Looking back, looking forward
‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’ - Winston Churchill
It’s called the city centre. Nestled at its southern-most tip and flanked by a Harbour on its east and the Arabian Sea on its west; housing Mumbai’s main business and wealthiest residential localities, its iconic landmarks, prestigious educational institutions, private membership clubs, world-famous stadiums, maidans esplanades and beaches. It is both an address and a state of mind, a destination and an aspiration; vilified, eulogized, criticized and celebrated, in snobberies and salutations and countless memes and jokes as the capital and epicentre of all that’s cool or counterfeit – depending on who you speak to.
But hard as it is to imagine even with all the history and heritage going for it, that there was a time in South Mumbai’s life when it appeared to be just another giddy teenager on the cusp of her first date, a district in flux. A work in progress. A debutante on the verge of something new and exciting…
The fact that it had a posh address, shiny plastic carrier bags with attractive logos and uniformed salesmen had added to its lustre.
Lying not even a few metres away from Amarsons and flanked by the upmarket residential enclaves of Altamount Road and Malabar Hill was another symbol of modernity and progress, the country’s first flyover at Kemps Corner, built by renowned architect and civil engineer and co conceiver of Navi Mumbai, Shirish Patel. Its construction in 1965 had been a significant marker both on the journey into the heart of Sobo and the reason why the area had assumed such a noteworthy position as the urbs primus of the city itself.
The imagined whoosh of butterflies in the stomach of passengers as their vehicles ascended its gradual incline and the feeling of being aloft and soaring had been an essential part of the Sobo experience in those days.