, not being treated right. People being reprimanded for speaking in the National Language... Now this was a new height... Since when did state interest come over national interest?
Its not a localized affect… much to the contrary its getting a foothold across the country… Look around you … Madras became Chennai, and Calcutta became Kolkatta.... Will we wait for these places also to be tainted under regional powers and regional discriminations??
We now have people being thrashed around for voicing personal opinions, people being pushed into apologizing for having a view, for free expression. Indians have always been a country of free minded and free voiced people.. If there was anything we could always manage, it’s was free ka advice and free ka opinion! Now even that is threatened.
The government manages to take time investigating and deciding what to do on this as well. If we could ban SIMI for its separatist, and fundamentalist ideology, why cant we do the same for the Sena?
Its time each of us wakes up and makes some noise. Do we want our cultural fabric to be tanned by such dumb witted separatist opinionated folks? Do we wish to be crushed for our opinions, and apologize for free expression?
Or do we wish to take a stand, be heard, roar out aloud and make a difference
Be an Indian…..Speak out now.... “Till Hope Remains”

By Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.