Doesn't it make your heart swell, writes Carol Andrade

Doesn't it make your heart swell, writes Carol Andrade

I, for one, have been over the moon, reading various reports and studies about how much more wealth India has, than it did two years ago.

Carol AndradeUpdated: Saturday, October 26, 2019, 01:31 PM IST
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Now that the hungama over the state Assembly elections is finally over and we can settle down to the next five years of tall claims from our rulers and snappish in-fighting among the Opposition, it’s time to turn out minds to other, more important things, preferably ones that make us feel better. How about wealth?

I, for one, have been over the moon, reading various reports and studies about how much more wealth India has, than it did two years ago. A Credit Suisse study has recently informed that we are fifth globally in terms of our numbers of high net worth individuals.

Read obscenely rich people. Our economy is a bit north of $12 trillion, and in the next five years, we are expected to add another $4 trillion.

Oh, and there’s another bit of good news. Mumbai is number 12 on the list of the world’s richest cities, with a combined wealth of $960 billion. Of course, that means Mukesh Ambani and I have sort of clubbed our “wealth” together; what the heck, I may never set foot in Antilia, but I want my “wealth buddy” to know that he is welcome to visit me in my 1BHK in Dahisar any time he wants. I’ll even shift the clothes off the living room furniture for him to stretch out comfortably on my divan. After all, we’ve been lumped together by the Wealth Report, he in his 400,000 square foot pad at Altamount Road, me in my 476 sq foot palace that barely clings to the common definition of Mumbai.

How does it make you feel, knowing that, as you suspected, there are loads of money in this city and you’ll never get your hands on a penny? Of course, much of it is represented by real estate, so you can take great comfort in knowing that your crumbling building is worth more every year just by virtue of having a toe-hold in the city of dreams. Every year, without lifting a finger, you’re richer.

That is, you would be if you sold and disappeared into oblivion, because, there is no way in hell that the money you get for your princely apartment is going to allow you to actually stay in the same area unless, by a weird piece of mathematical reckoning, you cough up a lot more, which you haven’t got, since that is the reason you’re selling in the first place. You haven’t got!

Still, and all, I don’t know about you, but I am completely chuffed to be able to say that I live in a city that is now not far behind New York and London and Singapore in terms of accumulated wealth (okay, it actually is), but ahead of Paris (honestly), and I will ignore the rest.

That more than half our population in the city lives in real slums or footpath shanties that we just don’t notice, which is strange, because often our high net worth fellow citizens live in the same locality as them.

That it takes me as much as 90 minutes to go 30 km in our shining city because the roads are so rotten. That we preen about having the only real forest in the city, making us globally unique, then we proceed to have running battles with our state government that is determined to chop it down in the name of development.

That Mumbai, our Xanadu, can kill you in a hundred ways difficult to imagine if you aren’t watchful. That the misery of 78 per cent of this great nation that has “accumulated wealth” well below $10,000 seems to be washing up on our city doorsteps in ever-greater numbers because Mumbai, in comparison with the rest of the country, still represents hope.

Most of all, ignore the queer hopelessness in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of our young people who leave college and flood into our city looking for “work”, that magic word which will give them access to adulthood and lives of their own.

And, last of all, try not to think of the other hundreds of thousands of young people who increasingly stream out of the country, determined to find ways to migrate, willing to do anything at all if it means they can better the quality of their lives.

Me, I’m resigned to my fate – living in the 12th richest city in the world as a citizen who understands only too well how most of us are living on a knife edge of uncertainty with very few cushions against the blows of fate.

Because there is no safety anywhere. Really. Next week, maybe we should talk about our banks and other financial institutions….

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