Indian writer Suketu Mehta has spent half his life observing urban life. And telling it in books like The Secret Life of Cities or This Land is Our Land (both in Random House Literature). His gaze has sharpened, without becoming dispassionate, and he has been moving away from himself to observe what happens in the lives of others. But it was his first work, Total City: Bombay Lost and Found, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and established him as the metropolitan observer he is today. From that rostrum, he concludes in that book that between the democracy where he has lived since he was 14 years old (New York) and that of the place where he was born (India) the main difference – between the two largest democracies in the world – is that, in India, the poor vote.
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A rescued landscape
He also points out that, in New York, it is too isolated. "A person can die behind closed doors of a flat and no one will find out." And compare, of course, to explain that in India, on the other hand, there are so many people on the street, so much noise, that one learns to live with noise and allows disorder to relax your life. That leads him to give advice like: "When you give the thief the keys to the treasure he does not steal." Or to write down social observations such as: "When a woman enters the house of her husband's family, she loses her origins." And, of course, it also leads you to explain the unreasonable reasons behind many urban icons.
He explains in that book that the Taj Hotel – not to be confused with the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum that Emperor Shah Jahan had built in honor of the memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal – was actually born of a snub.
The Taj Mahal Palace hotel, designed by architects Sitaram Khanderao Vaidya and D. N. Mirza, in traditional style and built in the neighborhood of Colaba in Mumbai more than 1,000 kilometers from the mausoleum of the seventeenth century, was born from the strength of resentment. It was built because a man was not allowed to enter a luxurious hotel. "When prominent Parsi industrialist Jamsetji Tata was denied entry to Watson's Hotel for being a native, he vowed revenge and built the massive Taj which, when completed in 1903, eclipsed the Watson in every way." So far a story of where it is born and why, sometimes, wins the desire for human improvement.
Cover of the book 'Total City'. Random House Literature
But notice Mehta's conclusion: "It's not so much a hotel as a testing ground for the ego. It is in the lobby and adjoining toilets of the Taj that one tests one's self-esteem; In theory, anyone can escape the heat and sit in the luxurious lobby, on the ornate sofas, among the Arab billionaires and socialites, or relieve themselves in the gleaming sinks. But you need your self-esteem to be projected before the numerous doormen and managers of those toilets; You need to convince yourself that you are in your element to convince others that you are. And then you realize that the most intimidating goalkeeper is inside you."
With that psychological and sociological way of observing cities, Mehta, in an interview I conducted a few months ago in New York, described Dubai as a sister city of Bombay. "A dystopian city for us. And fascinating." I write down below what did not fit in that interview published in EL PAÍS SEMANAL.
—Where does the fascination lie?
—It has known how to grow with trade. The one with oil is Abu Dhabi. And, mind you, it's the one that has the global rich.
"Why?"
"Because it gives them what they want.
"And what do they want?"
"They want the Louvre, the Guggenheim...
Is it culture what the world's rich want or lax laws?
Abu Dhabi, like Dubai, is a deeply unjust society. 90% of the population works for 10%. And that 10% wants to be like a God: they want the best art, a ski slope in the desert and live cool in the desert. The fact is that they succeed.
Mehta says he was a professor there "because, of course, they also have the best universities: an NYU (New York University), a Georgetown, a Cornell ... As with museums, they have the franchises of universities. American universities have become Starbucks.
"Why do they play that?" Why not limit the quality to be able to attend to it?
They use the excuse of democracy: many people want to study in the U.S. They have the money to do so. And the U.S. has decided to export, to take the product to the customer. Exporting the American model of education so as not to disrupt other cultural or religious customs is a way to change the world little by little.
—And 90% of the population?
As unfair and savage as it is, people who go to work in Dubai earn more money there than at home in Mumbai. How do you tell them not to go?
Is education primarily a business?
"It's a business, but it's also change. In Abu Dhabi I took my students to the area where the workers live. That is a microworld: there are people from Ghana, from Pakistan, Filipinos, Afghans, people from all over the world. There is more plurality on the outskirts of Dubai than in New York.