Circumstantial City

A vast majority of us do not live on Earth anymore. Not in any real sense of the word.

We live in Urth – the Earth we made, the Urban Earth. This is the truth. We live in cities and we shall live in cities evermore. And those of us who do not live in cities today, will probably live in cities tomorrow.

Cities do not resemble Earth. I don’t mean that badly. It is just the truth. Earth is made of soil and water, and overgrown with vegetation of all kinds, and infested with insects of all kinds, and over-run with animals with strange shapes and colors. Earth is full of things that are trying to kill each other, and from murder they bloom and grow. Earth is full of reproduction. Really full of reproduction.

Cities are nothing like that. except for the reproduction.

Cities are our dreams – and the most ideal cities are the dreams of the idealists among us. There are clean cities – where every inch of soil has been covered in pavement or grass so neatly trimmed and carefully chosen that it resembles a carpet. There are beautiful cities, filled with beautiful buildings, symmetrical streets, unnaturally uniform colors – and resemble a jungle as much a Ferrari car resembles a human. There are grand cities, which boast of the difficult things humans can do – how big we can make things, how tall, how wide. There are futuristic cities which drop all the illusions of being Earth, and are covered in neon.

Then there is Mumbai. It is not an ideal city. It would be difficult to describe a person who could’ve dreamt it, because quite clearly it wasn’t dreamt up.

It just happened, because you know, things do.

Delhi was dreamt up, and then dreamt up again, and dreamt up around the edges. So was Bangalore. Kolkata was dreamt of and then abandoned. Tokyo and London and New York were dreamt up. Perhaps they were even drawn.

But Mumbai was purely born of circumstance. Out of desperation and mistakes, and things and stuff, and let’s try and why not. And perhaps that is why, in a way, Mumbai resembles Earth more than any other truly large, important, significant city in the world.