Do you see mud and sludge?

I see the footprints of hundreds of busy feet that walked before me.

I see history being created….little histories, not major sagas. Just the history of ordinary people living ordinary lives.

I see their footprints as erasable and forgettable as them. But not unseen. I saw them, after they had passed. I saw them, I did.

I see my own footprints layering over theirs, left behind to be seen perhaps by someone else? Or overlaid by yet more footprints.

We are a city of ordinary people and dirty buildings. No grand monuments or pretty scapes, no great people breathe here (and I’m not talking about Bollywood, Page 3 and the glitterati).

I first blogged under the moniker of ‘Just a statistic’. That I still am. One of the teeming masses in this vast mechanism called Mumbai. So many people enter this city everyday with a dream, hoping to leave a mark behind on the world. Seeing these soon to be washed away imprints on the station floor made me wonder whether anyone here really does. And whether it matters. The real Mumbaikers, the citizens, the salt-of-this-earth is just moving mud on the railway platform. And then we’re gone.