When the late Vinod Mehta launched the weekly newspaper, Sunday Observer, he was often asked who his target reader was. “The man from Matu...
When the late Vinod Mehta launched the weekly newspaper, Sunday Observer, he was often asked who his target reader was. “The man from Matunga,” he said, explaining later that he wanted to reach out to readers beyond SoBo, as South Bombay is now known. Mehta would not have meant to exclude women, but the reader he sought out to reach was the so-called common man who was intelligent and curious, well-read and knowledgeable, who watched cricket on the maidans and experimental plays at Chhabildas School in Dadar, and was decent, tolerant, progressive, and not swayed by rhetoricians.
This was the city’s original middle class, the category now usurped by marketing managers who see that class only in its economic potential, to whom they want to hawk consumer goods, real estate, and other aspirations. The “man from Matunga” was part of the “real” Mumbai, beyond Haji Ali, and not part of an undifferentiated mass; the cosmopolitan virtues that the Cuffe Parade and Malabar Hill class believed it alone possessed, were spread far more widely and found in greater abundance in the parts of the city few in the wealthy parts could recognise.
To those fuzzy and warm liberal values add fierce commitment towards equality, genuine compassion for...
