Swept aside by the forces of greed and selfishness...

The train I take to work every day travels over the Vashi creek. The area surrounding the creek was once a marshy mangrove, but is now a bustling urban centre. A lot of people are moving into Navi Mumbai, just across the Vashi creek; and the marshland is being filled in ever more rapidly. The ecological implications of these changes are enormous, even to the untrained eye. But strangely, no one seems to be giving it much thought. I even read a news report after I came to Mumbai of the state environment minister saying the remaining mangroves should be cut down to make way for highrises!
My friends, who have been in this city far longer than I have been, tell me that only a few years back there was not one human being in the area. Pioneers here say stories of how hard daily life was in the early days of development, with taxis and even groceries hard to come by.
This transformation has set me thinking: who lived here once and were there wild animals in those ghats overlooking the coast? I still have no answers. But I guess there could have been people here; those that scrapped a living out of the meagre resources that nature offered, much like rural life in India in the early 1960s.
All those people could have been swept off by the fast-paced development. Many of those people would have become dependant on the new economy, after seeing their lands and the countryside which provided them sustenance, being snatched away from them.
It is a sad story, and our rulers are ensuring that it get repeated across the country, day after day. Naxalites and other radical elements may try to profit from this displacement and disempowerment but I don't think they can make any lasting transformation in the way things are going now. The forces of the market, fuelled by greed and selfishness, are too strong to be stopped on their tracks, let alone rolled back, by such radical movements.
So what next? I guess we are heading for a huge ecological disaster. I shudder to think of its dimensions and implications.

Finally, In Mumbai - And A New Beginning!

So now I am in Mumbai, the great business hub of India, thanks to my former editor and mentor who is now the top man in a leading business newspaper here. Well, first impressions are the best, they say. And I should say I liked Mumbai far, far better than dry and lifeless Delhi with its extreme climate and rude people. I now regret not having taken up a job in Mumbai several years back, turned off by the crowds I confronted here on my first day - a huge jolt for my small-town sense about crowds!
Okay, the place I stay in is in Navi Mumbai, and while I like the place I am also appalled by the environmental degradation that human development is causing all around. Which is why I think I will devote this blog to that cause and also to examine similar such existential issues from a cosmic standpoint - at least from a standpoint more removed from the rush of happenings taking place around me.