This is not only the story of Maxcity......

This was a blog that was read by me last week and thought that there is a very strong message to convey, and so am citing it for the readers to skim through when they get a chance,
Thank you


The BraveHearts of MaxCity
Pritish Nandy,
25 January 2010, 03:23 PM IST

The toughest thing to learn is The Art of Losing. There are no self help books on the subject. No educational institutions teach it. Not many parents are keen to pass on this knowledge to their kids today. Nor are too many kids eager to learn it because they are born with the DNA which tells them losing is a humiliating experience, nothing is gained from it. So when people lose (and, as we all know, many more people lose every day than win) they have no idea how to cope with it. I know because, like most people in this world, I am fortunate to have lost more often than won. And I am lucky I have lived to tell the tale.

Many don’t. Mumbai makes it difficult to survive failure for the city’s programmed entirely around The Art of Winning. The moment you lose, life is over; or so you think. Yet the truth is actually otherwise. MaxCity is home to the world’s largest population of losers. That’s what makes it so special. For every winner I know out here, there are thousands of losers lurking in the shadows. They believe that only success defines them, defeat is a terrible shame. So they spend the best years of their life hiding in the city's dark, desperate bylanes hoping to emerge one day as winners. Most of them never do. And, as we have seen in recent weeks, some self destruct.

When that self destruct is just plain suicide, we commiserate, move on. But when that suicide threatens the rest of us, as when a suicide bomber blows himself up and kills many others, that’s when we start worrying. Yet we don't do the most obvious thing, which is teach young people (as we were once taught) The Art of Losing. Yes, it may surprise you but we were taught how to be good losers. Teachers and parents in our time were wise enough to know that losing is far more commonplace than winning and taught us how to cope with it. It was drummed into us that it’s far more important to be a good loser than a good winner. Any ass can come first in class or win a match but only a good loser can rise above his failure, try again. Today no one teaches The Art of Losing and therefore everyone’s a bad loser. What’s worse, everyone learns The Art of Winning and yet most people are awful winners as well.

You lose your girl friend, you paste dirty pictures of her on Facebook. You lose a match and the first thing you do is abuse the umpire. You fail in school, you jump off the Vashi bridge. Your business fails, as most real businesses are prone to, you lie down on a railway track. Your marriage is in trouble, you hit the bottle. Retribution, abuse, suicide, these are but some of the stupid ways in which we try to deal with failure. We have lost the ability to master it.

Yet MaxCity is the world’s best teacher. Talk to the tea boy in Mehboob Studio. He’s no longer a boy. He’s 57 years old but is still hanging around waiting for that singing break he had come to Mumbai for 40 years ago. Talk to the models in tiny dorms in Andheri, sharing their beds in 8 hour shifts, looking for work. They are brimming with hopes and dreams even when their lives are full of failure and disappointment. But they soldier on bravely, like the bar girls from Bengal who are still waiting for their clients to get them the film roles they had promised years ago. Their jobs are outlawed. The police harass them. Landlords throw them out when they hear of what they do, neighbours call them filthy names. But they don’t give up. Their dreams, ambitions, hopes keep them going, fearlessly.

They are true BraveHearts. They lose every day and yet return to battle next morning. The auto driver from Saharanpur. The zari worker from Birbhum. The daily wage construction labourer from Salem who builds skyscrapers without wearing a harness. The farmer from Vidharba desperately seeking a job, any job. The college student from Meerut. The banker, the stock broker, the white collar executive, the reality show contestant, the writer, the painter, the dancer: Everyone is desperate to make good. Very few do but their success stories fire the imagination of many others who come in, buying into The Great Mumbai Dream, and are never able to step off the treadmill of hope.

There’s courage, grit, dignity in the way they go about their life, trying to bravely make it work. They refuse to shake hands with failure. They do not know what defeat is. They hang in there, day after day, clinging to faith, ambition, self esteem. They pray at Siddhivinayak, Haji Ali, Mount Mary too. MaxCity has taken away everything from them but it can't take away their dignity. The dignity of the loser who refuses to believe he has lost.