Almost street theatre, with the world watching on hungry channels how political preservation can gather its own turbulent momentum. The violence may yet abate, but even a lone death takes its toll on a modern city’s image. The committee was prescient and said as much, though in ways that according to a member “would have not resulted in the complete abandonment of the report”. The question before the committee was: should we stop dreaming simply because intolerance is the political writ?

Here’s what the report — that has the potential to upgrade the economic, corporate and financial landscape of India and remake the city’s cultural and social profile — noted: “Becoming an IFC also requires strengthening the spirit of tolerance. A healthy and hospitable city environment that can attract expatriates.”

A city that, perhaps, apart from making deals, provides a home to a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-nationality global workforce. In other words, a definitive interdependence and marriage of a cultural centre and a financial centre. Like Ny-lon-kong, a word coined by Time magazine representing the three great financial centres of the world — New York, London, Hong Kong. Can that be extended into Ny-lon-kong-mum? It must. Mumbai’s possibility as an international financial centre teeming with expatriate workers is important not only to swaggering suits driving red Ferraris and building multi-billion dollar deals or even smaller ones. These, like Raj Thackeray’s mobs, are only the visible, glamorous face, a very small tip of an economic iceberg that impacts and binds India together — rich or poor, urban or rural, worker or entrepreneur, consumer or investor. The deals that are made in Mumbai need the city to provide a physical negotiating platform for their fruition.

... contd.