Salaam Bombay

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How do you define belonging? By the Time you spend in a place? By Quality - the things you do there? By Dependance? By Love?

Whichever way I look at it, I belong to Bombay. It is the city of my sunrise, and very likely, it will be the city of my dusk. It has given me everything, and by every criteria, I give back daily in full measure. Time and again, I have wondered about leaving, fed up of its grime, heat, apathy, and utter selfishness. Its callousness towards my adoration. But like a helpless lover, I come back, and I stay. I'm still trying to unravel why I stay. Sometimes I feel like a slave to this city, the slavishness that love brings. Most days I feel like I own it, the ownership that time brings.

It's my Bombay, and my blood curdles at the thought of someone who doesn't love this city as much as I do, stick it down my throat, and tell me how I should refer to it. Now, the Shiv Sena wants to ensure that the 'small group of people' who refuse to call Bombay as Mumbai be forced to do so. It's like the goatherd telling the goat what brand of milk he would like out of it.

Galling, especially when it comes from party henchmen, who otherwise show this city no respect, primarily because many of them are not even from here. In the fight of supremacy between two regionalist parties, geared to grab headlines and mindspace, they are forgetting the credo that rules the city that has given us all shelter: freedom of speech, freedom of commerce, freedom of creed, and freedom of nomenclature.

It is the same freedom that allowed Balasaheb Thackeray's father, Prabhodhankar Thackeray (a fierce liberal) to anglicise his name from the Marathi 'Thakre' to the English 'Thackeray' - Prabhodhankar being a great admirer of the English author William Thackeray. In fact, political columnist Sujatha Anandan recalls a recorded interview with the Sena tiger himself, where throughout the interview, he pronounced his surname, in an accented, anglicised manner, to rhyme 'Thack' with 'hack'.

Bombay offers the very freedom that allows miscreants who burn buses, vandalize signboards at will (Bombay Dyeing), and paint school walls (Bombay Scottish), to migrate without fear to this city from their hometowns in rural Maharashtra.

The same freedom that, 60 years ago, allowed the Shiv Sena's main vote base - Marathi people from the Konkan - to migrate to mainland Mumbai as mill labourers.

The same freedom which allows the Thackerays to send their children to top English medium schools to study - Bombay Scottish being one of them.

It's a double-dealing logic that's passed over to the populace as Marathi asmita. My message to these self-styled culture guardians: You can go ahead and change Bombay to Mumbai if you so please. Both our airports and one major railway station are named after Chhatrapati Shivaji. Why leave anything out? Let a city with a distinct, multifaceted identity become one homogenous, indistinguishable mass. Go ahead. This city offers you that freedom. Make the headlines. We'll report it faithfully. And we'll write 'Mumbai' on our letterheads.

But don't dare tell me how I should refer to the city of my birth.