Taking a cue from his wife Sagarika, Rajdeep seems to have woken up to the reality of the India. Im my opinion I have observed that he has sugar coated his words when speaking or intervewing policticans on televsion but here he is direct and at his eloquent best.
As the megapolis one grew up in, there is an obvious emotional attachment to Mumbai. Which is why, at a studio discussion this week, when a panelist referred to the maximum city registering minimum voting as a sign of Mumbai's "resident non-Indian" mentality, I felt a little aggrieved.
Surely, a city with the energy and enterprise of Mumbai, a city which literally never sleeps, cannot be seen through such a cynical worldview.
And yet, as voting day for the Maharashtra assembly elections wore on, it became increasingly apparent that Mumbai was struggling to pass Pappu's electoral test.
Maybe, it's the same mindset which has chosen to watch the city being reduced to a giant slum by a political class which sees slum-dwellers as one large vote bank and little else.
Perhaps, that is also why year after depressing year, the city routinely goes under water in the monsoons.
It might also explain why no one has been able to challenge the builder-babu-neta nexus which has allowed the mangroves and green areas to be concretized.
You commute for eons in a creaking railway system, flyovers don't get built on time, a sealink takes years to come up, no additional power is generated for a decade, old, dilapidated buildings remain hostage to antiquated laws: nothing seems to change, and worse, no one seems to care enough to force change.
Take a look at the morning papers in Mumbai and you get a sense of just how much the city lives in a bubble of its own.
In no other city has page three merged as effortlessly into page one as in Mumbai. Shah Rukh's trousseau, Salman's antics, Priyanka's twittering, the city seems to have magnified all things trivial and made Bollywood its ultimate temple of worship. Read more
As the megapolis one grew up in, there is an obvious emotional attachment to Mumbai. Which is why, at a studio discussion this week, when a panelist referred to the maximum city registering minimum voting as a sign of Mumbai's "resident non-Indian" mentality, I felt a little aggrieved.
Surely, a city with the energy and enterprise of Mumbai, a city which literally never sleeps, cannot be seen through such a cynical worldview.
And yet, as voting day for the Maharashtra assembly elections wore on, it became increasingly apparent that Mumbai was struggling to pass Pappu's electoral test.
Maybe, it's the same mindset which has chosen to watch the city being reduced to a giant slum by a political class which sees slum-dwellers as one large vote bank and little else.
Perhaps, that is also why year after depressing year, the city routinely goes under water in the monsoons.
It might also explain why no one has been able to challenge the builder-babu-neta nexus which has allowed the mangroves and green areas to be concretized.
You commute for eons in a creaking railway system, flyovers don't get built on time, a sealink takes years to come up, no additional power is generated for a decade, old, dilapidated buildings remain hostage to antiquated laws: nothing seems to change, and worse, no one seems to care enough to force change.
Take a look at the morning papers in Mumbai and you get a sense of just how much the city lives in a bubble of its own.
In no other city has page three merged as effortlessly into page one as in Mumbai. Shah Rukh's trousseau, Salman's antics, Priyanka's twittering, the city seems to have magnified all things trivial and made Bollywood its ultimate temple of worship. Read more
